Russian and Soviet poet, playwright, artist and stage and film actor. He is among the foremost representatives of early-20th century Russian Futurism.
Mayakovsky, whose father died while Mayakovsky was young, moved to Moscow with his mother and sisters in 1906. At age 15 he joined the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party and was repeatedly jailed for subversive activity. He started to write poetry during solitary confinement in 1909. On his release he attended the Moscow Art School and joined, with David Burlyuk and a few others, the Russian Futurist group and soon became its leading spokesman. In 1912 the group published a manifestoand Mayakovsky’s poetry became conspicuously self-assertive and defiant in form and content. His poetic monodrama Vladimir Mayakovsky was performed in St. Petersburg in 1913.
When the Russian Revolution of 1917 broke out, Mayakovsky was wholeheartedly for the Bolsheviks. As a vigorous spokesman for the Communist Party, Mayakovsky expressed himself in many ways. From 1919 to 1921 he worked in the Russian Telegraph Agency as a painter of posters and cartoons, which he provided with apt rhymes and slogans. He poured out topical poems of propaganda and wrote didactic booklets for children while lecturing and reciting all over Russia. In 1924 he composed a 3,000-line elegy on the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin. After 1925 he traveled in Europe, the United States, Mexico, and Cuba, recording his impressions in poems and in a booklet of caustic sketches, “My Discovery of America”.
Mayakovsky found time to write scripts for motion pictures, in some of which he acted. Mayakovsky’s poetry was saturated with politics, but no amount of social propaganda could stifle his personal need for love, which burst out again and again because of repeated romantic frustrations. He had misunderstandings with the dogmatic Russian Association of Proletarian Writers and with Soviet authorities. Nor was the production of his Banya a success. Disappointed in love, increasingly alienated from Soviet reality, and denied a visa to travel abroad, he committed suicide in Moscow on 14 April 1930.
Mayakovsky was, in his lifetime, the most dynamic figure of the Soviet literary scene. His predominantly lyrical poems and his technical innovations influenced a number of Soviet poets, and outside Russia his impress was strong, especially in the 1930s, after Stalin declared him the “best and most talented poet of our Soviet epoch.” In the 1960s, young poets, drawn to avant-garde art and activism that often clashed with communist dogma, organized poetry readings under Mayakovsky’s statue in Moscow. In the Soviet Union’s final years there was a strong tendency to view Mayakovsky’s work as dated and insignificant, yet, on the basis of his best works, his reputation was later revived.

Link to Wikipedia biography