By Aleksey Calvin

Nikolay Gumilev was one of the most romantic characters of Russian literature for whom life and poetry were one. Like numerous writers of the silver age he had a beaming view of the poet’s role as a sort of a prophet whose pen must work to express, glorify, and enrich the beauty of our world. At the same time, the poet was a hero beyond the cloistered world of books and letters. For Gumilev, experience blended into poetry and poetry into experience. A courageous and decorated soldier, a lifelong adventurer, and an explorer of Europe and of Africa, Gumilev was the knight errant of the era’s verse. In all matters, he threw himself head first into the period’s dramas and affairs, whether they were literary or experiential.

Gumilev was born in 1886 to a doctor working for the Royal Russian Navy at Kronstadst, a naval base doubling as a small city (this detail is quite interesting since many years later Gumilev would be executed for his participation in the Kronstadt rebellion). Gumilev’s father was relatively wealthy and soon after the boy’s birth retired with his family after buying a fine house with a large garden and a slightly castle-like appearance not far from St. Petersburg. Both young Nikolay and his brother were sickly children to such an extent that the family was forced to move to warmer climes in the south of Russia for a few years. Nonetheless, Nikolay (or “Kolya” as he would have been called by those close to him) almost since the cradle possessed a fighting spirit which transcended any physical imperfections he was ordained with by fate. When still a small kid he already learned to ride horses around the countryside and soon commandeered a gang of adventurous and reckless friends. According to the recollections of Irina Odoevtseva, this is how Gumilev described his earliest years: “Since my childhood years I was vain to the point of sickness. I would suffer and fume when my brother would outrun me in a race or best me at climbing trees. I wanted to do everything better than the others, to always be first. In everything. But this wasn’t easy for me due to my weakness. And yet, I would somehow manage to climb to the very top of a pine tree, which was something that neither my brother nor the neighborhood boys would dare to do. I was very brave. And so, courage substituted for me both strength and agility.” Despite this strength of character, boy Gumilev was not a good student and was almost expelled from the royal gymnasium. What saved him was that he already, as a teenager, wrote great amounts of masterful poetry.

By the age of twenty-two Gumilev had already produced two highly regarded poetry collections, 1905's The Way of the Conquistadors and 1908's Romantic Flowers. Their very titles reveal some of Gumilev's lifelong lyrical preoccupations which consisted of a finely-balanced soup of Lermontov-style doomed Byronic Romanticism and an extreme exoticism which welcomed anything remarkable by the standards of educated European boyhood. Thus Gumilev's verse brims with knights, savannas, planets, society ladies in primrose dresses, and gallant officers with fatally wounded chests. Nevertheless, his mentality was not the same fairy tale fascination which marked out the early collections of Bely nor did it match the wine-drenched and nymph-spawning sensual Romanticism of young Blok. Firstly, Gumilev's verse strongly relies on a sense of the real. He abhorred the Symbolists' over-reliance on semantic trickery and their glorification of the mystical and the otherworldly. The subjects he evoked with his writing had to have existed somewhere, matters not whether in the present or the past, or at least had to hold the direct potential of existence. God know, there was enough mystery in the world one could see in one's eyes and touch with one's fingers! According to Gumilev, a fixation on uncertain horizons and constructs of the spirit was mere escapism (and yet, in spite of that, he considered himself a Christian!). In the poem titled "My Readers" he confidently described his relationship with his target audience: "I do not offend them with neurasthenia, I do not humble them with a soft heart, nor do I bore them with complex symbols about the shell of a sucked-out egg." Journeys through Baudelaire's dark tangle-branched reaches of consciousness were not for this knight of the word. He much preferred to step into the universe as an open plain of concrete manifestations where all was exactly as it appeared. His world-view was, therefore, materialistic in a fundamental sense which almost allies him with some of the later Soviet poets (a somewhat ironic notion considering Gumilev's wholehearted Tzarist rejection of the Revolution and everything associated with it). Substituting the curiosities of the world for the curiosities of the psyche so fashionable in the salon verse of his age, some of Gumilev's work also matched the exoticist colonial-minded subject matter of certain Victorian British poets such as Kipling. Like Kipling Gumilev was basically a patriot of his royal empire and strongly supported its expansion with its supposedly civilizing influence. One of Gumilev's (frankly unlikely) dreams was the spread of the Russian territories deep into Africa. Having personally spent time exploring the African continent, the young poet viewed this as entirely possible. From our vantage pedestal of time, we should perhaps excuse him for forgetting that far from everyone was at all like him, especially in Russia. Gumilev’s exoticism also often evokes the awe-inspiring poetic landscapes of the French Parnassians, albeit Gumilev’s attitude was much more involved and mercurial than that of his Western European precedents who preferred to rely solely on their imaginations instead of drawing on personal adventures like this wide-eyed Russian.

