Nicolai Gumilev

N. Gumilev (1886-1921)

He was made of the stuff of legends, during his lifetime and after his untimely death in the Bolshevist gaols. Dashing and handsome, of noble birth, Gumilev was most eligible bachelor of the Tsarskoe Selo, the residence of the Summer Imperial Court, only to marry elegant--she later became one of Amedeo Modigliani’s girlfriends--but unglamorous Anna Akhmatova, the future Russian classic. Gumilev has been a founding leader of Akmeist movement and his patronage was essential to early development of A. Akhmatova, O. Mandelstam and G. Ivanov. Adventurer by nature, he traveled and fought in Africa, volunteered as a cavalry commander during World War I and was famous for many love affairs. His own poetry represents a curious mixture of kitsch and unexpected discoveries, the fact obviously recognized by Anna Akhmatova: 

Когда б вы знали, из какого сора

Растут стихи, не ведая стыда.

Could you ever known from what kind of trash,

Poems shamelessly flourish? 

The Eagle is not the best poem of Gumilev. It is not even a very good poem. But it is very characteristic of the pre-Great War generation, which mixed Nitzschean dreams of self-realization with Edwardian pomp and circumstance. Of course, few of these intemperate young men would live to see a horrible world ushered in by their dreams and those who would, entered it permanently scarred. 

The Eagle

The Eagle was flying forward and above

To Holy See through portals of the ethers,

His master flight was beautiful enough

And sheening were his hazel feathers.

Where lived he? May be lived, restrained,

Been jailed by King in cage of sudden glory

And always cried when Spring, the Girl, thus came,

Who loved the Prince’s sole melancholy.

Or, may be in the cabin of some wiz,

When he looked through a tiny hole in cellar

He was entrapped by brightening zenith

Whose powers burnt his heart as being stellar.

But never mind! Twas’ playing song of lust

He was revealed Azure skies of perfection.

His soaring up three days and night had last

And Eagle perished strangled by affection.

He died alas! But also could not fell

Included thus in circles of Planets action,

Beneath him laid the abyss of the Hell,

But weak they were, the forces of attraction.

The rays were shooting back and forth the space,

Some emanations both sublime and chilly,

Not due to rot, he got conserved his pace

Observing stars by eyes as dead, as thrilling.

Not once, the Angel’s horn declared The Day,

Not once, the worlds were wrecking into Abyss,

But was untouched by all this vainly play

His sarcophagus eternal in the Heavens. 

Interesting facts, of which there are many:

-- Gumilev was so bad at school that only protection of I. Annensky (see the entry) saved him from expulsion. 

-- His son with Anna Akhmatova, Lev Gumilev (1912-1992), who survived 15 years in Stalin's Gulag, was famous off-the-beat historian and mystic in his own right. 

--Gumilev befriended future Haille Selassie, the Emperor of Ethiopia and Rastafarian deity before his ascension to the throne.