Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich
▪ Russian poet
Gumilyov also spelled Gumilev
born April 15, 1886, Kronshtadt, Russia
died Aug. 24, 1921, Petrograd [St. Petersburg]
Russian poet and theorist who founded and led the Acmeist movement in Russian poetry in the years before and after World War I.
The son of a naval surgeon, Gumilyov was educated at the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, where he was influenced by the poet and teacher Innokenty Annensky. Gumilyov's earliest published volumes of poetry, Put' konkvistadorov (1905; “The Path of the Conquistadors”), Romanticheskie tsvety (1908; “Romantic Flowers”), and Zemcuga (1910; “Pearls”), marked him as a talented young poet under the influence of the Symbolist movement then dominating Russian poetry. He spent the years 1906–08 in Paris and traveling in northern and eastern Africa, whose exotic locales were to figure prominently in his poetry for the next 10 years. He returned to St. Petersburg in 1908 and the following year became a founding member of Apollon, which became the leading poetry journal in Russia in the years before the war. In 1910 he married the poet Anna Akhmatova, but the couple separated less than a year later and were divorced in 1918.
Gumilyov was an indefatigable literary organizer, and in 1911 he and Sergey Gorodetsky assembled the group known as the Guild of Poets. Among the group's members were Akhmatova and Osip Mandelshtam, who together with Gumilyov soon formed the nucleus of the emerging Acmeist movement in Russian poetry. Gumilyov's poetry collection entitled Cuzoe nebo (1912; “Foreign Sky”) established his reputation as a leading Russian poet.
During World War I, Gumilyov fought at the front as a volunteer and in 1917 served as the Provisional Government's special commissar in Paris after the first Russian Revolution that year. He returned to Russia in 1918 and worked as a creative writing instructor in Petrograd, where he tried unsuccessfully to revive the Acmeist Guild of Poets as an association of writers unaffiliated with the Bolshevik Party. He attained his full artistic stature in the poems published in Kostyor (1918; “The Pyre”), Shatyor (1921; “The Tent”), and Ognennyi stolp (1921; “The Pillar of Fire”). He had never bothered to hide his antipathy toward the Bolshevik government, and in August 1921 he was arrested and shot for counter-revolutionary activities. He was posthumously rehabilitated in the Soviet Union in 1986.
Gumilyov's lyric poetry ranges over a wide variety of themes. Many of the poems of his middle period are set in Africa or other exotic places and glorify a life of romantic adventure, masculine heroism, and physical courage. The poetry in his last three volumes shows a shifting of concern toward spiritual problems and is characterized by greater stylistic complexity, enhanced philosophical depth, and a more intensely personal element. His poetic style is marked by the use of vivid imagery to convey sights, sounds, and colours to the reader with great clarity and directness. Gumilyov also wrote verse dramas and an important series of literary essays in which he developed the aesthetic canons of the Acmeist movement.
The Symbolist movement also spread to Russia, where Valery Bryusov (Bryusov, Valery Yakovlevich) published an anthology of Russian and French Symbolist poems in 1894–95. The revival of poetry in Russia stemming from this movement had as its leader Vladimir Sergeyevich Solovyov (Solovyov, Vladimir Sergeyevich). His poetry expressed a belief that the world was a system of symbols expressing metaphysical realities. The greatest poet of the movement was Aleksandr Blok (Blok, Aleksandr Aleksandrovich), who in Dvenadtsat (1918; The Twelve) united the Russian Revolution and God in an apocalyptic vision in which 12 Red Army men became apostles of the New World, headed by Christ. Other Russian Symbolist poets were Vyacheslav Ivanovich Ivanov (Ivanov, Vyacheslav Ivanovich), Fyodor Sologub, Andrey Bely (Bely, Andrey), and Nikolay Gumilyov (Gumilyov, Nikolay Stepanovich).
Mandelshtam, Osip Emilyevich
▪ Russian poet
Mandelshtam also spelled Mandelstam
born Jan. 3 [Jan. 15, New Style], 1891, Warsaw, Pol., Russian Empire [now in Poland]
died Dec. 27, 1938?, Vtoraya Rechka, near Vladivostok, Russia, U.S.S.R. [now in Russia]
major Russian poet and literary critic. Most of his works went unpublished in the Soviet Union during the Stalin era (1929–53) and were almost unknown outside that country until the mid-1960s.
Mandelshtam grew up in St. Petersburg in a cultured Jewish household. After graduating from the elite Tenishev School in 1907, he studied at the University of St. Petersburg as well as in France at the Sorbonne and in Germany at the University of Heidelberg.
