Nikolay Gumilyov
Encyclopedia
Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilev ' onMouseout='HidePop("83992")' href="/topics/Old_Style_and_New_Style_dates">NS
1886 – August 1921) was an influential Russian poet who founded the acmeism
movement.
on Kotlin Island
, into the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev (1836–1920), a naval physician, and Anna Ivanovna L'vova (1854–1942). His childhood nickname was Montigomo the Hawk's Claw. He studied at the gymnasium of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Symbolist
poet Innokenty Annensky
was his teacher. Later, Gumilev admitted that it was Annensky's influence that turned his mind to writing poetry.
His first publication were verses I ran from cities into the forest on September 8, 1902. In 1905 he published his first book of lyrics entitled The Way of Conquistadors. It comprised poems on most exotic subjects imaginable, from Lake Chad
giraffe
s to Caracalla
's crocodiles. Although Gumilev was proud of the book, most critics found his technique sloppy; later he would refer to that collection as apprentice's work.
From 1907 and on, Nikolai Gumilev traveled extensively in Europe, notably in Italy and France. In 1908 his new collection Romantic Flowers appeared. While in Paris, he published the literary magazine Sirius, but only three issues were produced. On returning to Russia, he edited and contributed to the artistic periodical Apollon. At that period, he fell in love with a non-existent woman Cherubina de Gabriak
. It turned out that Cherubina de Gabriak was the literary pseudonym for two people, a disabled schoolteacher and Maximilian Voloshin
, and on November 22, 1909 he had a duel with Voloshin over the affair.
Like Flaubert
and Rimbaud
before him, Gumilev was fascinated with Africa and travelled there almost each year. He hunted lions in Ethiopia
and brought to the Saint Petersburg
museum of anthropology and ethnography a large collection of African artifacts. His landmark collection The Tent (1921) collected the best of his poems on African themes.
and absorbed his views on poetry at the evenings held by Ivanov in his celebrated "Turreted House". His wife Anna Akhmatova
accompanied him to Ivanov's parties as well. Gumilev and Akhmatova married on April 25. On September 18, 1912, their child Lev
was born. He would eventually become an influential and controversial historian.
Dissatisfied with the vague mysticism of Russian Symbolism
, then prevalent in the Russian poetry, Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky
established the so-called Guild of Poets, which was modeled after medieval guilds of Western Europe. They advocated a view that poetry needs craftsmanship just like architecture needs it. Writing a good poem they compared to building a cathedral. To illustrate their ideals, Gumilev published two collections, The Pearls in 1910 and the Alien Sky in 1912. It was Osip Mandelstam
, however, who produced the movement's most distinctive and durable monument, the collection of poems entitled Stone (1912).
According to the principles of acmeism (as the movement came to be dubbed by art historians), every person, irrespective of his talent, may learn to produce high-quality poems if only he follows the guild's masters, i.e., Gumilev and Gorodetsky. Their own model was Théophile Gautier
, and they borrowed much of their basic tenets from the French Parnasse. Such a program, combined with colourful and exotic subject matter of Gumilev's poems, attracted to the Guild a large number of adolescents. Several major poets, notably Georgy Ivanov
and Vladimir Nabokov
, passed the school of Gumilev, albeit informally.
When World War I started, Gumilev hastened to Russia and enthusiastically joined a corps of elite cavalry. For his bravery he was invested with two St. George cross
es (December 24, 1914 and January 5, 1915). His war poems were assembled in the collection The Quiver (1916). In 1916 he wrote a verse play, Gondla, which was published the following year; set in ninth-century Iceland
, torn between its native paganism
and Irish Christianity
, it is also clearly autobiographical, Gumilev putting much of himself into the hero Gondla (an Irishman chosen as king but rejected by the jarl
s, he kills himself to ensure the triumph of Christianity) and basing Gondla's wild bride Lera on Gumilev's wife Akhmatova. The play was performed in Rostov na Donu in 1920 and, even after the author's execution by the Cheka
, in Petrograd in January 1922: "The play, despite its crowd scenes being enacted on a tiny stage, was a major success. Yet when the Petrograd audience called for the author, who was now officially an executed counter-revolutionary traitor, the play was removed from the repertoire and the theatre disbanded." (In February 1934, as they walked along a Moscow street, Osip Mandelstam
quoted Gondla's words "I am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she repeated them in her "Poem without a Hero.")
During the Russian Revolution
, Gumilev served in the Russian expedition corps in Paris. Despite advice to the contrary, he rapidly returned to Petrograd. There he published several new collections, Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally divorced Akhmatova (August 5, 1918), whom he had left for another woman several years prior. The following year he married Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, a noblewoman and daughter of a well-known historian.
