Both lyricist and agitator: the split personality of Vladimir Mayakovsky

Why increase
the number
of suicides?

Better
to increase
the output of ink!

wrote Vladimir Mayakovsky in 1926 in response to the death of a fellow poet. Four years later, aged 36, he shot himself. What drove the successful author, popular with the public and recognised by officialdom, to suicide? Bengt Jangfeldt provides some clues to this question in his detailed, source-rich biography.

Mayakovsky came to poetry as a Futurist, co-authoring the 1912 manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which granted poets the right ‘to feel an insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time’. That the new era demanded a new language was a principle Mayakovsky adhered to all his life. After the October Revolution he wrote poems and plays that propelled him to the top of the emergent literary hierarchy, performed for large audiences, made propaganda posters for the Russian Telegraph Agency, dabbled in film and collaborated with the Constructivist Alexander Rodchenko on innovative advertisements.