Burning Buildings

Burning Buildings (full title: Burning Buildings. Lyric of the Modern Soul, Горящие здания. Лирика современной души) is the fifth book by Russian Silver Age modernist poet Konstantin Balmont. It was first published in 1900 by the Moscow Scorpion publishing house and made its author famous across his country.^[1] The collection comprised 131 poems, most of them written in the autumn and winter of 1899 in the house of publisher and friend Sergey Poliakov.^[2][3]:569 The Burning Buildings' 2nd edition featured in an anthology entitled The Collection of Poems (Собрание стихов) which came out in 1904 in Moscow. The book's 3rd edition was included into the Complete Poems (Moscow, Scorpion, 1908). Its 4th and 5th editions followed in 1914 and 1917, respectively.^[3]:572

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".^[3]:569

I found myself caught in one wave of passion, got encaptured and carried on by it, being thrown up and down, unable to break free until I managed to straddle it by way of understanding its meaning. The book is called The Lyric of Modern Soul and that is not vain metaphor. While never cultivating artificial infatuation with what is now called modern world, which lived in other forms many times, I've never shut myself from voices coming from the past and, inevitably, the future... In this book I speak not just for myself but for many others who’ve got no voice and keep numb... but still are able to feel the burden of fatal conflicts even stronger than myself.^[3]:569

According to M.Stakhova, "The author saw his artistic mission in 'finding new amalgams of ideas, colours and sounds'. His main ideology in those times revolved around the idea of creating 'the lyric of the modern soul', the one with many facets, but also self-liberation and self-knowledge." He was looking for a new character, a "genius of Elements", a "superhero". Yet, sending the book too Leo Tolstoy, Balmont wrote: "This is but one long scream of 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."^[2]

Reception

Prince Alexander Urusov whose opinion for Balmont was crucial, failed to appreciate the poet's new, aggressive brand of modernism, seeing in it "extremes of decadence". One of those who greeted Balmont's new development was Nikolai Gumilyov who, in the article 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."^[4]

References