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Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in Bagdadi, Georgia, on 7th July, 1893. At the age of fourteen he joined the Bolsheviks and over the next ten years was arrested several times and spent eleven months in prison.

On his release from prison in 1909 he attended Moscow Art School where he formed the Cubo-Futurist Group with David Burlyuk. During this period he completed two major poems, A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and The Backbone Flute (1916).

Mayakovsky fully supported the October Revolution and inspired such poems as Ode to Revolution (1918) and Left March (1919). He also contributed drawings and text for hundreds of propaganda posters calling for a Bolshevik victory in the Civil War. He also wrote a 3,000 line elegy on the death of L.

Mayakovsky became increasingly critical of the Soviet government under Joseph Stalin. His plays, The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1930) were thinly disguised satires on Stalin's authoritarianism.

Increasingly disillusioned with communism and denied a visa to travel abroad, Vladimir Mayakovsky committed suicide in Moscow on 14th April, 1930.

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