Editing Vladimir Mayakovsky (section)

===Death===
[[File:Mayakovskiy deathbed2.jpg|thumb|Body of Mayakovsky on his death bed, April 13, 1930]]
On 12 April 1930, Mayakovsky was seen in public for the last time: he took part in a discussion at the [[Sovnarkom]] meeting concerning the proposed copyright law.<ref name="timeline"/> On 14 April 1930, his current partner, actress {{ill|Veronika Polonskaya|ru|Полонская,_Вероника_Витольдовна}}, upon leaving his flat, heard a shot behind the closed door. She rushed in and found the poet lying on the floor; he had apparently shot himself through the heart.<ref name="timeline"/><ref name="polonskaya">{{cite web | author=Polonskaya, Veronika| date=1938| url=http://az.lib.ru/m/majakowskij_w_w/text_0450.shtml|title=Remembering V. Mayakovsky| publisher=Izvestia (1990)| access-date=13 January 2015}}</ref> The handwritten death note read: "To all of you. I die, but don't blame anyone for it, and please do not gossip. The deceased disliked that sort of thing terribly. Mother, sisters, comrades, forgive me – this is not a good method (I do not recommend it to others), but there is no other way out for me. Lily – love me. Comrade Government, my family consists of Lily Brik, mama, my sisters, and Veronika Vitoldovna Polonskaya. If you can provide a decent life for them, thank you. Give the poem I started to the Briks. They'll sort them out."{{citation needed|date=December 2020}} The 'unfinished poem' in his suicide note read, in part: "And so they say – "the incident dissolved" / the love boat smashed up / on the dreary routine. / I'm through with life / and [we] should absolve / from mutual hurts, afflictions and spleen."<ref>{{cite web |url=http://www.stihi.ru/2008/12/11/3799 |title=B. Маяковский-Любовная лодка разбилась о быт... En |author=Belyayeva Dina |work=poetic translations |publisher=Stihi.ru – national server of modern poetry |language=ru, en |trans-title=V. Mayakovsky – The Love Boat smashed up on the dreary routine ... En |access-date=7 April 2010 }}</ref> Mayakovsky's funeral on 17 April 1930, was attended by around 150,000, the third largest event of public mourning in Soviet history, surpassed only by those of [[Vladimir Lenin]] and [[Joseph Stalin]].<ref name=":1" /><ref>{{Cite book|title=Stalin: Volume I: Paradoxes of Power, 1878–1928|url=https://books.google.com/books?id=OB90AwAAQBAJ&pg=PT371|publisher=Penguin|date=6 November 2014|access-date=8 May 2015|isbn=9780698170100|first=Stephen|last=Kotkin}}</ref> He was interred at the Moscow [[Novodevichy Cemetery]].<ref name="poets"/>

====Controversy surrounding death====
[[File:Mayakovsky the Last Letter-.jpg|thumb|right|250px|Mayakovsky's farewell letter]]
Mayakovsky's suicide occurred after a dispute with Polonskaya, with whom he had a brief but unstable romance. Polonskaya, who was in love with the poet, but unwilling to leave her husband, was the last one to see Mayakovsky alive.{{citation needed|date=December 2020}} But, as Lilya Brik stated in her memoirs, "the idea of suicide was like a chronic disease inside him, and like any chronic disease it worsened under circumstances that, for him, were undesirable…"<ref name="haaretz"/> According to Polonskaya, Mayakovsky mentioned suicide on 13 April, when the two were at [[Valentin Katayev]]'s place, but she thought he was trying to emotionally blackmail her and "refused to believe for a second [he] could do such a thing."<ref name="polonskaya"/>

The circumstances of Mayakovsky's death became a matter of lasting controversy. It appeared that the suicide note had been written two days before his death. Soon after the poet's death, Lilya and Osip Brik were hastily sent abroad. The bullet removed from his body didn't match the model of his pistol, and his neighbors were later reported to say they'd heard two shots.<ref name="haaretz"/> Ten days later, the officer investigating the poet's suicide was himself killed, fueling speculation about the nature of Mayakovsky's death.<ref name= "poets"/> Such speculation, often alluding to suspicion of murder by State services, especially intensified during the periods of first [[Nikita Khrushchev|Krushchevian]] [[De-Stalinization|de-Stalinisation]], later [[Glasnost]], and [[Perestroika]], as Soviet politicians sought to weaken Stalin's reputation (or Brik's, and by association, Stalin's){{Citation needed |date=March 2017}} and the positions of contemporary opponents. According to Chantal Sundaram:{{Blockquote | The extent to which rumours of Mayakovsky's murder remained widespread is indicated by the fact that even as late as the end of 1991 they prompted the State Mayakovsky Museum to commission an expert medical and criminological inquiry into the material evidence of his death kept in the museum: photographs, the shirt with traces from the gunshot, the carpet on which Mayakovsky fell, and the authenticity of the suicide note. The possibility of a forgery, suggested by [Andrei] Koloskov, had survived as a theory with different variants. But the results of a detailed hand-writing analysis found that the suicide note was undoubtedly written by Mayakovsky, and also included the conclusion that its irregularities "depict a diagnostic complex, testifying to the influence… at the moment of execution… of 'disconcerting' factors, among which the most probable is a psycho-physiological state linked with agitation." Although the findings are hardly surprising, the event is indicative of a fascination with Mayakovsky's contradictory relationship with the Soviet authorities which survived into the era of perestroika, despite the fact that he was being attacked and rejected for his political conformism at this time.<ref name=":1" />}}