Craft: Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky [Влади́мир Маяко́вский] (1893–1930) was a major Russian poet. He started in the Russian Futurist movement (sometimes called Cubo-Futurism) and co-signed their manifesto, “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” in 1913. He became a supporter of the Bolsheviks in the Russian Civil War (1917–1922), but as the Soviet Union began enforcing Socialist Realism, his relationship to Communism became more tense and atavistic.

Mayakovsky smiling for the camera in January 1924

Mayakovsky grew up in a Georgian village in the Caucuses where his father worked as a forest ranger. However, the natural world and landscape bored him. His autobiography says: “After seeing electricity, I lost interest in nature. Not up to date enough.”

In his youth, he was a Bolshevik activist, distributing leaflets, smuggling women activists out of prison, and irritating the government in general. All of these lead to an 11-month prison sentence, which is where he began making poems.