Lev Gumilev

Пусть в мире есть слезы, но в мире есть битвы

The world is not only full of tears but also of battles

“Prodigal Son,” by Nikolai Gumilev

By any measure, Lev Gumilev, son of the poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova (who divorced when he was 7), lived “a life that is full.” More often than not fighting against adversity, his was a life full of pain, sorrow and grievances, but also full of passion and accomplishments.

He was born one hundred years ago, on October 1, 1912.

Gumilev’s father, a white officer and hero of World War I, was shot by the Bolsheviks when Lev was just nine (in 1921). Akhmatova sent him to Bezhetsk, to live with his paternal grandmother and aunt, and only came to visit him twice in his childhood. As a result, for the rest of his life, his relationship with his mother was deeply strained.

While Akhmatova did intercede on many occasions to save her son from Stalin’s hangmen (in 1935, after receiving a personal letter from the poet, Stalin ordered NKVD chief Yagoda to release Gumilev and his stepfather Nikolai Punin), Lev always felt that Akhmatova had never truly been a mother to him, and time did nothing to attenuate his rancor.

Attempting to secure Lev’s release from the camps in the early 1950s, Akhmatova published poetic ditties to Joseph Stalin (in Ogonyok magazine – to no avail), but Lev did not appreciate even this sacrifice. Writing to his lover, Emma Gershtein, from yet another camp, on March 25, 1955, Gumilev said: “For her, my death would be a pretext to write a poetic epitaph on how she, the poor thing, lost her little son.”

Akhmatova, for her part, blamed Lev’s grudge against her on the long years he spent in Stalin’s prisons and camps, which had “damaged his soul.” Indeed, the trials and tribulations of his 14 years in camps would have broken the most indomitable character.

To “whitewash” his resume so as to be eligible for entry at Leningrad State University (LGU), this son of a nobleman and white counter-revolutionary “traveled each and every highway,” working first as a simple worker and then took part in several expeditions to Central Asia, working in often dangerous and toxic jobs. His “worker’s background” secured, he enrolled in LGU’s historical faculty in June 1934. But by 1935 he was arrested after being denounced by an institute mate, accused of plotting against Stalin.

Soon released, thanks to his mother’s intervention, he was reinstated at LGU in 1937, but then re-arrested in 1938, this time sentenced to five years in a camp in Norilsk. Upon serving out his term, Gumilev was not allowed to leave Norilsk. But in the fall of 1944 he insisted on volunteering for the Red Army and fought bravely on the Belorussian Front (participating in the storming of Berlin).

Upon demobilization, Lev was again reinstated at LGU, from which he graduated in 1946. In 1948 he defended his dissertation on the history of Turkish kaganat and landed a job at the Museum of Ethnography of USSR Peoples.

But accomplishment was to be short lived. The Zhdanovshchina and denunciation of Akhmatova eventually swept Gumilev back into the camps. From 1949 to 1956 he served in Kazakhstan, then Kemerovo Oblast, and finally in Omsk, where the news of his rehabilitation found him in May 1956.

Gumilev-the-scholar professed unorthodox ideas on the birth and death of ethnic groups (ethnoi) and their behavior. His ideas later gave rise to the political and cultural movement known as “Neo-Eurasianism.” In short, Gumilev introduced the concept of “passionarity” (“power of passion”), that can be explained as the level of vital energy and power characteristic of any given ethnic group. He argued that ethnic groups pass through stages of rise, development, climax, inertial, convolution, and memorial. It is, he postulated, during the “acmatic” phases, when the national passionarity reaches its maximum heat, that an ethnoi’s greatest accomplishments are made. But then, when the number of “sub-passionaries” – people with low levels of energy who seek to satisfy only their basic needs –reaches a certain threshold level, the nation starts to degrade and fade away.

Gumilev regarded Russians as a “super-ethnos” kindred to Turkic-Mongol peoples of the Eurasian steppe. Those periods when Russia has been said to conflict with the steppe peoples, Gumilev reinterpreted as the periods of consolidation of Russian power with the steppe in order to oppose destructive influences from Catholic Europe, which threatened the integrity of the Russian ethnic group. Consequently, Gumilev believed the negative role of the Mongol Yoke in Russia was greatly overstated – a serious deviation from previous, approved Soviet theories of history.

In a later interview, Gumilev criticized one opponent for citing Karl Marx, who said the soul of Russian people was “depressed, defiled and dried out” after the Mongol Yoke: “After the fourteenth century, the Russians created a state which went from victory to victory for 600 years. You can’t do that with a ‘defiled and dried out soul,’” Gumilev retorted.

The son of poets found love late in life, marrying the artist Nadezhda Simonovskaya in 1967. As a scientist, he received national recognition only towards the end of his tumultuous life, during the Gorbachevian perestroika.

In an interview in the journal Sotsium published shortly before his death on June 15, 1992, Gumilev urged Russia to “renounce such aberrations of mass conscience as Euro-centrism” and to consider humanity “not just as one whole oneness with a sole center – Europe – but rather as a mosaic-like unity divided into different landscapes.” Russia he said, would find salvation “only as a Euro-Asian power…” And the essence of Eurasianism he defined simply as, “one needs to look not so much for enemies – there are quite a few of them as it is, but rather for friends…” RL