But oddly enough, he was in a foul mood. Vyacheslav Ermolaev, one of Gumilev’s graduate students, remembers going to visit his former teacher to congratulate him on the end of the USSR, believing the old sage would be ecstatic at the news.
‘Lev Nikolaevich, I congratulate you – Soviet Power is dead!’
Gumilev was silent. ‘Lev Nikolaevich, something has happened? Why are you so gloomy?’ Gumilev suddenly replied: ‘Yes, it seems that you are right – Soviet Power is indeed dead. Only there is no reason to be happy – the country is falling apart before our very eyes.’
Ermolaev tried to make a joke, but Gumilev cut him off. ‘How can you joke about this – it is our country – our forebears fought for it, many generations of people fought so that Kazakhstan would be ours, that Fergana would be ours, that we would live with the Kazakhs and the Uzbeks in the same country. And now? What will happen to that country?’118
Gumilev seems to have felt an odd sense of attachment to the state that had oppressed him. Such feelings, however, were not at all unusual among many of Lev’s contemporaries, even those who, like him, had been victims of Stalin’s terrible labour camps. Over tea and raisin cakes at his Moscow flat, Lev Voznesensky told me:
Lev really took it very hard when the Soviet Union disintegrated. He considered it to be his country… Today, this seems strange, but when we sat in the camps, we often thought: ‘If we had a chance to escape, it would be great. But first of all where would we go?’ And secondly, for us it was like this: ‘We are Russians, let us die, but let us die in our country.’
Interestingly, Voznesensky himself, who spent ten years in a labour camp after Stalin had his father executed, dedicated his 2004 autobiography to ‘The Soviet People’.
Gumilev had spent his career studying the irrational bonds that tie nations and peoples together – and here he was, Exhibit A, fighting neurotically to save his beloved, repressive Soviet state. And as the Soviet Union crumbled, so did he. Gumilev had another stroke in June 1992. Leningrad newspapers followed his progress for the next week: ‘The surgery lasted for about two hours… Night has passed easily. However, Gumilev has still not regained consciousness.’ Then came 11 June: ‘Doctors continue to carry out a complex of vital procedures.’ Then 13 June: ‘Worsening again.’ On 15 June, Gumilev died.
The death of any famous figure in St Petersburg usually begets controversy: the city’s famous cemeteries host the likes of Pushkin and Dostoevsky, and when a major luminary dies, the competition to bury him is fierce. Lev did not want to be buried in Komarovo cemetery with his mother. The mayor’s office suggested Volkovo cemetery, with the likes of Mendeleev. But Gumilev had made it clear to his wife that he wanted to be buried in the Alexander Nevsky cemetery, named after his historical idol, the thirteenth-century prince of Novgorod, whose alliance with the Mongols thwarted a Western invasion by the Teutonic knights. The mayor’s office relented.
Gumilev’s funeral was a public event. In addition to his intelligentsia friends, nationalists of every stripe turned out. The great and the good of Russia’s far right wing came: Cossacks arrived attired in battle dress; dour generals emerged from black Zil limousines; bearded writers paid tribute. In charge of security, at the decision of Gumilev’s wife Natalya, was Nevzorov’s nationalist youth brigade, Nashi.
In life, Gumilev had been a complex figure, resisting all facile ideological pigeonholing. But in death, his legacy was transferred to the side of those who would use his wonderful and fanciful history books for demagoguery. With his reputation as a scholar assured by the demise of the USSR, Gumilev’s words would soon be reconstituted into the textbooks for putting it back together.
PART III
CHAPTER EIGHT
A SOVIET VIRGIL
The two-storey wooden barracks on Yuzhinsky Pereulok, near Moscow’s Patriarch’s Ponds, had a single, well-worn doorbell and six flats. Each occupant had a specific number of rings designated: to get hold of the last flat – up the stairs and at the end of the hall on the right – visitors had to ring six times. This was particularly unfortunate for the neighbours, because it had visitors coming and going all day, every day, and well into the night.
The man who lived there, Yury Mamleev, was an underground author and poet, whose residence just happened to be conveniently located equidistant from two landmarks of the Moscow intelligentsia: a few blocks from a statue erected to Vladimir Mayakovsky in Triumph Square on Moscow’s ring road, which had become a gathering point for poets and dissidents; and down the so-called Garden Ring from the Lenin Library, one of the few places in Moscow with a special section where foreign newspapers and books were plentiful and accessible to the general public. Mainly due to its location, Mamleev’s flat became a meeting place to discuss philosophy, poetry and literature.
Yury Mamleev was one of the leading lights of the 1960s generation, achieving a cult following as the author of what on the surface resembled horror novels, but which plumbed the depths of the Soviet psyche in a vaguely subversive way; the genre came to be called ‘metaphysical realism’. His flat and the people who gathered there regularly became known as the Yuzhinsky circle. (Yuzhinsky Pereulok has since returned to its pre-revolutionary name of Bolshoy Palashevsky.) A salon of sorts, the gatherings started as motley all-male assemblages of authors, artists, drunkards and hangers-on who referred to themselves collectively as the ‘mystical underground’.
Mamleev was an enthusiast of the occult, and specialized in taking the Soviet reality of official spangled mythology and pinpointing the black holes and dark matter at the edge of the bright lights of the socialist future. Mamleev’s characters were zombies, mass murderers, demented primitives who lived outside the city centres, in a countryside still stricken by shortages and alcoholism – dark-thinking, isolated provincials who inhabited a metaphysical universe of their own making. Normal Soviet life was transformed into a dark fantasy world, with just enough of the everyday detritus for the reader to find a connection; Mamleev’s characters rode Moscow’s suburban electric trains, lived in anonymous satellite towns with ill-stocked state stores that smelled of stale milk and lamb fat. The everyday realism was a carefully served ingredient of the fantasy and occult. Mamleev’s literary creations were all characterized by their neurotic rejection of the physical reality surrounding them, the conviction that the outer world either simply did not exist or must be subordinated to the inner one. ‘The surrounding world for them was one of the embodiments of the Inferno’, he said. One literary critic referred to Mamleev as ‘our Virgil, leading the way through the Soviet hell’.1
‘Mamleev was the describer of a Russian world that has sunk to the depths of the Inferno’, wrote Arkady Rovner, a Moscow-based mystic who joined the circle in the 1960s and became one of its many chroniclers.2 Followers would gather at his home, or occasionally in a cemetery, where Mamleev would recount stories of horror and the occult by candlelight, ‘introducing a secret and grotesque atmosphere into the apartments of the intelligentsia from which nervous and impressionable women not rarely fainted’, according to Rovner.3 The Yuzhinsky circle gained a reputation for Satanism, for séances, a devotion to all things esoteric – mysticism, hypnotism, Ouija boards, Sufism, trances, pentagrams and so forth – united by heavy use of alcohol in order to achieve enlightenment, among other things. ‘The rules of the circle were thus: first there was heavy drinking, followed by conversation’, recalled Rovner, who described the desired state of mind as marazm or ‘dementia’, which ‘was a kind of unique ski jump without which the exit to the higher state and spheres was considered impossible’.4 Mamleev’s circle was disparaged on all sides. Official culture tried to pretend that it did not exist. Even the liberal westernized liberal nomenklatura looked askance at the group’s fascination with the occult, fascism and mysticism, while nationalists and religious believers (another fast-growing side of the intelligentsia) considered Mamleev’s group to be Satanists.