Nikolai Gumilev

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev (also Gumilyov; Russian: Николай Степанович Гумилёв, IPA: [nʲɪkɐˈlaj sʲtʲɪˈpanəvʲɪtɕ ɡʊmʲɪˈlʲɵf] ⓘ; April 15 [O.S.

[2] His first poem, I Ran from Cities into Woods (Я в лес бежал из городов), was published on September 8, 1902 in the newspaper Tifliski Listok.

It turned out that Cherubina de Gabriak was the literary pseudonym for two people: Elisaveta Ivanovna Dmitrieva [ru] and Maximilian Voloshin.

Like Flaubert and Rimbaud before him, but inspired by exploits of Alexander Bulatovich and Nikolay Leontiev, Gumilev was fascinated with Africa and travelled there almost every year.

He explored, sporadically hunted lions, and even contributed to the development of Ethiopia, eventually donating a large collection of African artifacts to the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in Saint Petersburg.

According to the principles of acmeism (as the movement came to be dubbed by art historians), every person, irrespective of his talent, may learn to produce high-quality poems if only he follows the guild's masters, i.e., Gumilev and Gorodetsky.

Such a program, combined with colourful and exotic subject matter of Gumilev's poems, attracted to the Guild a large number of adolescents.

There he published several new collections, Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally divorced Akhmatova (August 5, 1918), whom he had left for another woman several years prior.

[9] Despite Gumilev's execution, Gondla was again performed in Petrograd in January 1922: "The play, despite its crowd scenes being enacted on a tiny stage, was a major success.

Yet when the Petrograd audience called for the author, who was now officially an executed counter-revolutionary traitor, the play was removed from the repertoire and the theatre disbanded.

"[10] In February 1934, as they walked along a Moscow street, Osip Mandelstam quoted Gondla's words "I am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she repeated them in her "Poem without a Hero.

"[11] Although banned in the Soviet times, Gumilev was loved for his adolescent longing for travel and giraffes and hippos, for his dreams of a fifteen-year-old captain"[1] His "The Tram That Lost Its Way" is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.