The script was written on an original theme of his own and was dedicated to the problem of the relationship between an artist’s inner and outer life, a subject that had constantly preoccupied the poet. However, according to the poet, the production ‘mutilated the script to the point of utter disgrace’. The fantastical journey of the film actress into real life and back – the climax of the cinematic legend – feels more like the retelling of a tedious dream. The innovator’s experiment failed.
Mayakovsky was deeply dissatisfied with this work: he believed that the cinematic adaptation had completely ruined the text’s meaning. The film turned out to be dull and somewhat ponderous. In the mid-1970s, archivists unearthed several discarded fragments of this film, which are held at the Russian State Archive of Film and Photo Documents in Krasnogorsk, but the film has not survived in its entirety.
