Unknown facts about famous writers. Anna Akhmatova

The famous historian Gumilyov Lev is the son of the legendary poets Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. In his youth, he was subjected to repression and visited camps. As a scientist, Gumilyov is best known for his passionary theory of ethnogenesis and his studies of the East.

Childhood

Lev Gumilev was born on October 1, 1912 in St. Petersburg. He was the only child of his parents. In 1918, Akhmatova and Gumilyov divorced. Then the Civil War began. Lev last saw his father in 1921 in Bezhetsk. Soon the poet Nikolai Gumilyov was shot by the Bolsheviks (he was accused of participating in an anti-Soviet conspiracy).

Subsequently, the child grew up with his paternal grandmother. In 1929, Lev Gumilev, who graduated from school, moved from Bezhetsk to Leningrad to live with his mother. He began to live in a communal apartment in the Fountain House, where his stepfather and his numerous relatives were his neighbors. Due to his aristocratic origin, Gumilyov had difficulty entering a higher educational institution.

Youth

In 1931, Lev Gumilyov took courses on a geological expedition. This was followed by a long journey to the east of the country. It was then that interests were formed that defined Gumilyov as a historian and scientist in general. The young man visited Tajikistan, the Baikal region. In 1933, after returning from the expedition, Gumilyov Lev found himself in Moscow.

In the Mother See, the young man became close to the poet Osip Mandelstam, who considered him “a continuation of his father.” At the same time, Gumilyov began working in the literary field - he translated poems by poets of different Soviet nationalities. Also in 1933, Lev was arrested for the first time (the arrest lasted 9 days). The problem was the “unreliability” of the writer. Origin and social circle had an impact. His patron Osip Mandelstam will soon be repressed.

In 1934, Gumilyov Lev, despite his disenfranchised status, entered Leningrad University, where he chose the Faculty of History. As a student, the young man lived in need and poverty, which often turned into natural hunger. His teachers were bright and honored scientists: Vasily Struve, Solomon Lurie, Evgeniy Tarle, Alexander Yakubovsky and others. Lev Nikolaevich considered sinologist Nikolai Kuehner to be his main teacher and mentor.

After returning from a new expedition, Gumilyov was arrested a second time. The year was 1935. The day before, Kirov was killed in Leningrad, and mass repressions began in the city. During interrogation, Gumilyov admitted that his public conversations were anti-Soviet in nature. Punin's stepfather was arrested along with him. Anna Akhmatova stood up for the men. She convinced Boris Pasternak to write a letter of petition to Joseph Stalin. Soon both Punin and Gumilyov were released.

In the camp

Due to the arrest, Lev was expelled from the university. Through patronage, he, however, became a member of an archaeological expedition that explored the ruins of the Khazar city of Sarkel. Then Gumilyov was reinstated at Leningrad State University. However, already in 1938, at the height of the repressions, he was arrested again and this time sentenced to 10 years in the Gulag.

The Norilsk camp became the place where Lev Gumilev served his sentence. The biography of the young intellectual was similar to the biographies of many of his other contemporaries from the same environment. Gumilyov ended up in the camp along with many scientists and thinkers. The prisoner was helped by his teachers and comrades. So, Nikolai Kuner sent books to Gumilyov.

Meanwhile, the Great Patriotic War began. Many camp inmates aspired to go to the front. Gumilyov ended up in the Red Army only in 1944. He became an anti-aircraft gunner and took part in several offensive operations. His army entered the German city of Altdamm. Gumilyov received medals “For the Victory over Germany” and “For the Capture of Berlin”. In November 1945, the already free military man returned to Leningrad.

New term

After the war, Gumilyov got a job as a fireman at the Institute of Oriental Studies. This position allowed him to study in the rich library of the Academy of Sciences. Then Gumilyov, at the age of 33, defended his thesis on the topic of Central Asian terracotta figurines. In 1948, it was the turn of the dissertation on the Turkic Kaganate. The life of a scientist did not settle down for long.

In 1949, Gumilyov again found himself in the camp. This time, the reason for his persecution was, on the one hand, the “Leningrad Affair”, and on the other, pressure on the historian’s mother, Anna Akhmatova. Lev Nikolaevich sat in the camp until the 20th Congress of the CPSU and the rehabilitation that followed it. Anna Akhmatova dedicated the poem “Requiem” about Soviet repressions to her son. Gumilyov's relationship with his mother was extremely complex and contradictory. After his final return from the camp, Lev Nikolaevich quarreled with Akhmatova several times. Anna Andreevna died in 1966.

For the first three years of his freedom, Gumilyov was a senior researcher at the Hermitage Library. At this time, the scientist was processing his own working drafts, written in the camps. In the second half of the 1950s. Lev Nikolaevich communicated a lot with orientalist Yuri Roerich, the founder of Eurasian theory Pyotr Savitsky and Georgy Vernadsky.

Gumilyov's first articles were published in 1959. The scientist had to struggle for a long time with the prejudice and suspicion of the scientific community towards his personality. When his materials finally began to appear in print, they immediately earned universal recognition. The historian’s articles appeared in the publications “Bulletin of Ancient History”, “Soviet Ethnography”, “Soviet Archeology”.

"Xiongnu"

Lev Gumilyov’s first monograph was the book “Xiongnu,” the manuscript of which he brought to the Institute of Oriental Studies in 1957 (it was published three years later). This work is considered the cornerstone of the researcher’s work. It was in it that the ideas that Gumilyov later developed throughout his scientific career were first laid down. This is the opposition of Russia to Europe, the explanation of social and historical phenomena by natural factors (including landscape) and the earliest references to the concept of passionarity.

The work “Xiongnu” received the greatest recognition from Turkologists and Sinologists. The book was immediately noticed by the main Soviet sinologists. At the same time, Gumilev’s first monograph already found principled critics. Lev Nikolaevich’s further work also evoked directly opposite assessments.

