A play and selected poetry by Russian author Vladimir Mayakovsky.

One of Russia's greatest poets, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a Futurist, early Bolshevik, and champion of the avant-garde. Despite his revolutionary youth, he became increasingly disillusioned with Soviet society, and three of his plays—all banned until after Stalin's death—reflect his changing assessments of the Revolution. Mayakovsky: Plays includes Mystery Bouffe, a mock medieval mystery 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 become a material paradise. The collection also includes Mayakovsky's more personal first play, Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy.

The period between the Revolution of 1917 and Stalin's coming to power in the early 1930s was one of the most exciting for all branches of the arts in Russia. This study tries to show how the diversity of the Soviet arts of the 1920s continued the major trends of the pre-Revolutionary years.

Forty short poems about bugs and other crawling creatures.

A compendium of all things Mayakovsky: new translations of his poems and essays, eyewitness accounts, photographs, and artwork from his circle. A reconsideration of the poet for the post-Soviet world.

"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 [4] of cover.

Two days before the 1913 premiere of this Futurist play in verse, the original cast withdrew because rumors started to spread across Saint Petersburg that they would be pelted with garbage and beaten by the public. In fact, the audience did throw rotten eggs, shouting at 20-year-old Vladimir Mayakovsky (who played the leading role), "Stop him immediately!... Catch him!... He is not to get away!... Make him give us back our money!" According to actor Konstantin Tomashevsky: Those were the times of turmoil, anxiety, dark forebodings. All of us instantly recognized in Mayakovsky a revolutionary, even if his hectic sermons to the human souls, mutilated by the vile city, sounded a bit muddled. It was an attempt at tearing off masks, revealing the sores of the society, sick beneath the veneer of respectability. Other theatrical events that season were barely noticed. "Who's more insane, the Futurists or the public?" the Peterburgskaya Gazeta newspaper asked.