[2] The drama was written between 1923 and 1924,[3] completed while Nabokov was living in Prague with his mother and sister as émigrés, having fled Russia because of the October Revolution in 1917.

Nabokov had experienced a personal tragedy the previous year, when his father had been killed in Berlin while shielding fellow expatriate Pavel Milyukov from an assassination attempt.

[5] The Zvezda version of the play, compared with the manuscript given to the Library of Congress by Nabokov in the 1950s, is known to be rife with errors.

[1] The protagonist of the drama is Morn, a masked king, whose ascent to the throne has brought peace and stability to the country.

He refuses, and runs off with Midia, while the revolutionaries overthrow the government in his absence, replacing the benign monarchy with a dictatorship.