Rus' and the Horde

In the 1960s The theme of Russian medieval history became the main one in the works published by Lev Gumilyov. Ancient Rus' interested him from many sides. The scientist began by conducting a study of “The Tale of Igor’s Campaign,” giving it a new dating (the middle, not the end of the 12th century).

Then Gumilyov took up the theme of the empire of Genghis Khan. He was interested in how a state emerged in the harsh steppe of Mongolia that conquered half the world. Lev Nikolaevich dedicated the books “Xiongnu”, “Xiongnu in China”, “Ancient Turks”, “Search for a Fictitious Kingdom” to the Eastern hordes.

Passionarity and ethnogenesis

The most famous part of the scientific heritage that Lev Gumilev left is the theory of ethnogenesis and passionarity. The first article on this topic was published by him in 1970. Gumilyov called passionarity the super-intense activity of a person in his desire to achieve a certain goal. The historian superimposed this phenomenon on the doctrine of the formation of ethnic groups.

Lev Gumilyov's theory stated that the survival and success of a people depends on the number of passionaries in it. The scientist did not consider this factor to be the only one, but defended its importance in the process of formation and displacement of ethnic groups by competitors.

The passionary theory of Lev Gumilev, which caused serious scientific controversy, stated that the reason for the emergence of a large number of leaders and extraordinary personalities are cyclical passionary impulses. This phenomenon is rooted in biology, genetics and anthropology. As a result, superethnoses arose, Lev Gumilyov believed. The scientist’s books included hypotheses about the reasons for the origin of passionary impulses. The author also called them energy impulses of a cosmic nature.

Contribution to Eurasianism

As a thinker, Gumilyov is considered a supporter of Eurasianism - a philosophical doctrine about the roots of Russian culture hidden in the synthesis of European and nomadic Asian traditions. At the same time, the scientist in his works did not touch upon the political side of the dispute at all, which markedly distinguished him from many adherents of this theory. Gumilyov (especially at the end of his life) criticized Western borrowings in Russia a lot. At the same time, he was not an opponent of democracy and a market economy. The historian only believed that the Russian ethnos, due to its youth, lags behind the Europeans and therefore is not ready to adopt Western institutions.

The author’s unique interpretation of Eurasianism was reflected in several works written by Lev Gumilyov. “Ancient Rus' and the Great Steppe”, “Black Legend”, “Echo of the Battle of Kulikovo” - this is just an incomplete list of these works. What is their main message? Gumilyov believed that the Tatar-Mongol yoke was actually an alliance of the Horde and Rus'. For example, Alexander Nevsky helped Batu, and in return received support in the fight against the Western crusaders.

Khazaria

One of Gumilyov’s most controversial works is “The Zigzag of History.” This essay touched on the little-studied topic of the Khazar Khaganate in the south of modern Russia. In his work, Gumilev described the history of this state. The author dwelled in detail on the role of Jews in the life of Khazaria. The rulers of this state, as is known, adopted Judaism. Gumilyov believed that the Kaganate lived under the Jewish yoke, the end of which was put after the campaign of the Kyiv prince Svyatoslav Igorevich.

Recent years

With the beginning of perestroika, poems by Nikolai Gumilyov reappeared in the Soviet press. His son was in contact with Literaturnaya Gazeta and Ogonyok, helped collect materials, and even read his father’s works at public events. Glasnost increased the circulation of books and Lev Nikolaevich himself. In the last Soviet years, many of his works were published: “Ethnogenesis”, “Ethnogenesis and the Earth’s biosphere”, etc.

In 1990, Leningrad Television recorded a dozen lectures by the historian. This was the pinnacle of his lifetime popularity and fame. The next year, Gumilyov became an academician of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. In 1992, Lev Nikolaevich underwent surgery to remove his gallbladder. As a result, there was profuse internal bleeding. The scientist spent the last days of his life in a coma. He died on June 15, 1992 at the age of 79.

The personal life and legacy of this historian are of great interest to a wide range of people. He is remarkable both as a scientist and as the son of great poets. Here are two main reasons to get to know him better.

Gumilev Lev - Russian historian, ethnologist, Doctor of Geographical and Historical Sciences. He is the author of the doctrine of ethnic groups and humanity as biosocial categories. Lev Nikolaevich studied ethnogenesis, its bioenergetic dominant, which he called passionarity.

Origin and childhood

1912 Gumilev Lev Nikolaevich was born in Tsarskoe Selo. His short biography is notable for the fact that his parents were the great Russian poets A. A. Akhmatova and N. S. Gumilyov. The Gumilevs' marriage broke up in 1918, and after that the boy lived either with his mother or with his grandmother in Bezhetsk. It is known that his relationship with Anna Andreevna was always difficult. In the photo below is Lev Gumilyov with his parents.

Training and arrests, participation in the war

Lev Nikolaevich entered the Leningrad State University, Faculty of History, in 1934. However, after completing his first year, he was arrested for the first time. Soon Lev Gumilyov was released, but he never managed to graduate from the university. Already in his 4th year, in 1938, he was again arrested for participation in a student terrorist organization. Gumilyov was sentenced to 10 years in the camps. Later his fate was softened. Lev Nikolaevich should have served a 5-year sentence in Norilsk. After this time, in 1943, he worked for hire in Turukhansk and near Norilsk. Then Gumilyov went to the front. He fought as an anti-aircraft gunner until victory. Gumilyov Lev Nikolaevich reached Berlin itself. The short biography of this scientist, as you can see, is marked not only by achievements in the field of history.

Defense of the first dissertation

Lev Nikolaevich passed the university exams as an external student in 1946, and then continued his education at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences, where he studied in graduate school. His candidate's thesis was already ready, but in 1947 the scientist was expelled from the institute due to the resolution on the magazines "Leningrad" and "Zvezda" adopted by the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks. This resolution condemned the work of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova. Despite all the difficulties, Lev Nikolaevich still managed to defend his dissertation thanks to the support of the scientific community of Leningrad.

