Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was a Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, and artist who stood at the vanguard of Russian Futurism and the Bolshevik avant-garde. Born in Georgia, he moved to Moscow after his father's death, joining the Bolshevik underground at fourteen and serving prison sentences where he began writing verse in solitary confinement.

Co-author of the 1912 Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste, Mayakovsky exploded conventional Russian poetic meters with his revolutionary 'stepped-ladder' (lesenka) verse, roaring acoustic rhymes, and epic tragedy in A Cloud in Trousers (1915). Embracing the October Revolution as 'my revolution', he designed ROSTA agitprop posters and satirized Soviet bureaucracy in plays like The Bedbug before disillusionment and personal heartbreak led him to take his own life in Moscow.