As a leading “Russian Futurist”, Vladimir Maiakovsky had, as a matter of course, been fundamentally drawn to the new, rather than the old. This disposition presupposed a commitment to the iconoclastic avant-garde in artistic forms, to scientific and technological advance, and to a new ideological and political system. Maiakovsky found all of these, and vigorously promoted them, over the first up-beat years of the post-October Bolshevik Soviet State. The artistic, and especially the technological, elements had long been associated, however, with America – the land of dynamic development and untrammelled capitalism. In 1925, he was to observe for himself in America “the futurism of naked technology” (My …
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