Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Notebooks in Academic Interpretation

The paper reviews the results of the project ‘Poetics and Textology of Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Notebooks (1917–1930)’. In the course of the research, we studied manuscripts of the Mayakovsky State Museum (68), the Russian State Archive of Literature and Art (4), and private collections (2). On this basis, and with account of Varvara Arutcheva’s work Mayakovsky’s Notebooks (1958), theoretical and practical experience of preparing ego-documents of other writers, the author developed principles relevant to Mayakovsky’s notebooks. In previous complete collections of Mayakovsky’s works, the notebooks were only partially used in the sections ‘Variations and Discrepancies’ and ‘Unused Lines and Rhymes’. The study noted the genre diversity of creative writings. The notes reveal about 500 names from Mayakovsky’s social circle. The author created a unified digital archive of Mayakovsky’s notebooks. The methodology of their transcribing, copying and commenting validated during the study of notebooks was put to practical use in the Vladimir Mayakovsky’s Complete Works in 20 volumes, where the notebooks have been first published in their entirety as an independent section.