Vladimir Mayakovsky

(1893 - 1930)

As a teenager in Moscow, Vladimir Mayakovsky joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and was arrested repeatedly for issuing revolutionary proclamations; he wrote his first poems in solitary confinement. In 1911 he became interested in futurism. The following year he coauthored the manifesto “A Slap in the Face of Public Taste,” demanding that society “enlarge the scope of the poet’s vocabulary with arbitrary and derivative words” and summon an “insurmountable hatred for the language existing before their time.”