Vladimir Mayakovsky fired at full volume — in his verse and in his life. "I want the pen to be ranked with the bayonet." Then, in 1930, he fired at himself.
He was born in Georgia in 1893, the son of a forester. His father died of blood poisoning, and ever afterward Mayakovsky was afraid of pins and of other people's things. In Moscow, prison at seventeen for revolutionary activity. In his cell he read everything he could lay hands on. He came out a poet.
A Cloud in Trousers, The Backbone Flute, About This — lyric poetry of enormous scale and enormous pain. He embraced the Revolution sincerely: the ROSTA windows of satire, agitprop posters, slogans. Then he began to feel the cage.
Lili Brik was his love and his torment over many years. His last poem: "It's after one. You must have gone to bed." In the morning, the shot. He was thirty-six.