[1] The "6-act drama with the circus and the fireworks" (according to the subtitle), satirizing bureaucratic stupidity and opportunism under Joseph Stalin,[2] evoked strong criticism in the Soviet press, particularly from the Russian Association of Proletarian Writers.

"[The play's] political agenda is fighting the narrow-mindedness, opportunism, bureaucratism, and paving the way for heroism, the tempo increase, for the Socialist perspectives," the author told Literaturnaya Gazeta in a 1929 interview.

[1] The Bathhouse's rough version was finished in September 1929, but Mayakovsky continued to make changes to the text while performing the play at public recitals.

On 22 September he read the play at home to a circle of friends, the next day at the meeting of the Meyerhold Theatre's Arts and politics council.

Speaking at the discussion which followed, Vsevolod Meyerhold extolled The Bathhouse, rating it as high as the best work of Moliere, Pushkin and Gogol.

"[This play] is the greatest phenomenon in the history of the Russian theatre, but we have to applaud Mayakovsky the poet, who's given us the pieces of prose, written as masterfully as the poetry...

The play premiered on 30 January 1930 at the People's House's Drama theatre in Leningrad, directed by Meyerhold's student Vladimir Lyutze, with Boris Babochkin in the leading role.

"[6] On 17 March The Bathhouse was shown at the Leningrad's Tovstonogov Bolshoi Drama Theater, directed by Pavel Weisbrem, with Sergey Balashov as Pobedonosikov.

On 19 July 1951, on the day of Mayakovsky's 58th birthday, the Ruben Simonov-produced version of the play (featuring Igor Ilyinsky as Pobedonosikov) was broadcast on the Soviet Radio.

(↑) Pont Kitch's speeches look like indecipherable nonsense, but they are an elaborate linguistic experiment in which the English phrases are compiled with the phonetically similar Russian words.

The Phosphorescent Woman arrives from 2030 (sent by the Institute of Studying of the History of Communism) and invites to her time and space every single person who's got at least some virtue.

[8] In his bid to expose this vice, Mayakovsky "failed to provide the class analysis of the bureaucratism… The People House's Drama Theatre's production by V. Lyutse proved to be uninventive and only aggravated the author's fallacies," Leningradskaya Pravda (2 February) argued.

And his scornful attitude towards our reality in which he sees nobody but the ignorant chatterboxes, narcissistic bureaucrats and the 'passers-by', is quite telling... His workers are lifeless stooges speaking the heavy, tricky language of Mayakovsky himself.

[6]"Mayakovsky portrays monstrous bureaucrats without pointing to the ways of dealing with them," Komsomolskaya Pravda complained on 22 March 1930, concluding: "In all honesty, the play turned out bad, Meyerhold had no business staging it."

To cheer him up, I started speaking about the Popov-Dubovskoy's article in Pravda, which, written by the culture department's chief reflected the position of the newspaper thus probably putting an end to this anti-Bathhouse campaign.