Room 208.01

From the end of the nineteenth century, under Czar Nicholas II, Russian cities were enveloped in misery, dragged along by industrialisation and ensuing periods of scarcity and the over-exploitation of workers. Bound to the exhaustion of the population, famine and tension stemming from Russia’s participation in the First World War, its city streets would become fields of protest and confrontation ignited by the urban proletariat in support of soldiers, events which would culminate in the Russian Revolution of 1917.  

Within this atmosphere of social struggle that shaped life in Russian cities, Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930), deemed the great poet of the Revolution and a flagbearer of Russian Futurism, represented, from real experience, individualism diluted among the heroism of the masses. He extolled an art that served the revolutionary cause, inspired by the streets, the squares, the buildings and the crowds, and expressed through verses that broke from every traditional rule of syntax and poetic precept, with the yearning to build a new Russia rooted in the aesthetics of the working class and socialism. Russian Futurism articulated his pull towards mechanisation, speed, the development of technique and factories. Literary and artistic groups such as Hylaea found, through poetry, a medium to transform reality, alloying, in the arrangement of elements, visual and sound aesthetics.  

Mayakovsky’s commitment to the working class stretched beyond the only film he would direct, Baryshnya i khuligan (The Young Lady and the Hooligan, 1918), widely reproduced in the squares of Russia’s major cities. The work recreates the reality of working-class neighbourhoods in the revolutionary city, with its cobbled streets and wooden buildings, where life takes place in the streets, and where there are disputes, dances, conflicts, games, gatherings in taverns, and so on, with this reality at once contrasting and unifying the worker in a bourgeois world represented by the figure of the schoolmistress.