Nikolay Gumilyov, a man of cruel destiny

2015 was declared as The Year of Literature in Russia. The relevant decree was signed by Vladimir Putin last summer. On the 15th of April, 1886 Nikolay Gumilyov, an influential Russian poet, literary critic, traveler, and military officer was born. He was the first husband of Anna Akhmatova and father of historian Lev Gumilev. A man of cruel destiny was arrested and executed by the Cheka in 1921.

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Nikolay was born in the town of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island. He studied at the gymnasium of Tsarskoe Selo, where the Symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky was his teacher. Later, Gumilyov 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 giraffes to Caracalla's crocodiles. Although Gumilyov 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 Gumilyov 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.

Gumilev married Anna Akhmatova in April 25, 1910. He dedicated some of his poems to her.On September 18, 1912, their child Lev was born. He would eventually become an influential and controversial historian.

Like Flaubert and Rimbaud before him, but inspired by exploits of Alexander Bulatovich and Nikolay Leontiev, Gumilyov was fascinated with Africa and travelled there almost each year. He explored, helping development of Ethiopia, sometime hunted lions, 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, one of them "Giraffe".

In 1910, Gumilyov fell under the spell of the Symbolist poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov and absorbed his views on poetry at the evenings held by Ivanov in his celebrated "Turreted House". His wife Akhmatova accompanied him to Ivanov's parties as well.

Dissatisfied with the vague mysticism of Russian Symbolism, then prevalent in the Russian poetry, Gumilyov 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., Gumilyov 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, Gumilyov hastened to Russia and enthusiastically joined a corps of elite cavalry. He fought in battles in East Prussia and Macedonia. For his bravery he was invested with two St. George crosses (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 jarls, 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."

During the Russian Revolution, Gumilyov 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.

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, père, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard and others."[1] In 1920 Gumilyov 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 Bolsheviks.

On August 3, 1921 he was arrested by the Cheka on allegation of participation in monarchist conspiracy known as "Petrograd military organization" or Tagantsev conspiracy. On August 24, the Petrograd Cheka decreed execution of all 61 participants of the case, including Nikolai Gumilev. They were shot on August 25 in the Kovalevsky Forest. The case was officially declared as "completely fabricated" and all victims rehabilitated by Russian authorities only in 1992.

Maxim Gorky, his friend and fellow writer, hurried to Moscow, obtained an order to release Gumilyov from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd he found out that Gumilyov had already been shot.

Eternal Poem

I’m in the days’ embracing limits,

Where even skies are ever gray,

Look through the ages, live in minutes,

And wait for Holy Saturday;

The end of soul’s aimless travels,

Of lucks and troubles peaceful end.

O, come, my day when I’ll be able

To Know, See and Understand.

My soul will be so new and broad,

All, that’s alluring, will be mine.

And I will bless the golden road,

From blind worm and to golden sun.

And he, who went with me wherever,

Trough thunders and the silent peace,

He, who was kind to me in fever,

And cruel when I stayed in bliss;

Who taught me to a wisdom whole,

To fight, reserve, or overcome,

Will turn to me, and leave his pole,

And simply tell me, “We have come.”

My thoughts

Why did you come, my thoughts, in instant,

Like thieves to rob my quiet habitation,

Like vultures, gloomy and malignant,

With thirst for dread retaliation.

My hopes are gone, and ran away my visions,

My eyes were opened by fierce agitation,

And, in the sacred books of new religions,

I read my words, my deals and plans for future actions.

For that, that I with looks so calm and quiet,

Watched them who sailed to victory and glory,

That with my lips I touched the lips in fire,

Which did not have the former sinning story,

That those hands of mine, my own fingers,

Didn’t know a plough, were so thin and pliant,

And that my songs, the rambling meistersingers,

Could only sing, while making a sad sound,

For all this now came repudiation.

Blind men will smash the gentle, deceptive temple,

And thoughts will come into my habitation,

And strangle me, like thieves – a shabby tramper.

Giraffe

Today, I see, your glance is especially sad

And your arms, embracing your knees, especially thin.

Listen: far, far away on the Lake of Chad

Wanders a gentle giraffe.

He is endowed with slender grace and bliss,

And his hide adorned with a magical design

Which the moonlight alone, shattering and rocking

On the wide wet of the lake, dares to rival.

From afar he resembles the colored sails of a ship,

And his gait is smooth as the joyful flight of a bird.

I know that the earth will witness many wonders,

When, at sunset, he hides in a marble grotto.

I could tell merry tales of mysterious lands

Of a black maiden, a young chief's passion,

But you have too long inhaled the heavy mist,

You will believe in nothing but the rain.

And how can I tell you about a tropical garden,

Slender palms, the scent of inconceivable herbs...

Are you crying? Listen...Far off on the Lake of Chad

Wanders a gentle giraffe.