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Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich

▪ Russian poet

original name  Viktor Vladimirovich Khlebnikov

born Oct. 28 [Nov. 9, New Style], 1885, Tundutov, Russia

died June 28, 1922, Santalovo, Novgorod province

      poet who was the founder of Russian Futurism and whose esoteric verses exerted a significant influence on Soviet poetry.

      Born into a scientific family, Khlebnikov studied both mathematics and linguistics during his university years. At that time he also began developing ideas for a renovation of poetic language. About 1912 he met the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, and the two became the centre of the Futurist literary movement, which was directed against the mysticism and narrowness of Symbolism and which regarded art as a social utility.

      Khlebnikov, unlike other Futurists, retained a kind of mysticism—of things and words rather than of ideas and symbols. Through his verbal experimentation he devised a “translogical language,” creating a “new world of words” in his verse that makes it fresh and invigorating but difficult for the general reader. He was a poet's poet, influencing others who extended his experimentation into their more accessible verse.

      Khlebnikov was a Slavophile who loved Russia and the Russian language; this led him to change his first name from Viktor (of Latin derivation) to Velimir. His popularity began to decline after the Revolution, although his influence persisted, as the works of Mayakovsky, Boris Pasternak, Osip Mandelshtam, and others clearly show. He died in a remote village in the province of Novgorod. After World War II Khlebnikov was attacked by Soviet critics as a “formalist” and “decadent,” and his name fell into complete oblivion. Following the death of Joseph Stalin, however, he was rehabilitated. An English translation of his work is available in the Collected Works of Velimer Khlebnikov, 3 vol. (1987–97).

Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich

▪ Russian poet

born July 7 [July 19, New Style], 1893, Bagdadi, Georgia, Russian Empire

died April 14, 1930, Moscow, Russia, U.S.S.R.

 the leading poet of the Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period.

      Mayakovsky, whose father died while Mayakovsky was young, moved to Moscow with his mother and sisters in 1906. At age 15 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the Moscow Art School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist (Futurism) group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifesto, Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”), and Mayakovsky's poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913.

      Between 1914 and 1916 Mayakovsky completed two major poems, “Oblako v shtanakh” (1915; “A Cloud in Trousers”) and “Fleyta pozvonochnik” (written 1915, published 1916; “The Backbone Flute”). Both record a tragedy of unrequited love and express the author's discontent with the world in which he lived. Mayakovsky sought to “depoetize” poetry, adopting the language of the streets and using daring technical innovations. Above all, his poetry is declamatory, for mass audiences.

      When the Russian Revolution of 1917 broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. Such poems as “Oda revolutsi” (1918; “Ode to Revolution”) and “Levy marsh” (1919; “Left March”) became very popular. So too did his Misteriya buff (first performed 1921; Mystery Bouffe), a drama representing a universal flood and the subsequent joyful triumph of the “Unclean” (the proletarians) over the “Clean” (the bourgeoisie).

      As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, Moye otkrytiye Ameriki (1926; “My Discovery of America”). In the poem "Khorosho!" (1927; “Good!”) he sought to unite heroic pathos with lyricism and irony. But he also wrote sharply satirical verse.

      Mayakovsky found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. In his last three years he completed two satirical plays: Klop (performed 1929; The Bedbug), lampooning the type of philistine that emerged with the New Economic Policy in the Soviet Union, and Banya (performed in Leningrad on Jan. 30, 1930; The Bathhouse), a satire of bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin.

      Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. After his early lyrics this need came out particularly strongly in two poems, “Lyublyu” (1922; “I Love”) and “Pro eto” (1923; “About This”). Both of these poems were dedicated to Lilya Brik, the wife of the writer Osip Maksimovich Brik. Mayakovsky's love for her and his friendship with her husband had a strong influence on his poetry. Even after Mayakovsky's relationship with Lilya Brik ended, he considered her one of the people closest to him and a member of his family. During a stay in Paris in 1928, he fell in love with a refugee, Tatyana Yakovleva, whom he wanted to marry but who refused him. At the same time, he had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow.

      Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress was strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the “best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.” In the 1960s, young poets, drawn to avant-garde art and activism that often clashed with communist dogma, organized poetry readings under Mayakovsky's statue in Moscow. In the Soviet Union's final years there was a strong tendency to view Mayakovsky's work as dated and insignificant, yet, on the basis of his best works, his reputation was later revived.