The 20th century did not need to resurrect Mayakovsky, because he did not allow it. With a blast, with the bang of the "small exquisite sphere," which he kept under his vest, he lived and survived "deadly and boorish always," striding like a cloud through the century and became the youthful symbol of the revolution and the bard of the Russian avant-garde.

From glorification to obscurity. At times triumphant and at other times in disgrace, condemned for years to silence and then rehabilitated, but heavily censored, the greatest and most talented poet of the Soviet era, according to Stalin, became streets and squares and a spectacular metro station in Moscow, huge and radiant, taking your breath away.

He also became many statues, those of socialist realism, sturdy and somewhat off-putting. "Walking down Gorky Street," wrote Ehrenburg, "I see a bronze man very haughty and every time I am genuinely astonished that this statue represents Mayakovsky, so little does the statue resemble the man I had known."