Akhmatova herself was not immune to the emotional maelstrom that had infected Lev. She repeatedly suggested to Lev that Varbanets, his lover, was one of those who had informed on him, and encouraged him not to see her. Lev’s file (which became available following the collapse of the Soviet Union) reveals no evidence that she in fact had done so, and Akhmatova was likely driven by the same senseless, claustrophobic jealousy that sent her son into spasms of pure hate.
The miserable triangle of correspondence between mother, son and sometime lover would have continued indefinitely but for a stunning historical twist. In February 1956, Nikita Khrushchev, who had consolidated his power as Stalin’s successor, felt secure enough in his position as general secretary to denounce the excesses of Stalin’s reign, in an incendiary speech to the Twentieth Communist Party Congress. It was an unimaginable step, which left delegates and the world gasping in disbelief. A few words had utterly and forever changed the lives of millions of Soviet citizens, including Lev’s.
On 30 July, a few months after Khrushchev’s speech, the prosecutor ruled: ‘it is established that there were no grounds for the conviction of Gumilev L. N.’. He remained only partially rehabilitated. Full rehabilitation would only come 20 years later in 1975. But at least he was free.
A room of one’s own
The ‘secret speech’ to delegates of the Twentieth Communist Party Congress did not stay secret for long. The delegates were shocked by what they heard: a list of accusations against Stalin, who, according to Khrushchev, had elevated himself so high that he took on ‘supernatural characteristics akin to those of a god’. He denounced the cult of personality and listed Stalin’s crimes, including the Great Terror, the gulag and the totalitarian society.
Following the speech, most remaining gulag camps were emptied. A mountain of repressed intellectual energy sought an outlet. As Akhmatova put it: ‘Two Russias now look each other in the eye: those who did the arresting and those who were put away.’ Khrushchev, still skirmishing with Stalinist hardliners, courted the intellectuals with lax censorship; this led to a flowering of intellectual culture and art on a scale not seen in three decades, and the late 1950s and early 1960s became a largely forgotten era of (relative) experimentation in all fields of art, and even in academia.
It was in this context that Lev Gumilev suddenly found himself back in St Petersburg, released from the gulag for the second (and last) time on 11 May 1956, partly rehabilitated by order of the Supreme Soviet. He arrived back in his home city clutching a plywood box tied up with string. The box was full of manuscripts, drafts and books that he had been allowed to accumulate in the camp since 1953. Among them, written on dried food sacks, were the final drafts of his two books, Xiongnu and Ancient Turks. The former he would publish in 1961 and the latter would become his doctoral dissertation, to be published in 1967.
His return from the gulag was marked by a number of minor and major breakthroughs. At 43, he had never had a room to himself since early childhood; but as a rehabilitee, he was eligible for housing and was put on a list. After a little over a year of sleeping on sofas at friends’ houses, he was finally allotted a room in a kommunalka in a building on Bolshaya Moskovskaya Street, opposite the city administration building. Outside was a semi-legal market, where in those days black marketeers peddled garden vegetables and meat. The room itself was a mere 12 square metres – long and narrow.51 There was one bathroom and one kitchen for three families and their children, plus Lev and an alcoholic poet named Pavel, who allowed Lev some space on his bookshelves.
For Lev, the allocation of private space, however cramped, was a gift. Suddenly he could have a writing table. He hung up a family photo of him as a child with his mother and father, and a photo of his father in military uniform. Lev’s terrible grudge against his mother did not ease, and relations between them went from bad to worse after he returned to Leningrad. Akhmatova would tell her friends that Lev had ‘stopped being a human being’. She spoke in one letter to her brother, Viktor Gorenko, of not having seen Lev for two years. Lev’s own disappointment with his mother is clear from his memoirs.
Whether Lev had impossibly high expectations of his mother, or whether Akhmatova’s self-obsession and poetic temperament had blinded her to her worldly responsibilities, is still debated in specialized literary journals to this day. But as a result of Akhmatova’s neglect, whether real or imagined, Lev’s relations with his mother were severely strained, and in 1961 were severed for the last five years of her life.
Lev seems to have taken out his frustrations on his friends and family, but he redoubled his efforts to prove himself as a scholar. In 1957, he got a job in the library of the Hermitage, the famous art museum perched on Leningrad’s Palace Embankment and the shore of the River Neva. Every day he would take the trolley bus down the bustling Nevsky Prospekt, cross Palace Square to the library, work an 8–9 hour day, and return. That year, Lev received some positive news: articles based on the books he had worked on in prison were to be published in respected academic journals, which almost certainly meant that the books themselves would soon follow, if the articles were well received.52
He spent the next four years polishing Xiongnu, doing additional research, forging connections in Leningrad, and working on archaeological digs to make ends meet. Most importantly, a chance encounter with an old acquaintance from a labour camp, Matvey Gukovsky, led him to get in touch with a man who was to be both a kindred spirit and a mentor, who would greatly inspire Gumilev. He was one of the last survivors of the original Eurasianist movement: Petr Savitsky.
Savitsky, it turned out, had read an article by Lev published in 1949, was impressed and had told Gukovsky so. Lev had heard of Savitsky, who had written the introduction to the book Scythians and Huns by N. P. Tollya, which had been one of two books by the Eurasianists that were available in the Leningrad University library; but he had no idea that the elderly philosopher was still alive (or where). Lev wrote to Savitsky immediately: ‘I was overjoyed on the day when Matvey Alexandrovich Gukovsky – my friend – showed me a page from your letter about my work.’
It is clear that his correspondence with Savitsky made a considerable difference to Lev’s life, extricating him from his post-traumatic depression and giving him a renewed sense of mission. Lev found in Savitsky an echo of the type of man he had wanted to be, and desperately hoped he had not lost the opportunity to one day become; and, sensing his mentor’s greater erudition, he eagerly adopted virtually all of the old Eurasianist’s views.
Both men were passionately interested in the history and geography of Inner Asia, and were self-righteously pedantic on the subject of the steppe nomads: ‘I would like’, wrote Gumilev, ‘to elevate the history of nomads and their culture like the humanists in the fifteenth century elevated the long-forgotten culture of Hellas, and then archaeologists raised Babylon and Sumer from the dead.’53
It seems to have been under Savitsky’s tutelage that Gumilev’s studies of Central Asian nomads began to take on a distinctly anti-Western slant – characteristic of the Eurasianist movement. While Xiongnu and Ancient Turks were politically neutral books, Lev’s further histories of Russia, written over the remaining three decades of his life, not only emphasize the positive role of the steppe tribes (particularly the Mongols) in Russian history, but also make the rather tendentious case that the real enemies of Russia lay in the West: Teutonic knights, Genoan bankers and Crusaders. They, he argued (on the basis of some largely fanciful historical rationale), were fanning the flames of Russian–Mongol conflict behind the scenes.