, Jules Verne
, Gustave Aimard
and others." In 1920 Gumilev co-founded the All-Russia Union of Writers. Gumilev made no secret of his anti-communist views. He also crossed himself in public and didn't care to hide his contempt for half-literate Bolshevik
s.
On August 3, 1921 he was arrested by Cheka
on allegation of participation in monarchist conspiracy. Most literary historians agree that it was not a Cheka fabrication, and Gumilev was a likely conspirator. On August 24 Petrograd Cheka decreed execution of all 61 participants of the Tagantsev Conspiracy, including Nikolai Gumilev. The exact dates and locations of their execution and burial are still unknown.
According to Rayfield's book 'Stalin and his Hangmen', the murder of Gumilev grew out of the consequences of the Kronstadt Rebellion
. The sailors of Kronstadt, in Petrograd, had protested against the new Bolshevik state in 1921. Rayfield asserts that the Cheka blamed the intellectuals of the city. A Chekist named Iakov Agranov came up with a plan to attack them. He tricked a local professor into performing dissident acts, then arrested the professor and forced him to name 300 'conspirators'. Agranov told him none of the named people would be killed. However, 100 were killed, and Gumilev was one of these. After appeals from Gorky
and others, Lenin agreed to pardon a small number of the condemned, but the Cheka officer in charge carried out the execution order so quickly that the pardon came too late. Gumilev is thought to have been buried in the Kovalevsky Forest
.
Hayward, in an introduction to a book of Akhmatova's poetry, writes that the execution placed a stigma on Anna and her son with Nikolai, Lev. Lev's arrest in the purges and terrors of the 30s were based simply on his being his father's son.
Gumilev's direct influence on Russian poetry was short lived. The sentiment is best expressed by Nabokov, who once remarked that Gumilev is the poet for adolescents, just as Korney Chukovsky
is the poet for children. His most durable verse, written in mystical strain, appeared in the collection The Pillar of Fire (1921).
Although "banned in the Soviet times, Gumilev was loved for his adolescent longing for travel and giraffes and hippos, for his dreams of a fifteen-year-old captain" and was "a favorite poet among geologists, archaeologists and paleontologists." His "The Tram That Lost Its Way" is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.
When Mikhail Sinelnikov was asked to study the archives of the late Mikhail Zenkevich, the last of the Acmeists - his teacher - he "found piles of secreted verse, an unpublished novel, manuscripts which Pasternak
brought to the old master to be critiqued, the poems and letters of his friends. According to Sinelnikov, "at the bottom of a wide box lay a copy of Izvestia Petrosovieta with a list of people executed in connection with the Tagantsev case. The type was barely legible, more like wisps of old wool. Some names, those of Zenkevich's acquaintances, were ticked off. Gumilev's name was underlined in red."
Old Style and New Style dates
Old Style and New Style are used in English language historical studies either to indicate that the start of the Julian year has been adjusted to start on 1 January even though documents written at the time use a different start of year ; or to indicate that a date conforms to the Julian...
1886 – August 1921) was an influential Russian poet who founded the acmeism
Acmeist poetry
Acmeism, or the Guild of Poets, was a transient poetic school which emerged in 1910 in Russia under the leadership of Nikolai Gumilyov and Sergei Gorodetsky. The term was coined after the Greek word acme, i.e., "the best age of man"....
movement.
Early life and poems
Nikolai was born in the town of KronstadtKronstadt
Kronstadt , also spelled Kronshtadt, Cronstadt |crown]]" and Stadt for "city"); is a municipal town in Kronshtadtsky District of the federal city of St. Petersburg, Russia, located on Kotlin Island, west of Saint Petersburg proper near the head of the Gulf of Finland. Population: It is also...
on Kotlin Island
Kotlin Island
Kotlin is a Russian island, located near the head of the Gulf of Finland, west of Saint Petersburg in the Baltic Sea. Kotlin separates the Neva Bay from the rest of the gulf...
, into the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev (1836–1920), a naval physician, and Anna Ivanovna L'vova (1854–1942). His childhood nickname was Montigomo the Hawk's Claw. He studied at the gymnasium of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Symbolist
Russian Symbolism
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...
poet Innokenty Annensky
Innokenty Annensky
Innokentiy Fyodorovich Annensky was a poet, critic and translator, representative of the first wave of Russian Symbolism...
was his teacher. Later, Gumilev admitted that it was Annensky's influence that turned his mind to writing poetry.
