Short answers, pulled from the story.
Vladimir Mayakovsky was a Russian poet, playwright, artist, and actor born in 1893 who became a prominent figure of the Russian Futurist movement. He co-signed the Futurist manifesto A Slap in the Face of Public Taste in 1913 and wrote poems including A Cloud in Trousers and Backbone Flute.
Vladimir Mayakovsky shot himself through the heart on the 14th of April 1930, and his partner the actress Veronika Polonskaya heard the shot as she left his flat. His suicide note asked that no one be blamed and that the government provide for his family.
The circumstances of Vladimir Mayakovsky's death became a lasting controversy because the bullet removed from his body did not match the model of his pistol and neighbors reported hearing two shots. The suicide note had been written two days before his death, and ten days later the officer investigating the case was himself killed.
Joseph Stalin described Vladimir Mayakovsky after his death as "the best and the most talented poet of our Soviet epoch." Stalin made this declaration in a resolution responding to a 1935 letter from Lilya Brik, adding that indifference to the poet's cultural heritage amounted to a crime.
Lilya Brik was a married woman with whom Vladimir Mayakovsky fell in love after meeting her and her husband Osip Brik in July 1915. He dedicated nearly all of his large poems to her, and her 1935 letter to Stalin secured the official rehabilitation of his legacy.
Vladimir Mayakovsky wrote poems such as A Cloud in Trousers, Backbone Flute, 150,000,000, and the 3,000-line epic Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. He also wrote satirical plays including Mystery-Bouffe, The Bedbug, and The Bathhouse, and produced roughly 1,100 Agitprop posters known as the ROSTA Windows.