Throughout the twentieth century, it was not unknown for leading left-wing American cultural figures to visit the Soviet Union. W. E. B. du Bois, Langston Hughes, John Reed, and Angela Davis all explored the vast socialist country with anticipation and an open mind. The same was true of Russians who were, despite the Cold War, often fascinated by the dynamism of the United States.

One such character was the revolutionary poet Vladimir Mayakovsky, who traveled to the United States in 1925. Though almost a century ago, his insights provide a unique perspective into a nation’s character as seen from the perspective of an outsider. Born in rural Georgia in 1893, Mayakovsky was a young man when he arrived in America. A founder of Russian futurism — a cultural movement which rejected premodern notions of art and embraced the turbulent pace of modernity — his travels to the United States, the world’s most modern nation, between May and October of 1925, were of both artistic and political significance.

In the New World, he recited verses to working-class audiences and gave talks on proletarian aesthetics, fighting back feelings of homesickness and disgust at the political backwardness of American capitalism. These were distinctly unromantic times. Vladimir Lenin died the year before the poet arrived in the US and Russia was still scarred from the horrors of the Civil War.