Of all the many Russian writers inspired and mobilised by the 1917 revolution, it is hard to think of anyone who typified the dynamic, experimental and highly factional literary culture of the early Soviet Union quite so vividly as the poet and playwright Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-30).

A controversial character and a provocative writer, Mayakovsky always enjoyed a complicated relationship with the revolution. His Futurist poetry was criticised in the Soviet press and his satirical plays attacked for being “obscure.”

Lenin never understood Mayakovsky’s poetry, which he dismissed as “pretentious,” while Trotsky observed dryly that while “it is impossible to out-clamour war and revolution, it is easy to get hoarse in the attempt” and indeed one of Mayakovsky’s books was called At the Top of My Voice. These days Mayakovsky is usually regarded as a tortured love poet, an unstable bohemian or a dupe of the system and, in an attempt to re-establish his reputation as one the most important political poets of the 20th century, Smokestack Books has just published Mayakovsky’s formidable 3,000-line epic poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (£11.99).