Vladimir Mayakovsky

One of Russia's greatest twentieth-century poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a Futurist, early Bolshevik, and champion of the avant garde. An early revolutionary, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet society, and three of his plays - all of which were banned until after Stalin's death - reflect his changing assessments of the Revolution. They are collected here with his first, more personal work, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy. This volume includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery play written in 1918 to celebrate the first anniversary of the Revolution; The Bathhouse, a sharp attack on Soviet bureaucracy subtitled "a drama of circus and fireworks"; and The Bedbug, in which a worker with bourgeois pretensions is frozen and resurrected fifty years later, when the world has been transformed into a material paradise. Mayakovsky's first play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy, reveals the poet's propensity for painful self-dramatization and his flair for grotesque imagery. Fresh, inventive, and shot through with zany humor, Mayakovsky's plays represent a radically new kind of theater.

A poem telling how a little boy gets a hobby horse.

Overview: This selection of Mayakovsky's work covers his entire career-from the earliest pre-revolutionary lyrics to a poem found in a notebook after his suicide. Splendid translations of the poems, with the Russian on a facing page.

"James McGavran's new translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry is the first to fully capture the Futurist and Soviet agitprop artist's voice. Because of his work as a propagandist for the Soviet regime, and because of his posthumous enshrinement by Stalin as "the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch," Mayakovsky has most often been interpreted--and translated--within a political context. McGavran's translations reveal a more nuanced poet who possessed a passion for word creation and linguistic manipulation. Mayakovsky's bombastic metaphors and formal élan shine through in these translations, and McGavran's commentary provides vital information on Mayakovsky, illuminating the poet's many references to the Russian literary canon, his contemporaries in art and culture, and Soviet figures and policies."--Publisher's website.

"This groundbreaking selection of Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry, lectures and artworks draws together for the first time his key translators from the 1930's to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated"--Page of cover.

'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.' -- from back cover.