Indeed, philosophically, Gumilev held fast to the notion that one must involve themselves in existence with a full resolve and a vigilant consciousness of life in all its detail. In his work he emphasized the importance of fostering in oneself a unique and striking personality: a drive towards individuation. In view of this, Gumilev’s view of poets was distinctly heroic. He would compare them to ancient castes of druids and shamans who, he hypothesized, were picked out by God and destiny to help guide humanity towards self-realization. The importance of these notions to the poet may partly be ascribed to his lifelong fascination with the works of Friedrich Nietzsche, whose doctrine of the “overman” went hand in hand with Gumilev’s worldview through which every man appeared as a potential knight and every woman a queen. As Gumilev matured, he continued to develop these conceptions using them to develop an idiosyncratic ideal of a poet’s purpose within society. Finally, perhaps drawing from Plato’s dream of “philosopher kings”, he came to the conclusion that poets must control the human world, being the only ones capable of refashioning it into a true utopia. But Gumilev’s idea of a utopia was a far cry from the utilitarian visions of socialist Edens so popular at the time. For him the health of a society was directly correlated to its peoples’ ability to appreciate the beautiful and the sublime, to feel love and empathy. All in all there was very little of the practical in these dreams of Gumilev’s, but it’s still a terrible shame that we will never know how they may have developed had the poet not perished at such a young age.

Another well-known aspect of Gumilev’s life is, of course, his short-lived marriage to one of several uncrowned queens of 20th century Russian verse Anna Akhmatova. The two met around the Christmas-time of 1903 when both were still teenagers. The romantically-heroic young cadet and the remarkably cultured and individualistic girl immediately made a strong impression on each other. Gumilev pursued her like a divine obsession. He also urged her to begin writing and many of her first poems (as well as his) were based upon their legendary teenage affair. But even though the two were undeniably compatible in many ways and Gumilev fell head over heels for the inimitable mistress of the modern word, Akhmatova was not entirely certain that she loved him. He continued to pursue her for seven years, reportedly asking her to marry him every few months or so (though during these same years Gumilev also began to play the part of a Russian Casanova of sorts, conquering many an impressionable dame). Finally, Akhmatova relented and the two were married in 1910. Their marriage would last only eight years and, besides innumerable poems, a deep-seated mutual artistic influence, and a twisted sense of bitterness, produce a single child Lev Gumilev who would grow up to become a famous Soviet historian, ethnologist, anthropologist, and translator (but, quite strangely considering his parentage, not a poet).

The years when Gumilev first began pursuing his muse also marked the beginnings of his traveling life. In 1906 he leaves Russia for the first time to attend Sorbonne in Paris. The expansion of his physical horizons had a similar effect on his creative horizons and this became the period when Gumilev first began writing plays, essays, articles, and short stories. While living in the “city of lights” he also begins to publish a literary journal entitled “Sirius”. Soon thereafter, the poet returned to St. Petersburg where he used his new journalistic experience coupled with his truly remarkable knowledge of both contemporary and classic literature to find work as a literary critic which he performed to great effect. This profession suited Gumilev well by supporting him while not physically tying him down and this is when he really began to travel, within the following few years going off to explore Africa for the first time (single-handedly convincing his university to fund an entire expedition), then returning only to spend time exploring Russia, or else spending months relaxing in paradise-like Crimea with its luxurious Mediterranean climate.

Besides Gumilev's achievements as a poet and an explorer, he was also a decorated officer. As in other his other careers, he achieved success in war not merely through his charm and capacity for masculine "old boy" politics so especially prevalent in the military, but by being a masterful soldier. He was one of few well-known Russian poets to not only fight in the Great War, but do so with an earnest fervor and a rare courage. When the war broke out in 1914 he volunteered as a mere private, but was immediately rocketed up the ranks by his intensity and dedication, soon serving as an officer in control of his own cavalry unit. His bravery in the East Prussia campaign got Gumilev two Saint George crosses. Remarkably, his wartime accomplishments did not put a hamper on his literary productivity and he continued to publish new collections of verse throughout the length of the conflict. Naturally, these collections included numerous war poems. When the February Revolution took place Gumilev happened to be passing through Paris, on his to fight on the Macedonian front. Concerned about the situation back home, he returned to Russia in the springtime and began vocally denouncing the Revolution and proclaiming himself a supporter of the Tsar. In spite of choosing the losing side in the subsequent historical developments in Russia, his vast literary fame temporarily kept Gumilev safe from arrest. He may have even imagined himself to be safe, for in those early years of the USSR few artists were aware of just how unsafe they really were in this new country. And, after all, though Gumilev was not a revolutionary, he was not much of a counter-revolutionary either, having chosen not to participate in the Civil War once it arrived. Ultimately, his support of the old regime was largely hypothetical and passive. But that did not save him. In 1921, soon after the release of his final collection of poetry, Gumilev was accused of having participated in a monarchist anti-Soviet conspiracy (known as the “Tagantsev conspiracy”), arrested and, a few weeks later, shot. In 1992, soon after the collapse of the Soviet Union, it was revealed by the new authorities that the conspiracy was an utter fabrication and Gumilev (along with 60 other victims of the case) was posthumously “rehabilitated” in the eyes of the law.