Night Wraps the Sky Vladimir Mayakovsky; edited by Michael Almereyda Farrar Straus Giroux, 304pp, £14

Vladimir Mayakovsky died twice. First, he shot himself in morning dress, leaving behind a poem explaining that “The love boat of life/has crashed on philistine reefs/Now you and I are quits”. Shortly afterwards he died symbolically, when Stalin decreed that indifference to the Russian futurist’s work was a crime, putting him safely beyond the pale for dictator-haters everywhere. But just as Alexander Rodchenko’s photographs of the poet have featured of late in exhibitions at the Hayward Gallery and Tate Modern, so his reputation shows signs of transcending the role he played in lionising the Soviet regime.

“My poems jump out,” Mayakovsky claimed, “like mad gladiators. ‘Kill!’/They cry”, and Night Wraps the Sky is a compendium of the best of them, while also teeming with photographs, diary entries and official documents. The reminiscences of writer-contemporaries (Osip Mandelstam and Boris Pasternak among them) are balanced against more sober retrospectives; John Berger contributes an essay on the poet’s psychological make-up; and the inclusion of Frank O’Hara’s “A True Account of Talking to the Sun at Fire Island” (a variation on a poem by Maya­kovsky) and Joseph Brodsky’s concluding comments point to his enduring influence.

Born in Georgia in 1893, Mayakovsky was jailed for Marxist agitation at 14, and began writing verse during a period of solitary confinement at 16. After his release, he joined the Russian futurists and helped write their 1912 manifesto, A Slap in the Face of Public Taste. Bruce Chatwin once observed that the futurists “saw themselves as a wrecking party which would unhinge the future from the past”, and Mayakovsky used his poems as firelighters at the foot of tradition. Intensely rhythmic, fizzing with neologisms and curses, his screed of lines screamed out apocalyptic love songs, as he, their hero, scaled buildings and fixed the sun in his eye like a monocle.

One of the things Night Wraps the Sky does well is to convey the centrality of performance to his art. Berger explains that in Russia poetry is read reverently, like a litany, but “Mayakovsky read like a sailor shouting things into a megaphone to another ship in a heavy sea”. The effect, as the writer Sergei Spassky recalls, was faintly unnerving: “He stands upright, hands in his pockets . . . His cap pushed to the back of his head, cigarette moving in his mouth . . . He sways on his hips, examining the public with cold flashing eyes. ‘Quiet, my kittens.’”

As a supreme egotist, Mayakovsky was an unlikely candidate for Soviet canonisation. One Marxist complained: “Mayakovsky, you consider yourself a proletarian poet-collectivist and you’re always writing I, I, I.” Certainly, Comrade Lenin was never a fan – he labelled one allegory on the battle between Soviet workers and the forces of capitalism “monstrously stupid, and pretentious” – and by the time of his death in 1930 Mayakovsky was falling further from favour with his masters. There is a passage in his play The Bathhouse where he comes dangerously close to satirising the Soviet state: “Go! Infect the imaginary masses with your imaginary enthusiasm!” Luckily, the poet of the new revolutionary order died before Stalin could decide that he should be purged and his poetry suppressed.

Night Wraps the Sky falters only when its American editor Michael Almereyda insists that “A Cloud in Trousers”, one of Mayakovsky’s greatest poems, should henceforth be known as “A Cloud in Pants” – though no doubt the poet would have relished this affront to tradition.

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