Vladimir Mayakovsky

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia in 1893. By the age of 15 he had moved to Moscow and joined the Bolshevik faction. Arrested in 1908, Mayakovsky spend his 11-month prison sentence reading Shakespeare, Byron and Tolstoy. The violence and turbulence of Mayakovsky’s life found its parallel in the Russian Revolution. During these revolutionary years, Mayakovsky produced what linguist and fellow futurist Roman Jakobson described as a poetry ‘qualitatively different’ to anything which had preceded it, not least because Mayakovsky’s verse was so concerned with eradicating any obstacles to the future. He died in 1930.