An avant-garde verse drama, satirizing the urban life and, at the same time, hailing the up-and-coming revolution of the industrial power, it featured a set of bizarre, cartoonish characters and a poet protagonist.
[1][2] The play, which had two working titles, "The Railway" (Железная дорога) and "The Riot of Things" (Восстание вещей), was written in summer 1913 in Kuntsevo nearby Moscow, at the family friend Bogrovnikov’s dacha where they resided from May 18 till the end of August.
For days he was roaming the Kuntsevo, Krylatsky and Rublyovo parks, composing his tragedy… [In the house] he scribbled words, lines and rhymes upon scraps of paper and cigarettes' boxes, imploring mother not to throw anything away.
The Poet says farewells to his followers he refers to as "my poor rats," declares Heavens "a cheat" and, after meditating upon what he'd rather be - "a rooster from Holland or a Pskovian king," - decides he likes "the sound of my name, Vladimir Mayakovsky, the best.
"[6] The play was premiered in December 1913 at the Saint Petersburg's Luna Park theatre, directed by Mayakovsky (also engaged in the leading role) and financed by the Union of Youth artistic collective, with stage decorations designed by Pavel Filonov and Iosif Shkolnik.
"The uproar which followed was of such proportions that the expected hits of the season, performances in Petersburg by actor Max Linder and child prodigy conductor Willy Ferrero, came and went almost unnoticed.
"We won't recall another such case of a theatrical stage abuse," maintained Peterburgsky Listok, dismissing the text of the poem as "white fever delirium."
[7] After 1917 the Soviet critics hailed the play as a "daring swipe at the bourgeois values," admiring the way the author has "dethroned the old, decrepit God who'd lost all ability to do anything for people, to place a Poet protagonist upon the pedestal.