Exhibition of the "Apartment on Bolshaya Presnya" Museum

About exhibition

The Mayakovsky family lived in the apartment on Bolshaya Presnya from August 1913 to May 1915. It is the only one remaining of the many rented apartments they occupied in Moscow after moving from the Caucasus in 1906, before they were able to obtain their own home. The poet, his mother and two sisters occupied three rooms and rented out another. In the summer of 1925 Vladimir Mayakovsky visited America for the first time, where he spent almost three months. During that time he gave lectures about the Soviet Union and the new revolutionary art, and read his poems. The trip produced more than two dozen poems and a book of essays, My Discovery of America. But not a word was said about the young émigré Ellie Jones, with whom he was infatuated. As a result, the poet fathered a daughter by her, Helen Patricia — Elena Vladimirovna Mayakovskaya. The poet never revealed his secret — only his closest friends knew about Ellie and the daughter. The traces of the American daughter would have been lost to time if, sixty years after the poet’s death, she had not decided to tell the story of her parents and make herself known. The exhibition "Daughter", which opened in the apartment in 2017, is a tribute to Helen Patricia Thompson, Ellie Jones and Vladimir Mayakovsky. Visitors can see collections of poems published in America, drawings made by Vladimir Mayakovsky, his photographs and the only surviving letter addressed to his beloved and daughter.