Vladimir Mayakovsky

Born in Bagdadi, Georgia, in 1893, Vladimir Mayakovsky moved to Moscow in 1906 after his father’s death. He joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in 1908 and was repeatedly arrested for his revolutionary activities. In 1911 he entered the Moscow School of Painting, Sculpture and Architecture, where he met David Burliuk and joined the Russian Futurist group Hylaea. In 1912 his poems appeared in the almanac A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, which challenged literary conventions. His early work combined formal experimentation with polemics against established culture. He published A Cloud in Trousers and The Backbone Flute in 1915. He welcomed the October Revolution and, from 1919, worked for the Russian Telegraph Agency (ROSTA), producing satirical posters and texts. In 1923 he founded LEF, a journal promoting experimental art and its engagement with revolutionary society. He composed a poem dedicated to Lenin in 1924 and travelled through Europe, the United States, Mexico and Cuba. Increasingly isolated amid political disillusionment, literary criticism and personal turmoil, he died by suicide in Moscow in 1930.