Short answers, pulled from the story.
Konstantin Balmont was a Russian Symbolist poet and translator born in Shuya who became one of the major figures of the Silver Age of Russian Poetry. His 1900 collection Burning Buildings made him the most popular poet in the Russian Symbolist movement, and he introduced formal innovations including melodic rhythms and the organization of lyric poems into narrative cycles that were widely imitated in Russian verse.
Balmont left Russia permanently on the 25th of May 1920 after Anatoly Lunacharsky granted him permission to depart, a move the diplomat Jurgis Baltrušaitis is credited with arranging. He settled in France, where he published several books of poetry and memoirs but found himself caught between suspicion from radical emigres and hostility from the Soviet press. He died in poverty at the Russian House emigre refuge in Noisy-le-Grand on the 23rd of December 1942.
Balmont translated Edgar Allan Poe's poem "The Bells" into Russian, and that translation became the text Sergei Rachmaninoff used as the basis for his choral symphony of the same name, Op. 35. Modern Russian literary scholars still regard Balmont's translations of Poe as exemplary.
Balmont attempted suicide twice. The first attempt was on the 13th of March 1890, when he jumped from a third-story window, leaving him with a limp and an injured writing hand for the rest of his life. The second attempt, also by jumping from a window, occurred in 1909.
Burning Buildings, published in 1900, is regarded as the apex of Balmont's legacy. The collection expressed his Nietzschean individualism and made him the central figure of Russian Symbolism. His friend and fellow poet Valery Bryusov later wrote that for a decade after its publication Balmont was a towering presence in Russian poetry whose influence others either followed or struggled to escape.
The writer Vladimir Korolenko provided crucial early support, offering detailed favorable criticism of Balmont's handwritten verse and writing to the editor Mikhail Albov of Severny Vestnik on his behalf in September 1891. Moscow University professor Nikolai Storozhenko was equally important, accepting Balmont's essay on Shelley and introducing him in October 1892 to influential writers including Dmitry Merezhkovsky and Zinaida Gippius, as well as the publisher Kozma Soldatyonkov.