Nikolai
Gumilev, the son of a naval surgeon, was educated at the Tsarskoye
Selo Lyceum. His first book of poetry, The
Path of the Conquistadores was published in 1905. This
was followed by Romantic Flowers
(1908) and Pearls (1910).
In 1911
Gumilev joined with Sergey Gorodetsky
and Osip Mandelstam to form the Guild
of Poets. Formed as a reaction to the Symbolist movement, the Acmeists,
as they became known, called for a return to the use of clear, precise
and concrete imagery.
Gumilev
was interested in the culture of Africa and Asia and in 1911 visited
Abyssinia where he collected folk songs. On his return he published
Foreign Sky (1912).
On the
outbreak of the First World War he joined
the Russian
Army and
while serving as an officer on the Eastern
Front was twice decorated for bravery. He described some of his
experiences in Notes of a Cavalryman
(1916).
A supporter
of the Provisional Government Gumilev
was sent by Alexander Kerensky to Paris
where he served as a special commissar in France.
Gumilev
returned to Russia in 1918 and worked as a creative writing teacher
in Petrograd. The following year he was recruited by Maxim
Gorky to work with him on his World Literature project. It was
the task of Gumilev, Yevgeni Zamyatin,
Alexander Blok, Nikolai
Gumilev, and other members of the editorial board to select, translate
and publish non-Russian literary works. Each volume was to be annotated,
illustrated, and supplied with an introductory essay.
Gumilev
also published three important volumes of poetry, The
Pyre (1918), The Tent
(1021) and The Pillar of Fire
(1921).
A strong
opponent of the Bolshevik
government, Gumilev supported the Kronstadt
Uprising in March, 1921. After the defeat of the Kronstadt sailors
in March, 1917, he was arrested and charged with being involved in
an anti-government conspiracy. Nikolai Gumilev was executed on 24th
August, 1921.
(1)
Victor Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (1945)
Nikolai
Gumilev was rather lean and singularly ugly: his face too long, heavy
lips and nose, conical forehead, weird eyes, bluish-green and over-large,
like a fish or Oriental idol - and indeed, he was very fond of the
priestly statues of Assyria, which everyone came to think he resembled.
(2)
When Victor
Serge discovered that Nikolai Gumilev was being held by the Cheka
he made an attempt to persuade Felix
Dzerzhinsky not to execute him.
One comrade travelled to Moscow to ask Dzerhinsky a question:
"Were we entitled to shoot one of Russia's two or three poets
of the first order? Dzerhinsky answered, "Are we entitled to
make an exception of a poet and still shoot the others?"
It was
dawn, at the edge of a forest, when Gumilev fell, his cap pulled down
over his eyes, a cigarette hanging from his lips, showing the same
calm he had expressed in one of the poems he brought back from Ethiopia:
"And fearless I shall appear before the Lord God." That,
at least, is the tale as it was told to me.
Over and
over again, with mingled The Worker, where he describe a gentle,
grey-eyed man who, before going to bed, finishes making "the
bullet that is going to kill me".
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