please take charge

Vladimir Mayakovsky

Over the years, he was considered the Soviet poet par excellence. It is certainly true that he lent his enormous talents to further the propaganda needs of the Soviet regime. He began his career as a revolutionary in both art and politics in pre-revolutionary Russia and remained an apologist for the revolution until almost the end of his life, despite criticism by contemporaries. Mayakovsky loved to break conventions in life and in poetry. He used free verse, unlike most Russian poetry, and created unusual rhymes and jarring images. His work was often upsetting, over the top, yet brilliant at the same time. Near the end of the 1920s, Mayakovsky became increasingly disillusioned with bolshevism and propaganda; his satirical play The Bedbug, dealt with his frustrations with Soviet philistinism and bureaucracy. During his last month, Mayakovsky struggled with illness and personal disappointment in addition to his mounting frustrations with the regime. On the evening of April 14, 1930, Mayakovsky shot himself. An unfinished poem in his suicide note read, in part:

The love boat has crashed against the daily routine. You and I, we are quits, and there is no point in listing mutual pains, sorrows, and hurts

After his death, Mayakovsky was attacked in the Soviet press as a "formalist" and a "fellow-traveller". When, in 1935, Lilya Brik, his muse and lover, wrote to Stalin to complain about the attacks, Stalin wrote a comment on Brik's letter:

"Comrade Yezhov, please take charge of Brik's letter. Mayakovsky is still the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch. Indifference to his cultural heritage is a crime. Brik's complaints are, in my opinion, justified..."

Following Stalin's death, rumors arose that Mayakovsky did not commit suicide but was murdered at the behest of Stalin. During the 1990s, when many KGB files were declassified, there was hope that new evidence will come to light on this question, but none has been found and the hypothesis remains unproven.