New arrest

In 1949, L. N. Gumilev was arrested again. His brief biography, as you can see, is replete with arrests. He was released only in 1956 and then completely rehabilitated. It turned out that no crime was found in Gumilyov’s actions. In total, Lev Nikolaevich was arrested 4 times. In total, he had to spend 15 years in Stalin’s camps.

Doctoral dissertations and publications of Gumilyov

Returning to Leningrad, Gumilev got a temporary job at the Hermitage. In 1961, he successfully defended his doctoral dissertation on the topic “Ancient Turks of the VI-VIII centuries.” Then the scientist was hired at the Institute of Geography, located at the Faculty of Geography of Leningrad State University. Here he worked until his retirement, which took place in 1986.

Gumilev Lev defended his geographical doctoral dissertation in 1974. However, the certification commission did not approve his degree. The manuscript of Gumilyov’s work “Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth” was prohibited from publication, but it was distributed in samizdat.

Only in 1959 did Lev Gumilyov begin to actively publish. It is no coincidence that his biography and work arouse great interest in scientific circles. He owns more than 220 works, including several monographs. In the post-Stalin era, Lev Gumilyov’s views were criticized in official publications, but there was no longer any persecution against him. Only in the early 1980s. the flow of his publications was briefly stopped. Lev Gumilyov had to address this issue to He wrote a letter regarding the ban on his publications. D.S. Likhachev and other historians of that time supported him.

Personal life

Lev Gumilev experienced several novels during his life. Biography, family and children - all this interests his fans. We will not dwell in detail on the personal life of Lev Nikolaevich. However, we note the most important facts. In 1967, Gumilyov married N.V. Simonovskaya, an artist (years of life - 1920-2004). He met her in June 1966. The couple lived together for 24 years, until the death of Lev Nikolaevich. According to others, this marriage was ideal. The wife devoted her entire life to Gumilyov. She left her old circle of acquaintances and her job. Lev Nikolaevich’s choice was also influenced by his desire not to have children: at that time his chosen one was 46 years old, and he himself was 55.

Relations with Slavophiles and nationalists

The extraordinary rise in Gumilyov's popularity occurred in the post-Soviet era. His books were published in huge numbers. The political views of this scientist, which he expressed in radio and television programs and in journalistic articles, were both anti-Western and anti-communist. This made his figure a symbol of illiberalism. Lev Nikolaevich’s thesis about the “Slavic-Turkic symbiosis” was picked up by Slavophiles at the turn of the 90s. These people had a negative attitude towards the scientist’s views on the Horde yoke, which, by the way, were very skeptical. The above thesis was taken up by the Slavophiles as a justification for the new ideology of the Russian state. Nationalists of the Turkic-speaking peoples who inhabited the USSR also referred to Lev Nikolaevich. For them, Gumilyov Lev was an indisputable authority.

"Theory of ethnogenesis" and natural sciences

Gumilyov considered himself “the last Eurasianist.” Nevertheless, the “theory of ethnogenesis” he created resembled Eurasianism only in general terms. From the point of view of a science such as history, the reflections of a scientist cannot be considered a theory. However, Gumilev Lev addressed primarily the Soviet technical intelligentsia, and not his fellow historians. By that time, the technical intelligentsia had become convinced that in the Soviet Union history was a propaganda tool, not a science, that it was falsified. Lev Nikolaevich's historical hypotheses aroused skepticism among scientists because they were not confirmed. However, the “theory of ethnogenesis” in the eyes of Gumilyov’s admirers did not lose any of this. Lev Nikolaevich judged history from the position of the natural sciences, and the scientific intelligentsia considered them less compromised than the humanities.

The main provisions of Gumilyov's theory

Gumilyov created his theory, trying to understand why wave-like and rapid ethnic processes were observed in the Great Steppe during the Middle Ages and antiquity. Indeed, they were often, in one way or another, associated with changes in climatic conditions. Therefore, to some extent, scientists’ linking landscape and ethnicity is justified. Nevertheless, the “theory of ethnogenesis” lost its credibility as a result of Gumilyov’s absolutization of the role of natural factors. The term “passionarity”, which belonged to Lev Nikolaevich, began to live its own life. The scholar used it to refer to the original ethnic activism. However, now this term has nothing in common with Gumilev’s “theory of ethnogenesis.”

On June 15, 1992, Lev Gumilyov died in St. Petersburg. The biography, family and heritage of the scientist were briefly reviewed by us. Now you know why the son of two great Russian poets gained great popularity.

And not just any khan, but Akhmat, the last khan of the Golden Horde, a descendant of Genghis Khan. This popular myth began to be created by the poetess herself back in the late 1900s, when the need arose for a literary pseudonym (Akhmatova’s real name is Gorenko). “And only a seventeen-year-old crazy girl could choose a Tatar surname for a Russian poetess...” Lydia Chukovskaya recalled her words. However, such a move for the Silver Age was not so reckless: the time demanded artistic behavior, vivid biographies and sonorous names from new writers. In this sense, the name Anna Akhmatova perfectly met all the criteria (poetic - it created a rhythmic pattern, two-foot dactyl, and had an assonance on “a”, and life-creative - it had a flair of mystery).

As for the legend about the Tatar Khan, it was formed later. The real genealogy did not fit into the poetic legend, so Akhmatova transformed it. Here we should highlight the biographical and mythological plans. The biographical one is that the Akhmatovs were actually present in the poetess’s family: Praskovya Fedoseevna Akhmatova was a great-grandmother on her mother’s side. In the poems, the line of kinship is a little closer (see the beginning of “The Tale of the Black Ring”: “I received rare gifts from my Tatar grandmother; / And why was I baptized, / She was bitterly angry”). The legendary plan is associated with the Horde princes. As researcher Vadim Chernykh showed, Praskovya Akhmatova was not a Tatar princess, but a Russian noblewoman (“The Akhmatovs are an old noble family, apparently descended from service Tatars, but Russified a long time ago”). There is no information about the origin of the Akhmatov family from Khan Akhmat or generally from the Khan’s family of Chingizids.

