In 1904–1905 Scorpion published a two-volume set of Balmont's collected works, followed in 1905 by the collection "A Liturgy of Beauty. Elemental Hymns" (Литургия красоты. Стихийные гимны) and "A Fairy's Fairy Tales" (Фейные сказки, both 1905). The first work dealt mostly with his impressions of the Russian-Japanese War, while the second was a children's book written for his daughter Nina Balmont. Neither collection was received as warmly as their predecessors; in retrospect many contemporaries recognized this as the beginning of Balmont's long decline as a poet. Back from his trip to Mexico and California, Balmont became involved in the 1905 street unrest, reciting poems on barricades and (according to Yekaterina Andreyeva) "carrying a pistol in his pocket wherever he went." Now friends with Maxim Gorky, he contributed both to the latter's "New Life" (Novaya zhizn) and Paris-based "Red Banner" (Krasnoye znamya) radical newspapers. On 31 December 1905, he fled to Paris to avoid arrest. Balmont's posturing as a political immigrant was ridiculed in Russia at the time, but years later researchers found evidence that the Russian secret police considered the poet a 'dangerous political activist' and tried to spy on him abroad. Balmont returned to Russia only in 1913 after an amnesty on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the Romanov dynasty was declared.