His first publication were verses I ran from cities into the forest on September 8, 1902. In 1905 he published his first book of lyrics entitled The Way of Conquistadors. It comprised poems on most exotic subjects imaginable, from Lake Chad
Lake Chad
Lake Chad is a historically large, shallow, endorheic lake in Africa, whose size has varied over the centuries. According to the Global Resource Information Database of the United Nations Environment Programme, it shrank as much as 95% from about 1963 to 1998; yet it also states that "the 2007 ...
giraffe
Giraffe
The giraffe is an African even-toed ungulate mammal, the tallest of all extant land-living animal species, and the largest ruminant...
s to Caracalla
Caracalla
Caracalla , was Roman emperor from 198 to 217. The eldest son of Septimius Severus, he ruled jointly with his younger brother Geta until he murdered the latter in 211...
's crocodiles. Although Gumilev was proud of the book, most critics found his technique sloppy; later he would refer to that collection as apprentice's work.
From 1907 and on, Nikolai Gumilev traveled extensively in Europe, notably in Italy and France. In 1908 his new collection Romantic Flowers appeared. While in Paris, he published the literary magazine Sirius, but only three issues were produced. On returning to Russia, he edited and contributed to the artistic periodical Apollon. At that period, he fell in love with a non-existent woman Cherubina de Gabriak
Cherubina de Gabriak
Cherubina de Gabriak was a literary pseudonym of Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva possibly together with Maximilian Voloshin.-Mysterious poet:...
. It turned out that Cherubina de Gabriak was the literary pseudonym for two people, a disabled schoolteacher and Maximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Voloshin
Maximilian Alexandrovich Kirienko-Voloshin was a Russian poet and famous Freemason. He was one of the significant representatives of the Symbolist movement in Russian culture and literature...
, and on November 22, 1909 he had a duel with Voloshin over the affair.
Like Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert
Gustave Flaubert was a French writer who is counted among the greatest Western novelists. He is known especially for his first published novel, Madame Bovary , and for his scrupulous devotion to his art and style.-Early life and education:Flaubert was born on December 12, 1821, in Rouen,...
and Rimbaud
Arthur Rimbaud
Jean Nicolas Arthur Rimbaud was a French poet. Born in Charleville, Ardennes, he produced his best known works while still in his late teens—Victor Hugo described him at the time as "an infant Shakespeare"—and he gave up creative writing altogether before the age of 21. As part of the decadent...
before him, Gumilev was fascinated with Africa and travelled there almost each year. He hunted lions in Ethiopia
Ethiopia
Ethiopia , officially known as the Federal Democratic Republic of Ethiopia, is a country located in the Horn of Africa. It is the second-most populous nation in Africa, with over 82 million inhabitants, and the tenth-largest by area, occupying 1,100,000 km2...
and brought to the Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...
museum of anthropology and ethnography a large collection of African artifacts. His landmark collection The Tent (1921) collected the best of his poems on African themes.
Guild of Poets
In 1910, Gumilev fell under the spell of the Symbolist poet and philosopher Vyacheslav IvanovVyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov
Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov was a Russian poet and playwright associated with the Russian Symbolist movement. He was also a philosopher, translator, and literary critic.-Early life:...
and absorbed his views on poetry at the evenings held by Ivanov in his celebrated "Turreted House". His wife Anna Akhmatova
Anna Akhmatova
Anna Andreyevna Gorenko , better known by the pen name Anna Akhmatova , was a Russian and Soviet modernist poet, one of the most acclaimed writers in the Russian canon.Harrington p11...
accompanied him to Ivanov's parties as well. Gumilev and Akhmatova married on April 25. On September 18, 1912, their child Lev
Lev Gumilev
Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev , was a Soviet historian, ethnologist and anthropologist. His unorthodox ideas on the birth and death of ethnic groups have given rise to the political and cultural movement known as "Neo-Eurasianism".-Life:His parents were two prominent poets Nikolay Gumilev and Anna...
was born. He would eventually become an influential and controversial historian.
Dissatisfied with the vague mysticism of Russian Symbolism
Russian Symbolism
Russian symbolism was an intellectual and artistic movement predominant at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. It represented the Russian branch of the symbolist movement in European art, and was mostly known for its contributions to Russian poetry.-Russian symbolism in...
, then prevalent in the Russian poetry, Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky
Sergei Gorodetsky
Sergey Mitrofanovich Gorodetsky was a Russian poet, one of the founders of Guild of Poets .Gorodetsky entered the literary scene as a Symbolist, developing friendships with Blok, Ivanov, and Briusov...
established the so-called Guild of Poets, which was modeled after medieval guilds of Western Europe. They advocated a view that poetry needs craftsmanship just like architecture needs it. Writing a good poem they compared to building a cathedral. To illustrate their ideals, Gumilev published two collections, The Pearls in 1910 and the Alien Sky in 1912. It was Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...
