Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov

Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilyov (born April 15, 1886, Kronshtadt, Russia—died August 24, 1921, Petrograd [now St. Petersburg]) was a Russian poet and theorist who founded and led the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry in the years before and after World War I.

The son of a naval surgeon, Gumilyov was educated at a gymnasium (secondary school) in Tsarskoye Selo (now Pushkin), where he was influenced by the poet and teacher Innokenty Annensky. Gumilyov’s earliest published volumes of poetry, Put’ konkvistadorov (1905; “The Path of the Conquistadors”), Romanticheskie tsvety (1908; “Romantic Flowers”), and Zemcuga (1910; “Pearls”), marked him as a talented young poet under the influence of the Symbolist movement then dominating Russian poetry. He spent the years 1906–08 in Paris and traveling in northern and eastern Africa, whose exotic locales were to figure prominently in his poetry for the next 10 years. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1908 and the following year became a founding member of Apollon, which became the leading poetry journal in Russia in the years before the war. In 1910 he married the poet Anna Akhmatova, but the couple separated less than a year later and were divorced in 1918.

Gumilyov was an indefatigable literary organizer, and in 1911 he and Sergey Gorodetsky assembled the group known as the Guild of Poets. Among the group’s members were Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, who together with Gumilyov soon formed the nucleus of the emerging Acmeist movement in Russian poetry. Gumilyov’s poetry collection entitled Cuzoe nebo (1912; “Foreign Sky”) established his reputation as a leading Russian poet.

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During World War I, Gumilyov fought at the front as a volunteer and in 1917 served as the Provisional Government’s special commissar in Paris after the first Russian Revolution that year. He returned to Russia in 1918 and worked as a creative writing instructor in Petrograd, where he tried unsuccessfully to revive the Acmeist Guild of Poets as an association of writers unaffiliated with the Bolshevik party. He attained his full artistic stature in the poems published in Kostyor (1918; “The Pyre”), Shatyor (1921; “The Tent”), and Ognennyi stolp (1921; “The Pillar of Fire”). He had never bothered to hide his antipathy toward the Bolshevik government, and in August 1921 he was arrested and shot for counter-revolutionary activities. He was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in 1986.

Gumilyov’s lyric poetry ranges over a wide variety of themes. Many of the poems of his middle period are set in Africa or other exotic places and glorify a life of romantic adventure, masculine heroism, and physical courage. The poetry in his last three volumes shows a shifting of concern toward spiritual problems and is characterized by greater stylistic complexity, enhanced philosophical depth, and a more intensely personal element. His poetic style is marked by the use of vivid imagery to convey sights, sounds, and colours to the reader with great clarity and directness. Gumilyov also wrote verse dramas and an important series of literary essays in which he developed the aesthetic canons of the Acmeist movement.