Lithographs, letterpress; bound volumeexpand_more
Gift of funds from the Print and Drawing Council and The Christina N. and Swan J. Turnblad Memorial Fundexpand_more B.90.4
Vladimir Mayakovsky's Tragedy was inspired by an avant-garde English production of Hamlet performed at Moscow in 1911. Mayakovsky wrote his Tragedy, an unusually short play with exuberant stage activity, first performed at Saint Petersburg in 1913; the author appeared in the title role. It was received with great enthusiasm. There was only one character in the production who is recognizable as a character, Mayakovsky himself; the others are figments of the protagonist's imagination. The Burliuk's illustrations portray them as fragments dominated by their characteristics, for example The Old Man with Cats, rendered in a reductivist Cubo-Futurist style. The actors in the production became doll-like figures with costumes painted on canvas stretched on figure frames pushed by the performers. The theatrical effect is conveyed in David Burliuk's design.
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