In the early 1924, soon after Lenin's death the poem called "The Komsomol Song" (Комсомольская) was published in Molodaya Gvardiya (Nos.

So shaken was he by this death that for some time couldn't find it in him to express his feelings [in writing]… [Mayakovsky] has been coming back to Lenin's memory and ideas throughout his life.

Author and critic Kornely Zelinsky in his 1955 memoirs remembered:The middle section of the poem, portraying Lenin against the backdrop of the international workers' movement was being received with some strain, some asked Mayakovsky to read slower...

[2] The Red Hall concert was reviewed on the 23 October issue of Rabochaya Moskva (The Working Moscow) newspaper.

The article titled "The poem Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, as Judged by the Party Activists," read:The Hall was overcrowded.

In October Mayakovsky also read the poem at some private meetings, notably in Valerian Kuybyshev's Kremlin office, and at Anatoly Lunacharsky's home.

In her 1963 memoirs Natalya Lunacharskaya-Rosenel remembered:We all gathered at eleven in the evening... [Mayakovsky] brought a large company with him: Sergei Tretyakov, Grossman-Roshchin, Lilya and Osip Briks, Malkin, Shterenberg, some other people...

I watched [his] face and saw, how with the words about the 'crying Bolsheviks' how his pince-nez glasses turned misty... As the recital was over, there was a minute's silence which for an author is more precious than any ovation... and then suddenly from the gallery above came a roaring applause and cries: 'Thank you!

It turned out that the artistic youth who gathered in my younger sister's room on the mezzanine silently creeped into the gallery and were listening from there, unobserved.

"[4]While the newspapers reported of highly successful public performances, the Soviet literary critics approached the poem with caution.

Poet and critic G. Lelevich, in Pechat i Revolyutsia (Press and Revolution, No.1, 1926), expressed his reservations: "Surely, the poem is masterfully written, but the chasm between the brain and the heart here is painful.

It's a tragedy that the ultra-individualistic verses 'about that' are strikingly sincere with Mayakovsky, while the Lenin poem, some exceptions aside, is cerebral and rhetorical.

Neither singing paeans to the revolution through abstract logic, nor exploiting the bohemian and individualistic motives of old will do as the basis for Mayakovsky's huge talent's further development.

[6] Critic Viktor Pertsov (at the time a LEF activist) in his 1925 article "Revising the Left Front Policy in the Modern Russian Art", wrote: "The poem 'Vladimir Ilyich Lenin' is this extraordinarily strange, self-contradictory thing.

On the one hand, the grief over this immense loss is cast in such words that won't fail to excite any of the future generations.

On the other hand, several pages earlier we have the insufferable wordiness, cringeworthy naivety and clumsiness in the descriptions of Lenin's life, as well as [the history of the] working class.