Myth two: Akhmatova was a recognized beauty

Many memoirs indeed contain admiring reviews of the appearance of the young Akhmatova (“Of the poets... Anna Akhmatova is most vividly remembered. Thin, tall, slender, with a proud turn of her small head, wrapped in a flowery shawl, Akhmatova looked like a giant... It was impossible to pass by her, without admiring her,” recalled Ariadna Tyrkova; “She was very beautiful, everyone on the street looked at her,” writes Nadezhda Chulkova).

Nevertheless, those closest to the poetess assessed her as a woman who was not fabulously beautiful, but expressive, with memorable features and a particularly attractive charm. “...You can’t call her beautiful, / But all my happiness is in her,” Gumilyov wrote about Akhmatova. Critic Georgy Adamovich recalled:

“Now, in memories of her, she is sometimes called a beauty: no, she was not a beauty. But she was more than a beauty, better than a beauty. I have never seen a woman whose face and entire appearance stood out everywhere, among any beauties, for its expressiveness, genuine spirituality, something that immediately attracted attention.”

Akhmatova herself assessed herself this way: “All my life I could look at will, from beauty to ugly.”

Myth three: Akhmatova drove a fan to suicide, which she later described in poetry

This is usually confirmed by a quote from Akhmatova’s poem “High vaults of the church...”: “High vaults of the church / Bluer than the firmament... / Forgive me, cheerful boy, / That I brought you death...”

All this is both true and untrue at the same time. As researcher Natalia Kraineva showed, Akhmatova really had “her own” suicide - Mikhail Lindeberg, who committed suicide because of unhappy love for the poetess on December 22, 1911. But the poem “High Vaults of the Church...” was written in 1913 under the impression of the suicide of another young man, Vsevolod Knyazev, who was unhappily in love with Akhmatova’s friend, dancer Olga Glebova-Sudeikina. This episode will be repeated in other poems, for example in “”. In “Poem Without a Hero,” Akhmatova will make Knyazev’s suicide one of the key episodes of the work. The commonality of the events that happened with her friends in Akhmatova’s historiosophical concept could later be combined into one memory: it is not without reason that in the margins of the autograph of the “ballet libretto” for the “Poem” there appears a note with Lindeberg’s name and the date of his death.

Myth four: Akhmatova was haunted by unhappy love

A similar conclusion arises after reading almost any book of poetry by the poetess. Along with the lyrical heroine, who leaves her lovers of her own free will, the poems also contain a lyrical mask of a woman suffering from unrequited love (“”, “”, “Today they didn’t bring me a letter ...”, “In the evening”, the cycle “Confusion”, etc. .d.). However, the lyrical outline of books of poetry does not always reflect the biography of the author: the beloved poetess Boris Anrep, Arthur Lurie, Nikolai Punin, Vladimir Garshin and others reciprocated her feelings.

Myth five: Gumilyov is Akhmatova’s only love

Akhmatova's marriage to the poet Nikolai Gumilyov. From 1918 to 1921, she was married to Assyriologist Vladimir Shileiko (they officially divorced in 1926), and from 1922 to 1938 she was in a civil marriage with art critic Nikolai Punin. The third, never officially formalized marriage, due to the specifics of the time, had its own strangeness: after separation, the spouses continued to live in the same communal apartment (in different rooms) - and moreover: even after Punin’s death, while in Leningrad, Akhmatova continued to live with his family.

Gumilyov also remarried in 1918 - to Anna Engelhardt. But in the 1950s-60s, when “Requiem” gradually reached readers (in 1963 the poem was published in Munich) and interest in Gumilyov, banned in the USSR, began to awaken, Akhmatova took on the “mission” of the poet’s widow (Engelhardt also time was also no longer alive). A similar role was played by Nadezhda Mandelstam, Elena Bulgakova and other wives of departed writers, keeping their archives and taking care of posthumous memory.

Myth six: Gumilyov beat Akhmatova

This conclusion was made more than once not only by later readers, but also by some of the poets’ contemporaries. No wonder: in almost every third poem the poetess admitted the cruelty of her husband or lover: “...My husband is an executioner, and his house is a prison,” “It doesn’t matter that you are arrogant and evil...”, “I marked with charcoal on the left side / The place where to shoot / To release the bird - my longing / On the deserted night again. / Cute! your hand will not tremble. / And I won’t have to endure it for long...”, “, / with a double folded belt” and so on.

The poet Irina Odoevtseva in her memoirs “On the Banks of the Neva” recalls Gumilyov’s indignation about this:

“He [poet Mikhail Lozinsky] told me that students were constantly asking him whether it was true that out of envy I prevented Akhmatova from publishing... Lozinsky, of course, tried to dissuade them.
<…>
<…>Probably you, like all of them, repeated: Akhmatova is a martyr, and Gumilyov is a monster.
<…>
Lord, what nonsense!<…>…When I realized how talented she was, even to my own detriment, I constantly put her in first place.
<…>
How many years have passed, and I still feel resentment and pain. How unfair and vile this is! Yes, of course, there were poems that I did not want her to publish, and quite a lot. At least here:
My husband whipped me with a patterned one,
Double folded belt.
After all, think about it, because of these lines I became known as a sadist. They started a rumor about me that, having put on a tailcoat (and I didn’t even have a tailcoat then) and a top hat (I actually had a top hat), I was whipping with a patterned, double-folded belt not only my wife, Akhmatova, but also my young fans, having previously stripped them naked.”

It is noteworthy that after the divorce from Gumilyov and after the marriage to Shileiko, the “beatings” did not stop: “Because of your mysterious love, / I screamed as if in pain, / I became yellow and fitful, / I could barely drag my feet,” “And in the cave the dragon has / No mercy, no law. / And there’s a whip hanging on the wall, / So that I don’t have to sing songs” - and so on.

