Burning Buildings
Burning Buildings (, subtitled: Lyric of the Modern Soul, ) is the fifth book by Russian Silver Age modernist poet Konstantin Balmont. It was first published in 1900 by Scorpion in Moscow and made its author famous across his country. The collection comprised 131 poems, most of them written in late 1899 at the house of the publisher and close friend Sergey Poliakov. The "Burning Buildings" second edition came as part of an anthology entitled "The Collection of Poems" (Собрание стихов) which came out in 1904 in Moscow. The book's third edition was included into the "Complete Poems" (Moscow , Scorpion, 1908). Its fourth and fifth editions followed in 1914 and 1917, respectively. History. As Balmont wrote in 1899, the whole collection has been created "under the spell of one single emotional wave" which turned his "life into a fairytale." According to critic M. Stakhova, "The author saw his artistic mission in "discovering new amalgams of ideas, colours and sounds." His main ideology in those times revolved around the idea of creating "a lyric of the modern soul," the one with many facets, but also self-liberation and self-knowledge." Balmont was apparently looking for a new character, 'genius of  Elements' and 'superhero'. Yet, sending the book to Leo Tolstoy, he wrote: "This is but one long scream of a soul, torn apart, lowly and, if you like, ugly. But I'll repudiate not a single page of it, not until I cease loving ugliness no lesser than I love harmony." Reception. Prince Alexander Urusov whose opinion was crucial for Balmont, did not appreciate the poet's new, aggressive brand of modernism, abhorring what he called "the extremes of decadence." Nikolai Gumilyov greeted Balmont's new development; in the article called "Leaders of the New School", praised the emergence of  all those hunchbacks, demons, all things beastly and perverse that have swept away the horde of old words, all those romances and dreaming, girls and boys, flowers and sunrises.