“The Magic Palimpsest” On the Signifi cance of L.N. Gumilev’s Poetry and Legacy

Abstract

L.N. Gumilev belonged to the very small group of the children of the Silver Age in Russian culture, and the fi rst three decades of his own adult life (until the early 1960s) he particularly devoted to writing poetry. The literary heritage of L.N. Gumilev’s has been preserved only fragmentarily and does not refl ect the full range of his interests – neither in subject matter, nor in genres (the prosaic works have not been basically preserved). However, the extant works make it possible to establish a direct connection between the poetic work of L.N. Gumilev and the tradition of the Silver Age, from which he drew many images and plots. The greatest infl uence on Gumilev Jr. was exerted by the works of his father, N.S. Gumilev. Moreover, in the proper scientifi c heritage of L.N. Gumilev poetry also constitutes a separate layer: these are both poetic allusions and direct quotations of poems, including those of the Silver Age. Often in his scientifi c works L.N. Gumilev embarked on an intellectual game, which, despite the outward lightness of his language, hid second and even third layers of meanings from the mass reader, like the shadows of former texts in old parchment manuscripts (palimpsests). Thus, throughout his scholar and creative life L.N. Gumilev was accompanied by the proper ‘poetic image of the historian’. This is a kind of the alter ego of the author, and in unraveling it, it is important to understand that for Gumilev the presence of science in poetry and of poetry in science was quite organic.