Myth seven: Akhmatova was a principled opponent of emigration

This myth was created by the poetess herself and is actively supported by the school canon. In the fall of 1917, Gumilev considered the possibility of moving abroad for Akhmatova, which he informed her about from London. Boris Anrep also advised leaving Petrograd. Akhmatova responded to these proposals with a poem known in the school curriculum as “I had a voice...”.

Admirers of Akhmatova’s work know that this text is actually the second part of a poem, less clear in its content - “When in the anguish of suicide...”, where the poetess talks not only about her fundamental choice, but also about the horrors against which a decision is made.

“I think I can’t describe how painfully I want to come to you. I ask you - arrange this, prove that you are my friend...
I am healthy, I really miss the village and think with horror about winter in Bezhetsk.<…>How strange it is for me to remember that in the winter of 1907 you called me to Paris in every letter, and now I don’t know at all whether you want to see me. But always remember that I remember you very well, I love you very much, and that without you I’m always somehow sad. I look with sadness at what is happening in Russia now; God is severely punishing our country.”

Accordingly, Gumilyov’s autumn letter is not a proposal to go abroad, but a report at her request.

After the impulse to leave, Akhmatova soon enough decided to stay and did not change her opinion, which can be seen in her other poems (for example, “You are an apostate: for the green island ...”, “Your spirit is darkened by arrogance ...”), and in the stories of contemporaries . According to memoirs, in 1922, Akhmatova again had the opportunity to leave the country: Arthur Lurie, having settled in Paris, persistently calls her there, but she refuses (in her hands, according to Akhmatova’s confidant Pavel Luknitsky, there were 17 letters with this request) .

Myth eight: Stalin was jealous of Akhmatova

The poetess herself and many of her contemporaries considered the appearance of the 1946 Central Committee resolution “On the magazines Zvezda and Leningrad,” where Akhmatova and Zoshchenko were defamed, as a consequence of an event that occurred at one literary evening. ““This is me earning a resolution,” Akhmatova said about a photograph taken at one of the evenings held in Moscow in the spring of 1946.<…>According to rumors, Stalin was angry at the ardent reception that Akhmatova received from her listeners. According to one version, Stalin asked after some evening: “Who organized the rise?” recalls Nika Glen. Lydia Chukovskaya adds: “Akhmatova believed that... Stalin was jealous of her ovation... The standing ovation was due, according to Stalin, to him alone - and suddenly the crowd gave an ovation to some poetess.”

As noted, all memories associated with this plot are characterized by typical reservations (“according to rumors,” “believed,” and so on), which is a likely sign of speculation. Stalin’s reaction, as well as the “quoted” phrase about “getting up,” do not have documentary evidence or refutation, so this episode should be considered not as the absolute truth, but as one of the popular, probable, but not fully confirmed versions.

Myth ninth: Akhmatova did not love her son

And that's not true. There are many nuances in the complex history of Akhmatova’s relationship with Lev Gumilyov. In her early lyrics, the poetess created the image of a negligent mother (“...I am a bad mother”, “...Take away both the child and the friend...”, “Why, abandoning the friend / And the curly-haired child...”), in which there was a share of biography: childhood and Lev Gumilyov spent his youth not with his parents, but with his grandmother, Anna Gumileva; his mother and father only occasionally visited them. But at the end of the 1920s, Lev moved to the Fountain House, to the family of Akhmatova and Punin.

A serious disagreement occurred after Lev Gumilyov returned from the camp in 1956. He could not forgive his mother, as it seemed to him, her frivolous behavior in 1946 (see myth eight) and some poetic egoism. However, it was precisely for his sake that Akhmatova not only “stood for three hundred hours” in prison lines with the transfer and asked every more or less influential acquaintance to help with the release of her son from the camp, but also took a step contrary to any selfishness: stepping over her convictions for the sake of her son’s freedom Akhmatova wrote and published the series “Glory to the World!”, where she glorified the Soviet system  When Akhmatova’s first book after a significant break was published in 1958, she covered pages with poems from this cycle in the author’s copies..

In recent years, Akhmatova has repeatedly told her loved ones about her desire to restore her previous relationship with her son. Emma Gerstein writes:

“...she told me: “I would like to make peace with Leva.” I replied that he probably wanted this too, but was afraid of excessive excitement for both her and himself when explaining. “There’s no need to explain,” Anna Andreevna quickly objected. “He would come and say: ‘Mom, sew on a button for me.’”

Probably, the feelings of a disagreement with her son greatly accelerated the death of the poetess. In the last days of her life, a theatrical performance unfolded near Akhmatova’s hospital room: her relatives were deciding whether or not to let Lev Nikolayevich see his mother, whether their meeting would bring the poetess’s death closer. Akhmatova died without making peace with her son.

Myth tenth: Akhmatova is a poet, she cannot be called a poetess

Often discussions of Akhmatova’s work or other aspects of her biography end in heated terminological disputes - “poet” or “poetess”. Those arguing, not without reason, refer to the opinion of Akhmatova herself, who emphatically called herself a poet (which was recorded by many memoirists), and call for the continuation of this particular tradition.

However, it is worth remembering the context of the use of these words a century ago. Poetry written by women was just beginning to appear in Russia, and was rarely taken seriously (see the typical titles of reviews of books by women poets in the early 1910s: “Women’s Handicraft”, “Love and Doubt”). Therefore, many women writers either chose male pseudonyms (Sergei Gedroits  Pseudonym of Vera Gedroits., Anton Krainy  The pseudonym under which Zinaida Gippius published critical articles., Andrey Polyanin  The name taken by Sofia Parnok to publish criticism.), or wrote on behalf of a man (Zinaida Gippius, Polixena Solovyova). The work of Akhmatova (and in many ways Tsvetaeva) completely changed the attitude towards poetry created by women as an “inferior” movement. Back in 1914, in a review of “The Rosary,” Gumilyov made a symbolic gesture. Having called Akhmatova several times a poetess, at the end of the review he gives her the name of a poet: “That connection with the world that I spoke about above and which is the lot of every true poet, Akhmatova has almost achieved.”

