Lev would spend evenings describing his theory of passionarity. ‘Like all the brilliant ideas… it came to my mind in a loo, of course’, he told friends. Kozyreva described him as ‘mesmerizing with his erudition’.25 He was given a break in 1948, thanks to the influence of the Leningrad University rector, Alexander Voznesensky. ‘So, your father is Nikolay Gumilev, and your mother is Akhmatova? I see you were dismissed from the postgraduate course after the Resolution on Zvezda magazine. Everything is clear!’ said the rector. He could not offer Lev a job at the university, but he did allow him to (successfully) defend his candidate’s thesis, ‘The Detailed Political History of the First Turkic Khanate (546–659 AD)’.26 At the time, this permission meant a lot to Lev.27 Later on, one of the historians who sat on his dissertation defence found out that before the rector made his decision, the matter had gone all the way up the Soviet chain of command to Vyacheslav Molotov, at the time the USSR’s foreign minister.28
Despite the success, Lev still impatiently sought a chance to get a doctoral degree and teach. In 1949, he began to work as a research fellow at the State Museum of Ethnography. But just as things started to turn a corner, in August Punin was rearrested and charged with the same offences as in 1935 and 1938. According to Akhmatova, as he was hustled out the door of their flat, his final words were ‘Never give up despairing!’
Lev knew he was next. He packed clothes and books and kept them in a suitcase by the door of the Fountain House flat. Sure enough, one day in November 1949 Lev was expected at the home of his girlfriend Natalya Varbanets to help tape up the windows in preparation for winter. He never showed up. Three days later, Akhmatova knocked on the door of Maryana’s flat. Lev had been arrested again.
‘Maryana, do you have my poems?’ asked Akhmatova. She did. ‘Throw them in the oven.’ She then explained: ‘Lev was arrested on the sixth. And yesterday my flat was searched for a second time. Throw them out without any further talk.’29
There and back again
The charges against Gumilev were essentially the same as those pronounced against him in 1935, dusted off for the third time: the feared article 58. Added to this was a pile of denunciations from his academic colleagues, who accused him of anti-Marxism. His acerbic and arrogant style would come back to haunt him: he aimed jokes at the expense of his detractors, and these slights were not easily forgotten.
In defending his thesis, he had been criticized by one academic, Bernstam, who accused him of not knowing Marxism and eastern languages. Lev answered in Persian and then Turkish, which Bernstam did not know. Bernstam was humiliated, and soon after made a formal denunciation. Back in January 1947, another academic named Saltanov had also written a denunciation: ‘Gumilev’s behaviour is intolerable, and I request your [the NKVD’s] assistance in working this matter out.’
These denunciations, past and present, comprised the formal case against Gumilev, though the immediate reason for his incarceration seems to have been to hold him as surety to guarantee Akhmatova’s good behaviour following the decree against Zvezda in 1946. Lev’s oft-repeated line about his stints in camp – that he served one sentence ‘for papa, the other for mama’ – seems to confirm this. So does the paperwork: a note in his file from a police official, Colonel Minchiv, asked the Interior Ministry for Gumilev’s detailed dossier in January 1947.
Lev spent a full ten months at Lefortovo prison pending the end of the investigation, and he was only sentenced in September 1950 to ten years’ corrective labour. It was back into the Stolypin wagons, this time bound for Karaganda, a rich coal basin in the midst of the endless steppe of Kazakhstan. There Gumilev was once again issued with the ragged white prison uniform with black numbers stitched onto the back, the chest, the left leg above the knee, and the cap.
In Churbay Nura, near Karaganda, he chanced to meet Lev Voznesensky, son of the Leningrad University rector who had allowed him to defend his thesis. The rector had been executed for an unrelated matter, and Lev Voznesensky was to become one of Lev’s close acquaintances in Karaganda. ‘It was nice to hear someone say something nice about my father’, recalled Voznesensky.
Voznesensky’s first impression of Gumilev in 1950 shows how the physical hardship of Lev’s life had worn him down:
Just imagine a parade ground covered with snow, bound by severe frost, surrounded by barracks. In one of them, almost right after I was brought to the special camp the previous night in the Kazakhstan steppe, I saw a stooping figure of an old bearded old man keeping the fire in the oven. It was Lev Nikolaevich Gumilev. The ‘old man’ was 38 years old that year.30
The job tending the oven was a stroke of good fortune, otherwise Lev might have been sent down the mines – gruelling work in unsafe conditions.
Previous rank was nothing in the camp, and could not save one from the heaviest work, from dreadful hunger, from complete lawlessness. For Lev Nikolaevich, his post at the oven saved him at least from cold… They were trying to deprive prisoners of their personal origin in every possible way, to turn them, as Beria said, into ‘camp dust’, and even so, Lev Nikolaevich remained himself inside.31
Several of Lev’s friends from this second camp period, like Voznesensky, remember a stooping walk. This is something that he seems to have acquired there, as previously no one described it. Another friend, Alexander Savchenko, remembers Gumilev as of medium height: ‘Constitution not nearly athletic. Fingers long and thin. Aquiline nose. Stooping walk.’
The regime in the camps had improved since the dark days of the 1930s, and after returning from work and having dinner the convicts usually had some free time for relaxation. Another major improvement from the 1930s was that the criminals and the politicals were separated, so that the politicals did not have to fear for their valuables or their lives. ‘Thanks to this, life in the camps became relatively bearable’, recalled Savchenko. ‘It would have been impossible for Lev to have made the kind of academic progress he did in the previous environment [with the criminals]. In this small way, the Lubyanka bosses helped science.’32
In fact, the improved conditions and the concentration of intellectuals actually lent the camp environment a vibrant intellectual atmosphere. ‘The camps at that time were full of interesting people, and every evening in different corners of the barracks in the dimly lit spaces where the top tier of plank beds blocked out the light of an electric bulb, groups of convicts gathered and held debates.’ The largest groups, Savchenko noticed, gathered around Gumilev:
Professors of history or philosophy from the universities of Warsaw, Riga and Sofia would come from other barracks, and furious dispute would flare up. In such cases Lev Nikolaevich simply obliterated them with reasons, proofs, historical facts, quotations from written sources or statements of great people. In most cases the opponent gave up.33
Having finished his candidate’s degree, Lev was busy working on what would be his doctoral dissertation – a complete history of the ancient steppe peoples up to the tenth century. The immense complication was that all books had been forbidden to the prisoners: ‘one should remember that in conditions of the camp regime not a single line could be committed to paper. During frequent shakedowns, any handwritten materials were confiscated by guards, and in that case their author was put in the dungeon.’ Lev was forced to save all his material in his prodigious memory, or ‘safe’, as he called it, so that he could use it later for his book. According to Savchenko, Lev could cite whole pages from some books on a wide range of subjects.