In the land where nothing is ever quite what it seems, the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky is the perfect enigma. For nearly 60 years after his death in 1930, Soviet schoolchildren memorized the elegiac revolutionary poetry of Mayakovsky. But like the matryushkas, those dolls within dolls, Mayakovsky was so much more and so much less.
In truth he had become horribly disillusioned with the revolution by the late 1920's. The real power in his art came from that same deep Slavic well of despair that inspired so many great writers - like Dostoyevsky and Gogol. He was driven by a passion for two women, one in Moscow, the other, a Russian ?gr?n Paris, who remained unwilling to commit to the impetuousness of Vladimir Mayakovsky, and refused to join him in Russia. Something else you won't find in the textbooks of the Soviet schoolchildren - the poet shot himself to death at age 36.
Is it possible to be both a passionate patriot and a wild romantic at the same time? Who owned the man's heart --Mother Russia, or the lovers he never possessed?
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Francine du Plessix Gray, author of "Mayakovsky's Last Loves" in the New Yorker (Jan 7, 2002)
Nadia Michoustina, expert in Russian literature at Columbia University