In the modern situation, when the merits of poetry created by women no longer need to be proven to anyone, in literary criticism it is customary to call Akhmatova a poetess, in accordance with generally accepted norms of the Russian language. 

He was born into a family of poets Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. As a child, he was raised by his grandmother on the Slepnevo estate in the Bezhetsk district of the Tver province. Little Lev very rarely saw his parents; they were busy with their own problems and rarely came to Slepnevo, the family estate of Nikolai Stepanovich’s mother, Anna Ivanovna Gumilyova. After the First World War broke out, followed by the revolution, small parcels and money transfers from St. Petersburg to the small estate of Slepnevo, located in the outback of the Tver province, rarely arrived. Lev's parents practically did not go there. Lev’s father, Nikolai Gumilyov, was one of the first to go to the front as a volunteer in 1914, and his mother, Anna Akhmatova, did not like Slepnevo, and characterized this village as follows: “That is not a picturesque place: fields plowed in even squares on hilly terrain, mills, bogs, drained swamps , “gate”, bread.” But if Lev lacked parental affection, then his grandmother, Anna Ivanovna, fully compensated for this inattention. She was a very pious person, with a broad outlook, and from childhood she taught Levushka that the world is much more diverse than it seems at first glance. She explained to Lev that what we see on the surface actually has its roots, sometimes so deep that it is not easy to get to the bottom of them, as well as a “look” into the sky, into infinity. This means that any phenomenon must be looked at from this angle: the roots, the tree itself and the branches that stretch to infinity. “I remember my childhood very vaguely and can’t say anything meaningful about it. I only know that I was immediately handed over to my grandmother, Anna Ivanovna Gumileva, and taken to the Tver province, where we first had a house in the village, and then we lived in the city of Bezhetsk, where I graduated from high school. At that time, I became interested in history, and I became incredibly interested, because I re-read all the books on history that were in Bezhetsk, and from my childhood memory I remembered a lot,” Lev Nikolaevich wrote in his autobiography.

Lev Gumilyov with his parents - N.S. Gumilyov and A.A. Akhmatova.

In 1917, after the October Revolution, the family left the village house and moved to Bezhetsk, where Lev studied at high school until 1929. Already at school, he turned out to be a “black sheep” and was accused of “academic kulaks” because, in terms of his knowledge and success, he stood out from the general class. And in the future, the scientist’s activities, because of their novelty and originality, constantly placed him in the same position.

Lev Gumilyov with his mother and grandmother, A.I. Gumilyova. Fountain House, 1927.

Lev Gumilyov graduated from his last class of secondary school in 1930 in Leningrad, at secondary school No. 67 on First Krasnoarmeyskaya Street. He said: “When I returned back to Leningrad, I found a very unfavorable picture for me. In order to gain a foothold in Leningrad, I was left at school for another year, which only benefited me, since I no longer had to study physics, chemistry, mathematics and other things (which were known to me), and I mainly studied history and tried to enroll in German language courses preparing for the Herzen Institute.”

Lev Gumilev. 1926

In 1930, Lev Gumilyov applied to the university, but was denied admission due to his social background. In the same year, he entered the service of the tram department of the city “Puti i Toka” as a laborer. He also registered with the labor exchange, which the next year sent him to work at the geological exploration institute, then known as the “Institute of Non-Metallic Minerals” of the Geological Committee. In 1931, as part of a geological exploration expedition, Gumilyov worked as a collector in the Sayans, and spoke about this work: “I tried to study geology, but had no success, because this science was not my profile, but nevertheless I am in the lowest position - junior collector - I went to Siberia, to Baikal, where I took part in an expedition, and the months I spent there were very happy for me, and I became interested in field work.”

In 1932, Lev Gumilyov got a job as a scientific and technical employee on an expedition to study the Pamirs, organized by the Council for Research of Productive Forces. Here, on his own initiative, outside of working hours, he became interested in studying the life of amphibians, which his superiors did not like, and he was forced to leave work on the expedition. He went to work as a malaria scout at the local malaria station of the Dogary state farm and intensively studied the Tajik-Persian language and mastered the secrets of Arabic script and writing. Then, already at the university, I learned Persian reading and writing on my own. “I lived in Tajikistan for 11 months,” recalled Lev Nikolaevich, “he studied the Tajik language. I learned to speak there quite cheerfully and fluently, which later brought me great benefit. After that, having spent the winter again at the Geological Prospecting Institute, I was fired due to staff reductions and moved to the Institute of Geology at the Quaternary Commission with a topic closer to me - archaeological. Participated in the Crimean expedition that excavated the cave. This was already much closer, clearer and more pleasant for me. But, unfortunately, after we returned, my head of the expedition, the prominent archaeologist Gleb Anatolyevich Bonch-Osmolovsky, was arrested and imprisoned for 3 years, and I again found myself without work. And then I took a chance and applied to university.”

In 1934, Lev Gumilev, as a student at the Faculty of History at Leningrad University, took courses in history from V.V. Struve, E.V. Tarle, S.I. Kovalev and other luminaries of historical science. Gumilyov said: “The year 1934 was an easy year, and that’s why I was accepted into the university, and the most difficult thing for me was to get a certificate of my social origin. My father was born in Kronstadt, and Kronstadt was a closed city, but I was found: I went to the library and made an extract from the Great Soviet Encyclopedia, submitted it as a certificate, and since this is a link to a printed publication, it was accepted, and I was admitted to the Faculty of History . Having entered the history department, I studied with pleasure, because I was very fascinated by the subjects that were taught there. And suddenly a nationwide misfortune happened, which hit me too - the death of Sergei Mironovich Kirov. After this, a kind of phantasmagoria of suspicion, denunciations, slander and even (I’m not afraid of this word) provocations began in Leningrad.”