, however, who produced the movement's most distinctive and durable monument, the collection of poems entitled Stone (1912).
According to the principles of acmeism (as the movement came to be dubbed by art historians), every person, irrespective of his talent, may learn to produce high-quality poems if only he follows the guild's masters, i.e., Gumilev and Gorodetsky. Their own model was Théophile Gautier
Théophile Gautier
Pierre Jules Théophile Gautier was a French poet, dramatist, novelist, journalist, art critic and literary critic....
, and they borrowed much of their basic tenets from the French Parnasse. Such a program, combined with colourful and exotic subject matter of Gumilev's poems, attracted to the Guild a large number of adolescents. Several major poets, notably Georgy Ivanov
Georgy Ivanov
Georgii Vladimirovich Ivanov was a leading poet and essayist of the Russian emigration between the 1930s and 1950s.As a banker's son, Ivanov spent his young manhood in the elite circle of Russian golden youth. He started writing pretentious verses, imitative of Baudelaire and the French...
and Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Nabokov
Vladimir Vladimirovich Nabokov was a multilingual Russian novelist and short story writer. Nabokov wrote his first nine novels in Russian, then rose to international prominence as a master English prose stylist...
, passed the school of Gumilev, albeit informally.
War experience
Cross of St. George
thumb|Original Cross of St. George.Ist and 2nd class were in gold.The Cross of St. George ', or simply the George's Cross, was, until 1913, officially known as the Sign of Distinction of the Military Order of St. George....
es (December 24, 1914 and January 5, 1915). His war poems were assembled in the collection The Quiver (1916). In 1916 he wrote a verse play, Gondla, which was published the following year; set in ninth-century Iceland
Iceland
Iceland , described as the Republic of Iceland, is a Nordic and European island country in the North Atlantic Ocean, on the Mid-Atlantic Ridge. Iceland also refers to the main island of the country, which contains almost all the population and almost all the land area. The country has a population...
, torn between its native paganism
Paganism
Paganism is a blanket term, typically used to refer to non-Abrahamic, indigenous polytheistic religious traditions....
and Irish Christianity
Christianity
Christianity is a monotheistic religion based on the life and teachings of Jesus as presented in canonical gospels and other New Testament writings...
, it is also clearly autobiographical, Gumilev putting much of himself into the hero Gondla (an Irishman chosen as king but rejected by the jarl
Earl
An earl is a member of the nobility. The title is Anglo-Saxon, akin to the Scandinavian form jarl, and meant "chieftain", particularly a chieftain set to rule a territory in a king's stead. In Scandinavia, it became obsolete in the Middle Ages and was replaced with duke...
s, he kills himself to ensure the triumph of Christianity) and basing Gondla's wild bride Lera on Gumilev's wife Akhmatova. The play was performed in Rostov na Donu in 1920 and, even after the author's execution by the Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
, in Petrograd in January 1922: "The play, despite its crowd scenes being enacted on a tiny stage, was a major success. Yet when the Petrograd audience called for the author, who was now officially an executed counter-revolutionary traitor, the play was removed from the repertoire and the theatre disbanded." (In February 1934, as they walked along a Moscow street, Osip Mandelstam
Osip Mandelstam
Osip Emilyevich Mandelstam was a Russian poet and essayist who lived in Russia during and after its revolution and the rise of the Soviet Union. He was one of the foremost members of the Acmeist school of poets...
quoted Gondla's words "I am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she repeated them in her "Poem without a Hero.")
During the Russian Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...
, Gumilev served in the Russian expedition corps in Paris. Despite advice to the contrary, he rapidly returned to Petrograd. There he published several new collections, Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally divorced Akhmatova (August 5, 1918), whom he had left for another woman several years prior. The following year he married Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, a noblewoman and daughter of a well-known historian.
Later poems and death
"Despite the hard experiences of real travels and battles, he remained, to the end of his life, a schoolboy entranced by the Iliad of childhood - the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He never outgrew the influence of Mayne Reid, Alexandre Dumas, pèreAlexandre Dumas, père
Alexandre Dumas, , born Dumas Davy de la Pailleterie was a French writer, best known for his historical novels of high adventure which have made him one of the most widely read French authors in the world...
, Jules Verne
Jules Verne
Jules Gabriel Verne was a French author who pioneered the science fiction genre. He is best known for his novels Twenty Thousand Leagues Under the Sea , A Journey to the Center of the Earth , and Around the World in Eighty Days...
