This text includes 8 pages of plates containing black and white photographs, depicting Vladimir Mayakovsky throughout his personal and professional life, as well as images of his friends and contemporaries.

Includes bibliographical references (pages 205-250) and index.

Part one: 1. Introduction -- 2. The landscape -- 3. Moscow was rusty -- 4. Painting reinterpreted -- 5. David Burlyuk -- 6. Neighbors -- 7. More neighbors -- 8. David Burlyak finds a poet -- 9. Women -- 10. Already about the Briks and more about the circle --

Part two: 11. Petersburg -- 12. On criticism -- 13. Kulbin/"The Stray Dog"/Debates -- 14. The war - the years 1914 to 1915 -- 15. About love and man -- 16. February - the years 1917-1918 --

Part three: 17. On Blok -- 18. I continue -- 19. OPOYAZ [Society for the Study of Poetic Language] -- 20. Mayakovsky's Verse --

Part four: 21. In the snow -- 22. Norderney -- 23. "About that" --

Part five: 24. The poet travels -- 25. The poet talks to posterity.

"Viktor Shklovsky’s Mayakovsky and His Circle is a magnificently made book: an eye-catching cover, vivid titles, readable print and so on...If you’re tempted to buy it too, what sort of read are you in for? Shklovsky says: ‘What I’m writing is neither memoirs nor a research paper. There’s no system, and the writer will not be described exhaustively, and his biography will not be written by me.’ What he offers instead is a kind of prose poem – at times lyrical, at times disjointed, at times superb, at times opaque. It tells you little about the history or the sociology of its subject (though the editor Lily Feiler makes a good stab at that with very full and useful notes). What it conveys instead is the feel of a group and a period, the feel of how it was to live and write in Russia in the decades before and after the Revolution. Mayakovsky himself is a fascinating and complex figure – youthful rebel and poseur, Futurist poet and Communist militant, despairing suicide. 'Nonsensical, stupid, sheer stupidity and affectation’ wrote Lenin in 1921 on seeing Mayakovsky’s poem 150,000,000, but later, after discussions with art students, he learned to respect the poet. Trotsky grunted about Mayakovsky’s ‘Bohemian nihilism’ but in 1924 spent long sections of Literature and Revolution in admiring analysis of his work. But by the end of the 1920s this sort of free, vigorous and invigorating debate had gone dead in the Soviet Union. On 9 April 1930, the journal Press and Revolution tried to print a greeting to Mayakovsky from the editors. It was cut out on the orders of Khalatov, Head of the State Publishing House. Five days later Mayakovsky shot himself. Five years later, for reasons best known to himself, Stalin changed his mind and decided one morning that Mayakovsky had been ‘the best, the most talented poet of the Soviet epoch’, so in 1940 Shklovsky was able to write this book. Into it he poured all his personal memories of Mayakovsky and his circle and all the contending circles in the explosive literary and artistic developments around the years of the Revolution. The book is a montage of snapshots. There’s the first conference of the OPOYAZ group of poets in the bitter winter of 1915: ‘We used books to make a fire but it was cold and Pyast kept his feet in the oven.’ There’s Mayakovsky in 1919 designing propaganda posters by the dozen during the Civil War and doing them flat on his belly because the cheap stoves filled the top half of his office with smoke and fumes. There’s the neighbor who refused Mayakovsky the loan of his razor because he claimed he’d be using it himself for a long, long time. ‘I understand,’ answered Mayakovsky, ‘you are shaving an elephant.’ And so on. Mayakovsky and His Circle is rambling, insightful, trivial, anecdotal, moving and worthwhile, often all on the same page. It’s everything an academic textbook is not. It’s not a full account of writers and the Russian Revolution, but if you want one writer’s angle on the joy and the terror and the futility and the cold and the splendor of revolution then read it." -- From International Socialism.

This text is a biography of Mayakovsky that is written in a more literary and poetic style, rather than as a straightforward textbook biography. The editor's multiple notes elaborate on the facts. -- From the cataloger.

Translated from Russian into English.