The story of the theater the Zolotoy Rog (Golden Horn) goes back to 1867 when merchant Ivan Galetsky, after ranging across many seas and countries--including the USA, China, and Japan-- came to Vladivostok to seek his fortune.  He wisely bought a large lot in the center of the city for 30 rubles and was later able to sell part of it for 10,000 rubles to the local government.  He constructed a two-story wooden hotel with an adjacent restaurant, and in 1885 he added a large hall holding 350 seats.  This was the first theater in Vladivostok; it became known as Madame Galetsky’s Theater.  The present four-story masonry structure was built in 1903 by local engineer I. Baginov following a fire of 1899 which destroyed the original wooden building.

      In 1919 this building housed the so-called “Futurists’ Club,” the members of which included well-known poets David Burlyuk (1882-1967) and Nikolai Aseyev (1889-1963).  An innovative poet and artist, Burlyuk is justly considered one of the founding fathers of Russian Futurism, a movement in the arts that rejected traditional forms of expression, portraying and advocating instead the dynamism, violence, speed, and power of the newly mechanized era.   Its most well known member was poet Vladimir Mayakovsky.  In 1920 Burlyuk emigrated first to Japan and two years later to the United States.  Representing a trend of whimsicality in Russian poetry at the beginning of his literary career, Aseyev later arrived at a deeper philosophical understanding and interpretation of life.  He was awarded the Soviet State Prize in 1941 for the poem Mayakovsky Begins, in which he has created the image of a poet fighting for new art forms.