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Mayakovsky in Cleveland (2023)

In the fateful year of 1917, the Bolshevik Revolution shook Russia and forever changed the world. Its impact left an indelible mark not only on the political history of the 20th century, but also on art, culture, film, and literature. Perhaps one of the greatest exponents of the new Russian Revolutionary zeitgeist was the poet, playwright, and artist Vladimir Mayakovsky, whose thunderous verse and visually arresting Cubo-Futurist agitprop shook the world as much as the history that surrounded...

In subsequent years, 2226 East 55th changed hands multiple times, and by the early 1930s, it assumed the identity of a nightclub and dance hall known as the “Cotton Club,” hosting popular jazz orchestras, such as those of Don Redman and Fletcher Henderson. Although no accounts survive of Mayakovsky’s poetry recitation at 2226 East 55th, he did return to the USSR with a flyer in memory of the event, titled "Unbelieveable in Cleveland" ( Nebyvaloe v Klivlende), which is now held at the State Literature Museum of Russia in Moscow. He identified them as workers from the “Rockefeller oil refineries” living in shanty towns in what he described as an “immense ditch” and “without any hope, under the current American conditions, to climb into something better.” Writing of the inequality facing these men and women, the working poor of America, he remarked, “the small standardized suburban house is the Winter Palace compared to their dwellings.”

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