Transcript Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov Variants of spelling include

(Russian: Никола́ й Степа́ н ович Гумилёв, April 15 NS 1886 –
August 1921) was an inf luential Russian poet who founded
the acmeism movement.
 Nikolai was born in
Kronstadt, 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 (Russian: Я в
лес бежал из городов) 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 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 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.
 Like Flaubert and Rimbaud before him, Gumilyov 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.
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 Anna Akhmatova accompanied him to Ivanov's parties as
well. Gumilyov 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, 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, Gumilyov published two
collections, The Pearls in 1910 and the Alien Sky in 1912. It was Osip Mandelshtam,
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 Theophile Gauthier, and they borrowed much of their basic tenets from the
French Parnasse. Such a program, combined with colourful and exotic subject matter of
Gumilyov's poems, attracted to the Guild a large number of adolescents. Several major
poets, notably Georgy Ivanov and Vladimir Nabokov, passed the school of Gumilyov,
albeit informally.

Nikolay Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and their
son Lev Gumilev, 1913
When the World War I started, Gumilyov hastened to
Russia and enthusiastically joined a corps of elite cavalry.
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, Gumilyov 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
Gumilyov'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 counterrevolutionary 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, 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 other woman several years prior to that. The
following year he married Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, a
noblewoman and daughter of a well-known historian.
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"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." In 1920 Gumilyov co-founded the All-Russia Union of Writers.
Gumilyov 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 Cheka on allegation of participation in monarchist
conspiracy. Most literary historians agree that it was not a Cheka fabrication, and Gumilyov
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.
Gumilyov's direct influence on Russian poetry was short lived. The sentiment is best
expressed by Nabokov, who once remarked that Gumilyov is the poet for adolescents, just like
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, Gumilyov 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. Gumilyov's name was underlined in red."