25 Facts About Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky's father died suddenly in 1906, when Mayakovsky was thirteen.

In July 1906 Vladimir Mayakovsky joined the 4th form of Moscow's 5th Classic gymnasium and soon developed a passion for Marxist literature.

In 1907 Vladimir Mayakovsky became a member of his gymnasium's underground Social Democrats' circle, taking part in numerous activities of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which he, given the nickname "Comrade Konstantin", joined the same year.

Years later Vladimir Mayakovsky conceded that was all for the better, yet he always cited 1909 as the year his literary career started.

On 17 November 1912, Vladimir Mayakovsky made his first public performance at Stray Dog, the artistic basement in Saint Petersburg.

In summer 1915 Vladimir Mayakovsky moved to Petrograd where he started contributing to the New Satyrikon magazine, writing mostly humorous verse in the vein of Sasha Tchorny, one of the journal's former stalwarts.

When his mobilization form finally arrived in the autumn of 1915, Vladimir Mayakovsky found himself unwilling to go to the frontlines.

In December 1918 Vladimir Mayakovsky was involved with Osip Brik in discussions with the Viborg district party school of the Russian Communist Party to set up a Futurist organisation affiliated to the party.

From 1922 to 1928, Vladimir Mayakovsky was a prominent member of the Left Art Front he helped to found and for a while defined his work as Communist Futurism.

In May 1923 Vladimir Mayakovsky spoke at a massive protest rally in Moscow, in the wake of Vatslav Vorovsky's assassination.

On 12 April 1930, Vladimir Mayakovsky was seen in public for the last time: he took part in a discussion at the Sovnarkom meeting concerning the proposed copyright law.

Vladimir Mayakovsky met husband and wife Osip and Lilya Brik in July 1915 at their dacha in Malakhovka nearby Moscow.

In summer 1918, soon after Lilya and Vladimir starred in the film Encased in a Film, Mayakovsky and the Briks moved in together.

In 1920 Vladimir Mayakovsky had a brief romance with Lilya Lavinskaya, an artist who contributed to ROSTA.

Brik and Vladimir Mayakovsky's relationships ended in 1923, but they never parted.

Still, when in 1926 Vladimir Mayakovsky was granted a state-owned flat at the Gendrikov Lane in Moscow, all three of them moved in and lived there until 1930, having turned the place into the LEF headquarters.

In summer 1925 Vladimir Mayakovsky traveled to New York, where he met Russian emigre Elli Jones, born Yelizaveta Petrovna Zibert, an interpreter who spoke Russian, French, German and English fluently.

Vladimir Mayakovsky saw the girl just once, in Nice, France, in 1928, when she was three.

In 1928 in Paris Vladimir Mayakovsky met Russian emigre Tatyana Yakovleva, a 22-year-old model working for the Chanel fashion house, and niece of painter Alexandre Jacovleff.

Vladimir Mayakovsky's poetry was saturated with politics, but the love theme in the early 1920s became prominent too, mainly in I Love and About That, both dedicated to Lilya Brik, whom he considered a family member even after the two drifted apart, in 1923.

In 1926, Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote and published "Talking with the Taxman about Poetry", the first in a series of works criticizing the new Soviet philistinism, the result of the New Economic Policy.

In 1937 the Vladimir Mayakovsky Museum were opened in Moscow.

Nikolay Aseyev received a Stalin prize in 1941 for his poem "Vladimir Mayakovsky Starts Here", which celebrated him as a poet of the revolution.

In 1974 the Russian State Museum of Vladimir Mayakovsky opened in the center of Moscow in the building where Vladimir Mayakovsky resided from 1919 to 1930.

In 2007 Craig Volk's stage bio-drama Vladimir Mayakovsky Takes the Stage won the PEN-USA Literary Award for Best Stage Drama.