BOOK LAUNCH - Volodya: Selected Works by Vladimir Mayakovsky

Event information

Step back into revolutionary Russia and celebrate the release of this magnificent new collection of Mayakovsky's works at the best book launch of your life!


Featuring:


· Readings by George Hyde, Harry Gilonis, Rosy Carrick, Alan Hay & Laurie Bolger!

· Screening of Mayakovsky’s 1918 silent film The Lady & The Hooligan!

· Installations & Photo Gallery!

· Polaroid Pix, Futurist Style!

· Soviet Souvenirs + Revolutionary Spirits for All!




Volodya: Selected Works by Vladimir Mayakovsky
Edited by Rosy Carrick. Published by Enitharmon Press. £14.99


Vladimir Mayakovsky was a poet, playwright, artist, director, actor, diarist, producer of agitprop posters and advertisement slogans, and writer of articles, essays and speeches. The inherent conflict of his status as an avant-garde communist writer working within the steadily narrowing cultural conditions of early Soviet Russia runs vividly throughout his work, and was a significant contributing factor to his suicide at the age of thirty-six.

This groundbreaking collection draws together for the first time Mayakovsky’s key translators from the 1930s to the present day, bringing some remarkable works back into print in the process and introducing poems which have never before been translated.

The radical scope of its representation makes for the most comprehensive account of Mayakovsky’s work to date – an account which charts not only the extraordinary range of his creative output, his rigorous and passionate innovation of language and form, and the intense power of his electrifying live performances, but also the fascinating and turbulent history of Mayakovsky’s cultural and political representation in the western world.


“His poetry, full of neologisms, punchy metaphors, original imag­ery, syncopated rhythm and stac­cato lines, stuns the reader with its energy and self-confidence and shouts across the years." – Spectator (2015)

“Mayakovsky, the whirlwind Rus­sian who composed grandiose, sprawling poems about revolu­tion, romantic love, the Soviet Union and himself ... a captivat­ing, contradictory, frustrating human being. Who would not want to go and read his works?” – Telegraph (2015)

“A handsome young man with a gloomy expression sat in front of me, overflowing with lethal and incessant cleverness. His voice was like that of a singer of Psalms and his fists like that of a wrestler. A kind of combi­nation of a mythical hero and a Spanish toreador…It was poetry that was well sculpted by an artist, arrogant, demonic, and at the same time poetry whose fate had been sealed, infinitely lost, almost crying out for help.” – Boris Pasternak