While working upon the poem Mayakovsky often visited Gorky, recited new fragments and, apparently, received advice.

[2] In the end of 1915, having finished Part 3 of the poem, Mayakovsky read it in the offices of Letopis magazine, with Gorky present.

[3] Gorky was the poem's most ardent champion who admired the anti-war pathos, but also its in-your-face language, totally devoid of subtlety ("like telegraph posts playing upon your nerves," as he put it).

The Futurists received the poem negatively and accused the author of having torn with all the basic principles of the movement, apparently under Gorky's influence.

Later Soviet literary historians eagerly explored this line, finding the two authors' rhetoric at the time in many ways similar.