Nikolay Gumilev: Toward A Reevaluation

Abstract

Nikolay Gumilev is a poet with whom any student of Russian poetry is at least superficially acquainted, but who is virtually unknown outside that relatively narrow circle. Since this article is addressed in part to a wider audience, it seems appropriate to begin with some background information. The period of what can be called Modernism in Russian poetry is roughly circumscribed by the dates 1890-1930.1 It can be divided into two major phases: the Symbolist period (ca. 1890-1910) and the post-Symbolist period (ca. 1910-1930). The latter is characterized by the coexistence (none too peaceful) of various poetic schools, all of which opposed themselves to Symbolism (although all were in some degree the heirs of the Symbolists) and to each other. The major ones carried the labels of Acmeism, Futurism, and Imagism. Gumilev belongs to the post-Symbolist generation and is best known in Russian literary history as the founder, chief theoretician, and organizational leader of the Acmeist movement. Symbolism (its Russian version more than the French) was largely a neo-romantic movement, and Acmeism was, or considered itself to be, a reaction against and a corrective to some of the romantic aspects of Symbolism: in the area of thematics or ideology, its mystical-religious tendencies; in the area of poetics, its stress on musicality of verse over plasticity, its preference for suggestion over representation, its tendency away from the concrete and precise toward the abstract and vague-in short, the use of words as suggestive and subjective symbols rather than as objective labels. The Acmeists have been called, variously, neo-Classicists, neo-Realists, and neo-Parnassians (in regard to the latter, it may be mentioned that Gumilev's favorite poets were Theophile Gautier and Leconte de Lisle. Acmeism has also certain affinities with the Anglo-American Imagist school,2 which flourished at about the same time, although there is no question of one's