"Ordinary" and "sacred" worlds featured in Nikolai Gumilyov’s works

April 15, 2020 marks the 134th anniversary of the birth of Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov (1886–1921), the poet of the Silver Age, creator of the School of Acmeism and the “Workshop of Poets”, playwright, literary critic, translator, traveler, officer of the Uhlansky regiment, gentleman of the two George Crosses. The Presidential Library’s collections contain abstracts of dissertations that reveal the rich oeuvre of Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov.

“The lyrical hero of Gumilyov is constantly rushing” from the “ordinary” to the “sacred” world. But not only the poet’s lyrical hero rushed, but he himself, and since adolescence. First on paper, then in life.

Nikolai Stepanovich was born in Kronstadt, in the family of a ship's doctor, and he had the good fortune to spend his childhood in Tsarskoye Selo. After a three-year stay of the family in Tiflis, Gumilyov entered the seventh grade of the Tsarskoye Selo Nikolaev gymnasium. But he studied poorly (he liked to read at the same time), regularly fell into the lists of underperforming students.

They were going to expel a weak student, but at the pedagogical council the director of the gymnasium, symbolist poet Innokenty Annensky, stood up for him. He managed to convince colleagues that the teenager's poor performance was offset by excellent verses. Between the teacher and the student, understanding and admiration for each other arose, they were friends.

At the end of 1912, acmeists created their own publishing house - Hyperborea - and began to publish the magazine of the same name. In January 1913, the issue of Apollo was published with articles “Some Trends in Contemporary Russian Poetry” by Sergei Gorodetsky and “The Legacy of Symbolism and Acmeism” by Nikolai Gumilev. Thus a new literary direction was declared.

The abstract of the dissertation by Anastasia Kulagina Life-creating concept and principles of creating an image in the lyrics and dramaturgy of N. S. Gumilyov (2012), notes that any artist exists in two spaces of being: the space of life and the space of art. Since the era of German romantics, a new concept has come into art - life creation. Unlike symbolists, realists, futurists, the author continues, for acmeists (acmeism is a literary movement opposing symbolism; acmeists proclaimed materiality, objectivity of themes and images, accuracy of a word) the artist’s life has its own value and makes up his biography. “Life creation” acts as a conscious structuring of one’s own life when a person appears as the author-hero of his life’s narration.

In this way, by structuring his own life, Gumilyov also ventured to go, rushing towards adventures, during which images of the conquistadors, Abyssinian monks were born; thus was created "Don Juan in Egypt". New poetic images were born not only on paper or in the imagination. In the fall of 1908, Gumilyov made his first trip to Africa - and became the discoverer of the African theme in Russian poetry. He was three times in this country previously unknown to the reader: he collected folk songs and other ethnographic materials. Subsequently, it was magnificent and fully displayed in the series “Abyssinian Songs”.

After wandering around hot, fantastically beautiful Africa, Nikolai Stepanovich no longer wanted to continue the bohemian life in Petersburg. And when the pipes of the First World War thundered, Gumilyov volunteered for the Uhlan Regiment, in the army. “He accepted the war with perfect simplicity, with straightforward ardor. He was perhaps one of the few people in Russia whose soul the war found in the highest combat readiness. His patriotism was as unconditional as his religious confession was cloudless”, - wrote Andrei Levinson, an employee of the Apollon magazine. The co-workers recalled that Gumilyov’s sense of self-preservation seemed to be weakened, he was drawn to danger, he was often the first to attack from the trench.

He was awarded two St. George crosses for courage and received an officer rank. In the newspaper "Vedomosti" published his chronicle essays "Notes of the cavalryman." In 1916, the book “Quiver” was published, in which Italian travel sketches recede into the background, and for the first time a piercing Russian theme acquires sound.

But no military merit of the poet was taken into account by the Petrograd Extraordinary Commission, which arrested him on suspicion of participation in the conspiracy of the Petrograd military organization V.N. Tagantsev, as it turned out later, fabricated. The poet was shot. The exact date and place of burial remained unknown. One of the participants of the firing squad subsequently recalled that Gumilyov did not flinch a single muscle of his face on the way to the place of execution, sometimes an understanding grin ran across his lips, he managed to ask the soldiers for a cigarette and finished it until the end... And a few decades later, in 1991 year, the case of the poet Nikolai Gumilyov was dismissed for lack of corpus delict.

Readers' real discovery of Gumilyov has just begun, and the Presidential Library will continue to digitize research materials and documents related to him, as well as materials and collections of his poems.