Two days before the 1913 premiere of this Futurist play in verse, the original cast withdrew because rumors started to spread across Saint Petersburg that they would be pelted with garbage and beaten by the public. In fact, the audience did throw rotten eggs, shouting at 20-year-old Vladimir Mayakovsky (who played the leading role), "Stop him immediately!... Catch him!... He is not to get away!... Make him give us back our money!" According to actor Konstantin Tomashevsky: Those were the times of turmoil, anxiety, dark forebodings. All of us instantly recognized in Mayakovsky a revolutionary, even if his hectic sermons to the human souls, mutilated by the vile city, sounded a bit muddled. It was an attempt at tearing off masks, revealing the sores of the society, sick beneath the veneer of respectability.Other theatrical events that season were barely noticed. "Who's more insane, the Futurists or the public?" the Peterburgskaya Gazeta newspaper asked.

Author Biography

Vladimir Mayakovsky was born in 1893 in the village of Bagdadi, near Kutayis (now renamed Mayakovsky) in the Republic of Georgia. In June of 1906 his family moved to Moscow, where he entered high school and was brought into political work with the then Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (Bolsheviks). He became a member of the party the following year. He was arrested and released several times, and befriended several poets of the Futurist Group. His first play Vladimir Mayakovsky: A Tragedy was written in verse and caused a riot when it premiered in 1913. His major works include "A Cloud in Trousers," "Man," and his play Mystery Bouffe (1918). Most of these works were written in support of the new Soviet order, but Mayakovsky's later works, such as The Bedbug (1928) and The Bathhouse (1930) were satirical criticisms of the new order. He grew increasingly disillusioned with Soviet life and committed suicide in 1930.