Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Century of Censorship

Vladimir Mayakovsky died by suicide in 1930 at the age of 36. Five years after his death, Joseph Stalin canonized his legacy amidst uncertainty regarding Mayakovsky’s political alignment. Stalin’s words read, “Mayakovsky was and remains the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.” Soon after, Triumfalnaya Square in Moscow was renamed in his honor. Mayakovsky was thereby posthumously absorbed as a symbol of the state, washing away the complications of his tumultuous, and at times dissident, career. He has become one of the major poets of the Soviet era.

However, in the wake of Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine, Mayakovsky's legacy is as complicated as ever.

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in the Kutais Governance in Georgia, then a province of the Russian Empire. At 13, his family moved to Moscow after the death of his father. Once enrolled in secondary schooling in Moscow, Mayakovsky soon developed an interest in socialist literature and became involved in underground socialist activist groups. At 16 he received a prison sentence for his participation in the smuggling of fellow activists out of prison. It was in the confinement of prison that Mayakovsky began to write. A provincial suffering for the socialist cause, Mayakovsky immediately had the makings of a great revolutionary poet. 

His voice was brazen, fervent, and rebellious. In his 1915 poem "The Cloud in Trousers," Mayakovsky posits himself as a martyr of the coming revolution: “I am where pain is – everywhere; / on each drop of the tear-flow / I have nailed myself on the cross.”

Mayakovsky’s poetry was well suited to the uprising Bolsheviks. The monarchy was becoming more unstable, and the people had to be mobilized if a successful coup was to be carried out. At the same time, though, Mayakovsky was suffering his own personal turmoil, which was altering his convictions. 

While the revolution was impending, the Russian Empire was still fighting in World War I. In 1915 Mayakovsky was called up for military service. As he began to personally experience the horrors of war, his brash, pro-conflict predilection seriously waned. In 1916 he wrote the poem "The War and the World," sometimes translated as War and Peace, which questioned the necessity of war with its multitude of horrors and suffering. Mayakovsky now repainted his path to utopia with a love for and cultivation of the life that he saw lost firsthand on the front lines.

Though he was growing more averse to violence, Mayakovsky still supported the revolution and its promises of a united, just future under communism. After the monarchy was successfully deposed in 1917, Mayakovsky energetically aligned himself with the Communist Party. For his entire life he would maintain admiration for Vladimir Lenin, though his allegiance to the party began to fade as the years of the Soviet regime passed.

When Stalin rose to power after Lenin's death in 1924, Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with the state. His work turned toward satire, contemptuously criticizing bureaucracy and prophesying the falsity of the future promised by Stalin. Still, when Mayakovsky died by his own hand in 1930, his poetic genius caught the attention of the Soviet dictator, who hailed him as a national artistic hero.

By canonizing Mayakovsky as a poet of the Soviet epoch despite his dissidence, Stalin initiated a century-long struggle around the poet’s legacy that has not yet found an end.  Of Mayakovsky’s Soviet legacy, Boris Pasternak famously wrote, “he began to be introduced forcibly, like potatoes under Catherine the Great.” 

In the post-Stalin era, Mayakovsky's memory was further manipulated. A monument was unveiled at Mayakovsky Square, celebrated with poetry readings embracing the free expression of art. This reclamation of Mayakovsky was not permitted to persist, however, and the readings were officially banned in 1961. In 1992 the Square was reverted back to its original name: Triumfalnaya, or "triumphant."

Most recently, in 2022, poets Artyom Kamardin, Yegor Shtovba, and Nikolai Dayneko revived the old tradition at Mayakovsky’s monument to read poems in protest of the invasion of Ukraine. Each were arrested and sentenced to more than four years in prison. Evidently, Mayakovsky's legacy is still in dispute.

From Pushkin onward, Russian literary greats have been transformed into cultural icons. Since Russia's invasion of Ukraine in 2022, the conflation of classic Russian literature with the modern Russian state has been difficult to reconcile with, especially with Putin's tendency to evoke Tolstoy and other long-deceased literary giants. Mayakovsky's legacy, when considered in its complex totality, is an important reminder of the dangers of both censorship and state symbolization. 

For an excellent collection of Mayakovsky's poetry, see Patricia Blake's edition, "The Bedbug and Selected Poetry."