About Vladimir Mayakovsky
 Born in 1893 in the Georgian village of Bagdadi (which was renamed Mayakovsky after his death), Vladimir Mayakovsky was the son of a forestry officer. By the time of the 1905 revolution Mayakovsky was already working with the local Social Democrats, and when his family moved to Moscow a couple of years later he joined the Bolsheviks. He did propaganda work for the party until his arrest in 1908, which resulted in an imprisonment of eleven months.
The imprisonment was crucial to his artistic and political development, as he spent the time reading the classics of world literature. Nevertheless, upon leaving prison he became a key figure of the artistic avant-garde in Moscow, becoming a Futurist, an artistic movement resolutely opposed to all that was old and bucolic, and which praised the city, speed, and modernity. As their manifesto said: “We alone are the face of our time. Time’s trumpet blares in our art of words. The past is stifling…Throw Pushkin, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, etc, overboard.”
From this time until the revolutions of 1917 Mayakovsky was one of the most visible members of the Russian artistic scene. He wrote rough, declamatory poetry and cultivated the image of a hooligan, and poems he wrote during this period, like “ The Cloud in Trousers” and “I,” were among the most important of the time.
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