A Life at Stake is the first serious biography of the legendary Russian poet Vladimir Mayakovsky. Physically imposing, crude, a sexual adventurer and ex-convict, Mayakovsky rose to fame between 1912 and 1917 as a Futurist agitator and the author of radical poems and plays. He embraced the Russian Revolution and became one of its most passionate propagandists, then at the age of thirty-six took his own life, disappointed in the course of Soviet society and ravaged by private conflicts. Mayakovsky s poems are as exhilarating today as when he declaimed them for friends in smoky flats in Moscow, Berlin, Paris, and New York. In Bengt Jangfeldt s propulsive biography, Mayakovsky s life, too, is compelling: a story of constant, passionate upheaval against the background of the First World War, the Russian Revolution, Stalin s terror, and cycles of anti-Semitism. Mayakovsky emerges from this biography a highly vulnerable figure, more a dreamer than a revolutionary, more a political romantic than a hardened Communist."

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.

James McGavran’s new translation of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s poetry is the first to fully capture the Futurist and Soviet agitprop artist’s voice. Because of his work as a propagandist for the Soviet regime, and because of his posthumous enshrinement by Stalin as “the best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch,” Mayakovsky has most often been interpreted—and translated—within a political context. McGavran’s translations reveal a more nuanced poet who possessed a passion for word creation and linguistic manipulation. Mayakovsky’s bombastic metaphors and formal élan shine through in these translations, and McGavran’s commentary provides vital information on Mayakovsky, illuminating the poet’s many references to the Russian literary canon, his contemporaries in art and culture, and Soviet figures and policies.

Two of the most striking manifestations of Soviet image culture were the children's book and the poster. This text plots the development of this new image culture alongside the formation of new social and cultural identities.

Futurist, hooligan, revolutionary, propagandist, lover, clown, martyr, hero-the poet Vladimir Mayakovsky was the powerhouse and rock star of Russia's Silver Age. This bilingual edition provides "maximum access" to his best known poems, and features:Precise English translations.Stress marks in the Russian text.Commentary on syntax, wordplay and neologisms.Clarification of cultural, historical and literary references.Essays on theme, persona and poetic technique.This is undiluted Mayakovsky, in the highest obtainable proof for non-native speakers.

A play and selected poetry by Russian author Vladimir Mayakovsky.

An enchanting collection of the very best of Russian poetry, edited by acclaimed translator Robert Chandler together with poets Boris Dralyuk and Irina Mashinski. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, poetry's pre-eminence in Russia was unchallenged, with Pushkin and his contemporaries ushering in the 'Golden Age' of Russian literature. Prose briefly gained the high ground in the second half of the nineteenth century, but poetry again became dominant in the 'Silver Age' (the early twentieth century), when belief in reason and progress yielded once more to a more magical view of the world. During the Soviet era, poetry became a dangerous, subversive activity; nevertheless, poets such as Osip Mandelstam and Anna Akhmatova continued to defy the censors. This anthology traces Russian poetry from its Golden Age to the modern era, including work by several great poets - Georgy Ivanov and Varlam Shalamov among them - in captivating modern translations by Robert Chandler and others. The volume also includes a general introduction, chronology and individual introductions to each poet. Robert Chandler is an acclaimed poet and translator. His many translations from Russian include works by Aleksandr Pushkin, Nikolay Leskov, Vasily Grossman and Andrey Platonov, while his anthologies of Russian Short Stories from Pushkin to Buida and Russian Magic Tales are both published in Penguin Classics. Irina Mashinski is a bilingual poet and co-founder of the StoSvet literary project. Her most recent collection is 2013's Ophelia i masterok [Ophelia and the Trowel]. Boris Dralyuk is a Lecturer in Russian at the University of St Andrews and translator of many books from Russian, including, most recently, Isaac Babel's Red Cavalry (2014).

"Touring the United States in 1925, the Russian Futurist poet and propagandist Vladimir Mayakovsky observed at first hand what he considered to be the model for Soviet technological development. Writing in his typical declamatory style, he found much to celebrate in the modernised, industrialised America of the 1920s - creativity and advancement, a primitive futurism. But he also decried the social injustices of uncaring capitalism, losing no opportunity to propound his own political beliefs." "Presented here in full for the first time in the English language, My Discovery of America forms an inspired series of humorous sketches, thoughts, jottings and poems, the significance of which resounds from the early twentieth century through to our own times."--BOOK JACKET.

'Vladimir Mayakovsky' & Other Poems is the only single-volume selection in English to fully represent the work of one of Modernism's vital literary forces. The poems encompass Mayakovsky's pre-Revolutionary surrealism as well as his exclamatory agitprop of the 1920s, by which time he had become the pre-eminent Soviet poet. New translations of key works are included alongside several poems that have never been translated into English before, while an introduction and notes provide helpful contexts and elucidations. Screenplays, dramatic scripts and advertising slogans give a sense of the unusual breadth and invention of Mayakovsky's project, and his skill both as poet and propagandist. 'A poet needs to be good at life as well', he writes; his job is to 'smooth brains with the file of his tongue'. Womack's translations help to revise the predominant image of Mayakovsky as a hectoring egoist, offering a more nuanced impression of a poet whose concern was as much comradeship and intimacy as politics and posterity: 'all of this - do you want it? - I will abandon for one single tender human word.' -- from back cover.