His first poems appeared in the avant-garde journal Apollon (“Apollo”) in 1910. Together with Nikolay Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova, Mandelshtam founded the Acmeist school of poetry, which rejected the mysticism and abstraction of Russian Symbolism and demanded clarity and compactness of form. Mandelshtam summed up his poetic credo in his manifesto Utro Akmeizma (“The Morning of Acmeism”). In 1913 his first slim volume of verse, Kamen (“Stone”), was published. During the Russian Civil War (1918–20), Mandelshtam spent time in the Crimea and Georgia. In 1922 he moved to Moscow, where his second volume of poetry, Tristia, appeared. He married Nadezhda Yakovlevna Khazina in 1922.
Mandelshtam's poetry, which was apolitical and intellectually demanding, distanced him from the official Soviet literary establishment. His poetry having been withdrawn from publication, he wrote children's tales and a collection of autobiographical stories, Shum vremeni (1925; “The Noise of Time”). A second edition of this work, augmented by the tale “Yegipetskaya marka” (“The Egyptian Stamp”), was published in 1928. That year, a volume of his collected poetry, Stikhotvoreniya (“Poems”), and a collection of literary criticism, O poezii (“On Poetry”), appeared. These were his last books published in the Soviet Union during his lifetime.
In May 1934 he was arrested for an epigram on Joseph Stalin he had written and read to a small circle of friends. In addition to describing Stalin's fingers as “worms” and his moustache as that of a cockroach, the draft that fell into the hands of the police called Stalin “the murderer and peasant slayer.”
Shattered by a fierce interrogation, Mandelshtam was exiled with his wife to the provincial town of Cherdyn. After hospitalization and a suicide attempt, he won permission to move to Voronezh. Though suffering from periodic bouts of mental illness, he composed a long cycle of poems, the Voronezhskiye tetradi (“Voronezh Notebooks”), which contain some of his finest lyrics.
In May 1937, having served his sentence, Mandelshtam returned with his wife to Moscow. But the following year he was arrested during a stay at a rest home. In a letter to his wife that autumn, Mandelshtam reported that he was ill in a transit camp near Vladivostok. Nothing further was ever heard from him. Soviet authorities officially gave his death date as Dec. 27, 1938, although he was also reported by government sources to have died “at the beginning of 1939.” It was primarily through the efforts of his widow, who died in 1980, that little of the poetry of Osip Mandelshtam was lost; she kept his works alive during the repression by memorizing them and by collecting copies.
After Stalin's death the publication in Russian of Mandelshtam's works was resumed.
Additional Reading
Nadezhda Mandelstam (Nadezhda Mandelshtam), Hope Against Hope (1970, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1970), and Hope Abandoned (1974, reissued 1989; originally published in Russian, 1972), memoirs by his wife, were published in the West in Russian and English. In Russia the Marinetti visit took root in a kind of Russian Futurism that went beyond its Italian model in a revolutionary social and political outlook. Marinetti influenced the two Russian writers considered the founders of Russian Futurism, Velimir Khlebnikov (Khlebnikov, Velimir Vladimirovich) (q.v.), who remained a poet and a mystic, and the younger Vladimir Mayakovsky (Mayakovsky, Vladimir Vladimirovich) (q.v.), who became “the poet of the Revolution” and the popular spokesman of his generation. The Russians published their own manifesto in December 1912, entitled Poshchochina obshchestvennomu vkusu (“A Slap in the Face of Public Taste”), which echoed the Italian manifesto of the previous May. The Russian Futurists repudiated Aleksandr Pushkin, Fyodor Dostoyevsky, and Leo Tolstoy and the then-current Russian symbolist verse and called for the creation of new techniques of writing poetry. Both the Russian and the Italian Futurist poets discarded logical sentence construction and traditional grammar and syntax; they frequently presented an incoherent string of words stripped of their meaning and used for their sound alone. As the first group of artists to identify wholeheartedly with the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 (Russian Revolution of 1917), the Russian Futurists sought to dominate post-Revolutionary culture and create a new art that would be integrated into all aspects of daily life of a revolutionary culture. They were favoured by Anatoly Lunacharsky, the first Soviet commissar of education, and given important cultural posts. But the Russian Futurists' challenging literary techniques and their theoretical premises of revolt and innovation proved too unstable a foundation upon which to build a broader literary movement. The Futurists' influence was negligible by the time of Mayakovsky's death in 1930.