In 1935, Lev Gumilev was arrested for the first time along with Anna Akhmatova’s then-husband Punin and several fellow students. Oddly enough, Anna Akhmatova’s appeal to Stalin saved Lev Gumilyov and the university students arrested with him “due to the lack of corpus delicti.” However, he was expelled from the university and later said: “I suffered the most from this, because after that I was expelled from the university, and I was very poor all winter, I even went hungry, because Nikolai Nikolaevich Punin took everything for himself mother’s rations (by redeeming them with ration cards) and refused to feed me even lunch, declaring that he “can’t feed the whole city,” i.e., showing that I was a completely stranger and unpleasant person to him. Only at the end of 1936 did I recover thanks to the help of the rector of the university Lazurkin, who said: “I will not let the boy’s life be crippled.” He allowed me to take exams for the 2nd year, which I did as an external student, and entered the 3rd year, where I enthusiastically began to study not Latin this time, but Persian, which I knew as a colloquial language (after Tajikistan) and Now I’m learning to read and write.” At this time, Lev Gumilyov constantly visited the Leningrad branch of the Institute of Oriental Studies of the USSR Academy of Sciences (LO IVAN AS USSR), where he independently studied printed sources on the history of the ancient Turks.

In 1937, Gumilyov made a report at the Leningrad Region IVAN AS USSR on the topic “The appanage system of the Turks in the VI-VIII centuries,” which 22 years later, in 1959, was published on the pages of the magazine “Soviet Ethnography.”

At the beginning of 1938, Lev Gumilev was arrested again, while a student at Leningrad State University, and sentenced to five years. Gumilev said: “But in 1938 I was arrested again, and this time the investigator told me that I was arrested as the son of my father, and he said: “You have nothing to love us for.” This was completely ridiculous, because all the people who took part in the “Tagantsevsky case”, which took place in 1921, had already been arrested and shot by 1936. But the investigator, Captain Lotyshev, did not take this into account, and after seven nights of beating, I was asked to sign a protocol, which I did not draw up and which I could not even read, being very beaten. Captain Lotyshev himself was then, according to rumors, shot in the same year, 1938, or at the beginning of 1939. The court, the tribunal, me and two students with whom I was barely familiar (I just visually remembered them from the university, they were from a different faculty), convicted us on these fake documents accusing us of terrorist activities, although none of us knew how to shoot, I didn’t fight with swords, I didn’t own any weapons at all. What happened next was even worse, because the prosecutor at that time announced that the sentence against me was too lenient, and that in addition to 10 years under this article, execution was due. When they told me about this, I took it somehow very superficially, because I was sitting in the cell and really wanted to smoke and was thinking more about where to smoke than about whether I would stay alive or not. But then a strange circumstance happened again: despite the cancellation of the sentence, due to the general confusion and disgrace at that time, I was sent to a convoy to the White Sea Canal. From there, of course, I was returned for further investigation, but during this time Yezhov was removed and destroyed, and the very prosecutor who demanded my cancellation for leniency was shot. The investigation showed the complete absence of any criminal actions, and I was transferred to a special meeting, which gave me only 5 years, after which I went to Norilsk and worked there first in general work, then in the geological department and, finally, in the chemical department laboratory archivist."

After Lev Gumilyov served the five years assigned to him, in 1943 he was left in Norilsk without the right to leave and worked as a geological technician. In the barracks he lived next to Tatars and Kazakhs and learned Tatar, as well as Kazakh and Turkic languages. Gumilyov said: “I was lucky to make some discoveries: I discovered a large iron deposit in Nizhnyaya Tunguska using magnetometric surveys. And then I asked - as if in gratitude - to let me go into the army. The authorities were hesitant for a long time, but then they finally let me go. I volunteered to go to the front and first ended up in the Neremushka camp, from where we were urgently trained for 7 days to hold a rifle, walk in formation and salute, and were sent to the front in a seated carriage. It was very cold, hungry, very hard. But when we reached Brest-Litovsk, fate intervened again: our train, which was the first, was turned back one station (I don’t know where it was) and there they began to train anti-aircraft artillery. The training lasted 2 weeks. During this time, the front on the Vistula was broken through, I was immediately assigned to an anti-aircraft unit and went to it. There I ate a little and, in general, served quite well until I was transferred to field artillery, about which I had not the slightest idea. This was already in Germany. And then I really did something wrong, which is completely understandable. The Germans had very tasty jars of pickled cherries in almost every house, and while our automobile convoy was marching and stopping, the soldiers ran to look for these cherries. I ran too. And at that time the column started moving, and I found myself alone in the middle of Germany, albeit with a carbine and a grenade in my pocket. For three days I walked and looked for my part. Having made sure that I would not find her, I joined the very artillery with which I was trained - the anti-aircraft artillery. They accepted me, interrogated me, found out that I had done nothing wrong, had not offended the Germans (and I could not have offended them, they were not there - they all ran away). And in this unit - Regiment 1386 of the 31st Division of the Reserve of the High Command - I ended the war, being a participant in the assault on Berlin. Unfortunately, I didn't end up with the best of batteries. The commander of this battery, Senior Lieutenant Finkelstein, disliked me and therefore deprived me of all awards and encouragements. And even when, near the city of Teupitz, I raised the battery on alarm to repel a German counterattack, it was pretended that I had nothing to do with it and that there was no counterattack, and for this I did not receive the slightest reward. But when the war ended, and it was necessary to describe the combat experience of the division, which our brigade of ten to twelve intelligent and competent officers, sergeants and privates was tasked to write, the division command found only me. And I wrote this essay, for which I received a clean, fresh uniform as a reward: a tunic and trousers, as well as exemption from assignments and work until demobilization, which was supposed to happen in 2 weeks.”

