Vladimir Mayakovsky. Dreamer and Herald

Mayakovsky и Revolution

In Russian literature of the 20th century, Mayakovsky plays a very particular role. He was the first to devote his great talent to the revolutionary transformation of life. Mayakovsky was deeply convinced that the revolution and poetry require each other. He turned poetry into an active participant of meetings, demonstrations, debates. Mayakovsky's propaganda posters becomes a kind of laboratory in which he, in his own words, "separated verses on topics that do not need many words from the poetic chaff".

A striking example of these creative experiments is the anthology Mayakovsky - Rodchenko. Classic Constructivism which included three poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky : About This, Sergei Yesenin, Conversation with a Tax Collector About Poetry, illustrated by Alexander Rodchenko, a renowned master of the Russian artistic avant-garde, designer and photographer. The photo montage, illustrated Mayakovsky's poems, was the new design approach in the book art. For the first time, the author was seen in the illustrations as a real character, thanks to photographic portraits made by Abram Shterenberg and other photographers in 1923. The second part of the book consist of excerpts from the memoirs of Rodchenko Working with Mayakovsky from 1915 to 1930, describing the meetings, discussions, collaborate work on advertising in the 1920s.

Breathtaking panorama of the life of Vladimir Mayakovsky, coloured neither with Soviet ideology nor with the struggle against it, is deployed in the book More Than Life at Stake. Vladimir Mayakovsky and his Circle by Bengt Jangfeldt. The famous writer, translator, expert on Russian literature of the 20th century Jangfeldt frankly and detailly talk about the maelstrom of personal, political, literary passions, which proved fatal for Mayakovsky. The book More Than Life at Stake gives a unique chance to really see and correctly understand Mayakovsky for the first time. It contains a lot of photographs, documents, original drawings from the archives of Lilya Brik and the archives of the British security services.