Today, he is remembered mostly for his memoirs depicting Russian literary life in the 1920s and his friendship with Sergei Yesenin.

Marienhof's literary career started in 1918, when he participated in the Imaginists' manifesto "Deklaraciia", published in Voronezh.

The former presented his fictionalized (although still largely accurate) recollections of his friendship with Sergei Yesenin; the latter was a story of the life of young intellectuals during the revolution and the War communism.

After the publication of his last novel, "Shaved Man", in 1930 in Berlin and parts of his historical novel "Ekaterina" (1936), Marienhof was reduced to writing for theatre and later for radio without any hope of being published again.

Yesenin's works were edited in the USSR for a long period of time to omit the dedications to Marienhof.