Vladimir Mayakovsky
Russian and Soviet poet (1893-1930) · Russia · On the map · Writers · Died at 36
The poet who tried to marry avant-garde fury with Bolshevik faith - and found the Soviet state a colder audience than he'd hoped. Mayakovsky roared through Russian Futurism, wrote agitprop for Lenin, then watched censors turn on his satires before he pulled the trigger in 1930.
Vladimir Mayakovsky is read about 1,839 times a day, in 84 languages.
A typical day, 30 days to 12 November 2026
The middle day of the days counted, so one week of news cannot move it. The line under it is the last 400 days, one point a day.
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Vladimir Mayakovsky
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In their own words 4
, Agitprop / sticks / in my teeth too, / and I'd rather / compose / romances for you - / more profit in it / and more charm.
A rhyme's / … / a barrel of dynamite. / A line is a fuse / that's lit. / The line smoulders, / the rhyme explodes - / and by a stanza / a city / is blown to bits.
No gray hairs streak my soul, / no grandfatherly fondness there! / I shake the world with the might of my voice, / and walk - handsome, / twentytwoyearold.
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About this person
Vladimir Vladimirovich Mayakovsky was born 19 July 1893 and rose in pre-Revolution Russia as a leading voice of Futurism, co-signing the manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste in 1913 and writing poems like A Cloud in Trousers (1915) and Backbone Flute (1916). After 1917 he threw himself into the Bolshevik cause: he directed plays, appeared in films, edited the art journal LEF, and made agitprop posters during the Civil War, his work shot through with admiration for Lenin. But the Soviet state he championed began to chafe - his satirical poem "Talking With the Taxman About Poetry" (1926) and plays The Bedbug (1929) and The Bathhouse (1929) met scorn from censors and the literary establishment as Socialist realism calcified into doctrine. On 14 April 1930, Mayakovsky killed himself. Stalin, whose apparatus had let proletarian writers savage him in life, called him after death "the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch."
