Left: Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1924, by Alexander Rodchenko. Right: The Collected Poems of Vladimir Mayakovsky, translated by Dorian Rottenberg, USSR, 1972.Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893–1930) was the leading poet of Russian Revolution of 1917 and of the early Soviet period. He was,
…an individualist and a rebel against established taste and standards, one of the founders of Russian Futurism movement. Originally Mayakovsky planned to become an artist. His early poems have strong painterly visions and sequences in many of his works recall film techniques. Mayakovsky was deeply concerned with the problem of death throughout his life, and in 1930, troubled by critics and disappointment in love, he shot himself with a pocket pistol. (Authors’ Calendar)