The poem could be seen as a sequel to its predecessor, according to biographer A.Mikhaylov. Both were autobiographical and shared the common leitmotif, that of love being killed by the social conventions and bourgeois morality. As A Cloud in Trousers several months earlier, Backbone Flute outraged most of the contemporary Russian critics, some of whom referred to the author as a talentless charlatan, spurning "empty words of a malaria sufferer," others as a psychically unstable man "who should be hospitalized immediately."
