A strong influence proved to be petrashevets Sergey Durov who advised him to translate Barbier's Iambes et poemes for the Geneva-based The Word of the Underground magazine.

At 20 he debuted with an article in Alexander Hertzen's Kolokol,[4] in 1862 started contributing satirical poems to magazines Iskra and Zritel, writing under the pseudonym Vladimir Monumentov.

[3] After Dmitry Karakozov's attempt on the life of Tsar Alexander II in 1866, Burenin's flat was searched by the police and the publication of his highly popular feuilletons in Saint Petersburg's Vedomosti was stopped.

[7] Writers including Maxim Gorky, Anton Chekhov, Alexander Blok, Vladimir Korolenko, Leonid Andreev and Ivan Bunin filed lawsuits against him and complained about the critic's harsh words about opponents.

So insistent was the liberal and left press in their obstruction that Burenin's name became a token one: Vladimir Lenin mentioned it regularly as a symbol of 'dirty' methods in leading the polemics.

"Violating every norm of manner and behavior in his attacks on Merezhkovsky, Volynsky, Gippius... Burenin has done more than anybody else to popularize the new trends he slagged each Fridays in his brilliant buffoonery," argued critic Pyotr Pertsov.

[9] Burenin's novels and novellas had considerable commercial success (mainly due to their sensationalist nature: the characters were easily recognizable real people) but, according to biographer Lepyokhin, hold little artistic merit.

More substantial were Burenin's plays, based on antique and Middle Ages plots (Medea, with Suvorin as co-author, 1883; Messalina, 1885; The Death of Agrippina, 1887; The Comedy of Princess Zabava Putyatishna and Boyar-lady Vasilisa Mikulishna, 1889), all staged by Maly and Alexandrinsky theatres.

Criticising Burenin’s methods ("what he does is looking for every possibility way to offend his opponent, by ascribing to him some kind of smut"),[12] Leskov still credited him for "great erudition, wit and cleverness".

Never motivated by corporative or ideological interests, he was relying totally on his own ideas and concepts, one of which was that all Russian writers (and the new generation of them, in particular) were charlatans tending to fool their readership with nonsense which had nothing to do with reality.

[16] Yet, author and critic Nikolai Snessarev thought Suvorin (who reviewed his plays regularly and always negatively) might have been jealous of Burenin, a highly popular playwright.