Nikolai Gumilyov: Returning from Oblivion

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov (1886–1921), poet and traveler, dramatist and translator, philologist and ethnographer.

In 1986 the ban on his works was lifted. The first scholarly edition was Poems and Long Poems (1988), available in the RUDN University library. It contains most of Gumilyov’s lifetime collections, his first published poem “I ran from the towns into the forest” (1902), the manuscript book Persia (1921), and the publication of the manuscript Abyssinian Songs, Collected and Translated by N. Gumilyov gathered during three journeys to Abyssinia.

“The Path of the Conquistadors” from the eponymous 1905 collection is included here as a “Sonnet” for what the poet considered his first book, Romantic Flowers (1908).

“Gumilyov’s poetry lives in an imaginary, almost phantom world; he somehow keeps his distance from modernity,” wrote Valery Yakovlevich Bryusov (1873–1924) in a review of the famous Pearls (1910) dedicated to him.

The poet’s appearance was equally decorative. Writer Sergei Abramovich Auslender (1886–1937) recalled how self-confidently his friend Gumilyov, all “starched,” strode in a top hat, “shouldering editors’ doors aside” with his theatrical haughtiness, clearing the way for others.

N. S. Gumilyov’s prose follows the best traditions of Russian classics. See his Notes of a Cavalryman (1916) in the collection Eyewitness Notes (1991) or African Diary in the book In a Pillar of Fire (1991). In Africa Gumilyov was at home: stripping naked, he squeezed between two huge stones, ignoring the bones of those who had failed the test of sinfulness.

The pinnacles of N. S. Gumilyov’s work are the dramas Gondla (1917) and The Poisoned Tunic (1917–1918). All the poet’s plays, sketches and variants were first published together in the collection Dramatic Works (1990).