, Gustave Aimard
Gustave Aimard
Gustave Aimard was born Olivier Aimard in Paris in 1818. He was the author of numerous books about Latin America.-Biography:As he once said, he was the son of two people who were married, ‘but not with each other.’ His father, François Sébastiani de la Porta was a general in Napoleon’s army and...
and others." In 1920 Gumilev co-founded the All-Russia Union of Writers. Gumilev made no secret of his anti-communist views. He also crossed himself in public and didn't care to hide his contempt for half-literate Bolshevik
Bolshevik
The Bolsheviks, originally also Bolshevists , derived from bol'shinstvo, "majority") were a faction of the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which split apart from the Menshevik faction at the Second Party Congress in 1903....
s.
On August 3, 1921 he was arrested by Cheka
Cheka
Cheka was the first of a succession of Soviet state security organizations. It was created by a decree issued on December 20, 1917, by Vladimir Lenin and subsequently led by aristocrat-turned-communist Felix Dzerzhinsky...
on allegation of participation in monarchist conspiracy. Most literary historians agree that it was not a Cheka fabrication, and Gumilev was a likely conspirator. On August 24 Petrograd Cheka decreed execution of all 61 participants of the Tagantsev Conspiracy, including Nikolai Gumilev. The exact dates and locations of their execution and burial are still unknown.
According to Rayfield's book 'Stalin and his Hangmen', the murder of Gumilev grew out of the consequences of the Kronstadt Rebellion
Kronstadt rebellion
The Kronstadt rebellion was one of many major unsuccessful left-wing uprisings against the Bolsheviks in the aftermath of the Russian Civil War...
. The sailors of Kronstadt, in Petrograd, had protested against the new Bolshevik state in 1921. Rayfield asserts that the Cheka blamed the intellectuals of the city. A Chekist named Iakov Agranov came up with a plan to attack them. He tricked a local professor into performing dissident acts, then arrested the professor and forced him to name 300 'conspirators'. Agranov told him none of the named people would be killed. However, 100 were killed, and Gumilev was one of these. After appeals from Gorky
Gorky
Gorky may refer to:People:*Maxim Gorky , Russian author and political activist, founder of socialist realism*Arshile Gorky , Armenian/American abstract expressionist painterInhabited localities:...
and others, Lenin agreed to pardon a small number of the condemned, but the Cheka officer in charge carried out the execution order so quickly that the pardon came too late. Gumilev is thought to have been buried in the Kovalevsky Forest
Kovalevsky Forest
Kovalevsky Forest is a forest near St Petersburg, Russia, where thousands of Soviet citizens were massacred and buried in the first half of the twentieth century as part of the Red Terror. The site was rediscovered by the human rights charity Memorial. In all, around 4,500 people are thought to be...
.
Hayward, in an introduction to a book of Akhmatova's poetry, writes that the execution placed a stigma on Anna and her son with Nikolai, Lev. Lev's arrest in the purges and terrors of the 30s were based simply on his being his father's son.
Gumilev's direct influence on Russian poetry was short lived. The sentiment is best expressed by Nabokov, who once remarked that Gumilev is the poet for adolescents, just as Korney Chukovsky
Korney Chukovsky
Korney Ivanovich Chukovsky was one of the most popular children's poets in the Russian language. His poems, Doctor Aybolit , The Giant Roach , The Crocodile , and Wash'em'clean have been favourites with many generations of Russophone children...
is the poet for children. His most durable verse, written in mystical strain, appeared in the collection The Pillar of Fire (1921).
Although "banned in the Soviet times, Gumilev was loved for his adolescent longing for travel and giraffes and hippos, for his dreams of a fifteen-year-old captain" and was "a favorite poet among geologists, archaeologists and paleontologists." His "The Tram That Lost Its Way" is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.
When Mikhail Sinelnikov was asked to study the archives of the late Mikhail Zenkevich, the last of the Acmeists - his teacher - he "found piles of secreted verse, an unpublished novel, manuscripts which Pasternak
Pasternak
Pasternak or Pasternack . Notable people with the last name "Pasternak" include:* Boris Pasternak, poet and writer* Joe Pasternak , Hungarian-US actor...
brought to the old master to be critiqued, the poems and letters of his friends. According to Sinelnikov, "at the bottom of a wide box lay a copy of Izvestia Petrosovieta with a list of people executed in connection with the Tagantsev case. The type was barely legible, more like wisps of old wool. Some names, those of Zenkevich's acquaintances, were ticked off. Gumilev's name was underlined in red."
External links
- Collection of Poems by Nikolay Gumilev (English Translations)
- Russian Site on Gumilev
- Nikolay Gumilyov. Poems
- English translation of Gumilev's Beatrice