In 1970, he published the third in his so-called ‘steppe trilogy’, focusing on the Mongols. Searches for the Imaginary Kingdom recounts the strange tale of a rumour that swept medieval Europe in 1145 of an unknown Christian kingdom that had been founded in Central Asia by a man named Prester John. Gumilev argued that the tale was not a hoax, as was generally believed, but actually referred to a tribe of Mongols that had converted to Nestorian Christianity. Gumilev makes a fairly controversial assertion that Nestorianism was strong among the steppe peoples around 1200, though he provided little evidence to back this up. The book, however, is a fantastic read: an engaging, ambitious and eccentric tale proposing that a Christian Mongol army in Iraq tried to unite with a Crusader army at Acre in the twelfth century, but was rebuffed by the French. Left to their fate, the Mongols converted to Islam – a historical mistake of mega proportions, which Gumilev attributes to ‘the arrogance of the civilized European, for whom everything east of the Vistula is savagery and mediocrity’. The book showcases Gumilev’s first major treatment of the Mongols. He would become perhaps Russia’s most famous apologist for their brutal conquests. ‘Mongolia’, he wrote, ‘was drawn into the subsequent wars not of its own free will, but by the logic of events in world history and a policy in which it could no longer fail to take part.’
The book marked the beginning of Gumilev’s complex (and not strictly scholarly) theories about the role the steppe tribes played in Russian history. In this and subsequent books he made many controversial claims about how the Golden Horde’s invasions of Russian lands in the thirteenth century were actually something far more complex than simple conquest by a foreign people. The Mongols and the Russians did not consider each other to be ‘foreigners’, he wrote. And while the Mongols destroyed the capital city of Kiev, they left other Russian cities alone. Indeed, Russian princes and Mongol emperors frequently fought on the same side. The dual facts that the Mongols were able to hold onto the lands of Rus for two centuries and that the Russians were then able to hold onto the Mongol khanates that they conquered in the fifteenth century, indicated to Gumilev that there was a natural affinity between the Russians and the steppe tribes, which did not exist between Russians and Europeans – neither of whom had been able to hold the other’s territory for long.
His opponents accused him of total disregard for the evidence. In one instance, he took on the epic poem The Tale of the Host of Igor, supposedly about an 1186 battle between Rus and the Cumans (a pre-Mongol nomadic people), and reinterpreted it as a thirteenth-century work about the Mongols. According to his friend Kozhinov:
Gumilev was, if you wish, both a historian and a poet equally. Fantasy and even direct ‘fiction’ play a paramount role in L.N. Gumilev’s works. This allows him not only to masterfully grasp the consciousness of readers, but also quite often to remarkably ‘guess’ secret, discreet movements of history. But at the same time, these same features cause dissatisfaction (or even indignation) in people who consider strict documenting obligatory, and do not accept any ‘intuitive’ conclusions in historical studies.65
However, it is equally clear that the official Romanov-era historiography of the Mongol invasions was just as flawed, if not more so. Gumilev was partly right on a number of accounts. Historians agree that while any talk of ‘integration’ between the Russians and the Mongols is hugely exaggerated, nonetheless relations between the Russians and the Mongols were slightly more complicated than Russian and Soviet historiography had held since Nikolay Karamzin’s time: the actual term ‘yoke’, for example, in fact dates from the seventeenth century, a full 200 years after the Mongols were defeated. Also, no contemporary sources use words such as ‘conquer’ to describe the Mongol invasion of 1237–40, but instead prefer ‘plunder’ or ‘capture’ without implying any change in political sovereignty. It is just as clear that Russia’s boyars and princes collaborated with the Mongols, and that Moscow even formed an alliance with the Mongols against the rival city state of Tver. It seemed that neither the Russian city states nor the Mongols were monolithic entities, and their histories were intertwined far more than historians chose to let on.
Kozhinov and other nationalist intellectuals were fast noticing Gumilev’s works and his rising public profile. Kozhinov readily admits adopting many of Gumilev’s views, and he popularized a concept very similar to Gumilev’s ideas in a mass-circulation newspaper, Literaturnaya Gazeta, in 1969.66 There Kozhinov questioned the veracity of Marxist historiography, and argued that Marxism was based on flawed assumptions; world history was not a story of class struggle, but the rise and fall of national civilizations. That the article appeared at all in such a top-flight publication was a milestone for the nationalist ideologues.
In Searches for the Imaginary Kingdom, published the following year, Gumilev reflected Kozhinov’s argument. ‘Here it is impossible to talk of a single [historical] process’, he wrote, criticizing dialectical materialism. ‘On the contrary, the interweaving of different processes with their own momentum of development is to be seen: a rapid rise, a brief stabilization at its zenith, and a gradual decline.’67
Lev’s fortunes rose with those of the nationalists. According to his close friend, the late Savva Yamshchikov, a member of VOOPIK’s presidium: ‘Lev did his own thing. He wasn’t into politics.’ He generally did not publish in the wide-distribution journals, preferring academic articles. But his real forte was lecturing. His personal history was legendary, with such illustrious parents, and his oratorical skills were magnificent. Yamshchikov remembers organizing a lecture for him in Moscow which an astonishing 800 people attended, filling the auditorium and spilling into the halls. He found there was a nearly unquenchable thirst in Soviet society for alternative history, for summoning the lost roots of the nation – something that the Communist Party had done its best to stamp out.
Dancing on bones
Today, most think the vanished USSR was a drab, grey place of ideological conformism and rigidity; and for the most part, it was. But in the 1960s there was a heady, vibrant cultural scene lurking just below the otherwise placid, dull surface. Literary experimentation, jazz, alternative politics – all could be found if only one knew where to look. Around the corner from Lev’s flat, in the vegetable market at Leningrad’s Vladimirskoe metro station, black marketeers sold jazz records made from discarded X-ray plates – the records were artfully dubbed ‘dancing on bones’.
The mid-1960s was a time of great personal change for Gumilev. In 1966, Akhmatova died. They had not spoken during her final five years, and guilt on this score seems to have plagued him intermittently. Nevertheless, his mother’s passing removed a strong presence from his life, and it says something about Lev’s attachment to his mother – which Gerstein described as an ‘obsession’ – that he only married after she died. He had met his wife, Natalya Simonovskaya, in 1965 at a party at a friend’s apartment. She remembered that he looked like ‘an overgrown child’: ‘Trousers a bit too short, his cuffs stick out of his sleeves.’ But nonetheless he was ‘gallant’. They married in 1966. She was an artist. On 15 June 1967, she moved into Gumilev’s one-room kommunalka in Leningrad, having received a note in typical Gumilev style: ‘[I am] finishing the proof-reading of Ancient Turks, and waiting for you on the appointed date. Have already washed the floor.’68 The two never had children, however. ‘Lev believed that his books were his children’, recalled Natalya.69