In a sense, the creative writers of St Petersburg could afford to let Mir Iskusstva and Novyi Put' slip from their control because of the new publishing opportunities, provided by the publishing house Skorpion. The establishment of this venture in 1900 led to the regular appearance, from 1901 to 1905, of the ‘decadent’ almanac Severnye Tsvety, called after Pushkin's Northern Flowers, and, from 1904 to 1909, of the periodical Vesy. ‘Skorpion’ was a Moscow initiative run by literati of the Moscow school and financed by Moscow money. The prime organiser was Briusov, but the original impulse came from Bal′mont.

In 1899, Bal′mont, having cemented his public association with Briusov by the publication of Kniga razdumii – in which the two poets had debated, in an antiphonal exchange of poems, their differing views on art and life – spent the summer as a guest on the country estate of Sergei Aleksandrovich Poliakov in pursuit of inspiration and the female poet Nina Lokhvitskaia. Here, enraptured by the company, the beauty of nature and the fashionable craze for Nietzschean self-assertion, Bal′mont wrote his most immediately successful body of poetry, which was to form the bulk of a new collection under the suitably vivid and catastrophic title Goriashchie zdaniia (Burning Buildings, the Lyric Poetry of a Contemporary Soul).