In 1945, Lev Gumilyov, after general demobilization, returned to Leningrad, again became a student at Leningrad State University, at the beginning of 1946 he passed 10 exams as an external student and graduated from the university. During the same time, he passed all the candidate exams and entered the graduate school of the Leningrad Region IVAN USSR.

In the summer of 1946, while a graduate student, Lev Gumilyov took part in the archaeological expedition of M.I. Artamonov in Podolia. Gumilyov said: “When I returned, I found out that at that time Comrade Zhdanov and Joseph Vissarionovich Stalin did not like my mother’s poems, and my mother was expelled from the Union, and the dark days began again. Before the bosses realized it and kicked me out, I quickly passed the English language and specialty (entirely), with the English language getting a “B” and the specialty getting an “A”, and submitted my Ph.D. thesis. But I was no longer allowed to protect her. I was expelled from the Institute of Oriental Studies with the motivation: “For inconsistency of philological preparation with my chosen specialty,” although I also passed the Persian language. But there really was a discrepancy - two languages ​​were required, but I passed five. But, nevertheless, they kicked me out, and I again found myself without bread, without any help, without a salary. Luckily for me, I was hired as a librarian in an insane asylum on the 5th line in the Balinsky hospital. I worked there for six months, and after that, according to Soviet laws, I had to submit a reference from my last place of work. And there, since I showed my work very well, they gave me a pretty decent reference. And I turned to the rector of our university, Professor Voznesensky, who, having familiarized himself with the whole matter, allowed me to defend my Ph.D. dissertation.” Thus, Lev Gumilyov was admitted to defend his dissertation for a candidate of historical sciences at Leningrad State University, which took place on December 28, 1948.

In the spring of 1948, Lev Gumilev, as a researcher, took part in an archaeological expedition led by S.I. Rudenko in Altai, at the excavation of the Pazyryk mound. After defending his Ph.D. thesis, he was hardly hired as a research assistant at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR due to the lack of a decision from the Higher Attestation Commission. But he never received a decision, because on November 7, 1949 he was arrested again. Gumilyov said: “I was arrested again, for some reason they brought me from Leningrad to Moscow, to Lefortovo, and the investigator, Major Burdin, interrogated me for two months and found out: a) that I do not know Marxism well enough to challenge it, secondly, that I I didn’t do anything wrong - something for which I could be prosecuted, thirdly, that I had no reason to be convicted, and fourthly, he said: “Well, what morals you have there!” After which they replaced him, gave me other investigators, who drew up protocols without my participation and again transferred them to a Special Meeting, which this time gave me 10 years. The prosecutor to whom I was taken to Lubyanka from Lefortovo explained to me, taking pity on my bewilderment: “You are dangerous because you are literate.” I still can’t understand why a candidate of historical sciences should be illiterate? After that, I was sent first to Karaganda, from there our camp was transferred to Mezhdurechensk, which we built, then to Omsk, where Dostoevsky once sat. I studied all the time since I managed to get disability. I really felt very bad and weak, and the doctors made me disabled, and I worked as a librarian, and along the way I studied, wrote a lot (I wrote the history of the Xiongnu based on the materials that were sent to me, and half of the history of the ancient Turks, unfinished in the wild, also according to the data and books that were sent to me and that were in the library).”

In 1956, Lev Nikolaevich returned to Leningrad again, where he was deeply disappointed when meeting his mother. This is how he wrote about it in his autobiography: “When I returned, there was a big surprise for me and such a surprise that I could not even imagine. My mother, whom I had been dreaming about meeting all my life, had changed so much that I could hardly recognize her. She changed both physiognomically, psychologically, and in relation to me. She greeted me very coldly. She sent me to Leningrad, but she herself remained in Moscow, so as, obviously, not to register me. But, however, my colleagues registered me, and then, when she finally returned, she registered me too. I attribute this change to the influence of her environment, which was created during my absence, namely her new acquaintances and friends: Zilberman, Ardov and his family, Emma Grigorievna Gershtein, the writer Lipkin and many others, whose names I don’t remember even now, but who Of course, they didn’t treat me positively. When I returned back, for a long time I simply could not understand what kind of relationship I had with my mother? And when she arrived and found out that I was registered after all and was on the waiting list for an apartment, she gave me a terrible scandal: “How dare you register?!” Moreover, there were no motives for this; she simply did not give them. But if I had not registered, then, naturally, I could have been expelled from Leningrad as not registered. But then someone explained to her that I still needed to be registered, and after a while I went to work at the Hermitage, where Professor Artamonov accepted me, but also, apparently, overcoming a lot of resistance.”

The director of the Hermitage, M.I. Artamonov, hired Lev Nikolaevich as a librarian “for the staff of pregnant and sick people.” While working there as a librarian, Gumilyov completed his doctoral dissertation “Ancient Turks” and defended it. After defending Gumilyov’s doctoral dissertation, the rector of Leningrad State University, corresponding member A.D. Aleksandrov, invited him to work at the Research Institute of Geography at Leningrad State University, where he worked until 1986, until his retirement - first as a researcher, then as a senior researcher. Before his retirement, he was transferred to leading scientific staff. In addition to working at the research institute, he taught a course of lectures at Leningrad State University on “Ethnic Studies.” Gumilyov later said: “I was accepted not into the history department, but into the geography department at the small Geographical-Economic Institute, which was attached to the faculty. And this was my greatest happiness in life, because geographers, unlike historians, and especially orientalists, did not offend me. True, they didn’t notice me: they bowed politely and passed by, but they never did anything bad to me in 25 years. And vice versa, the relationship was completely, I would say, cloudless. During this period, I also worked a lot: I compiled my dissertation into the book “Ancient Turks,” which was published because it was necessary to object to the territorial claims of China, and as such my book played a decisive role. The Chinese anathematized me, and abandoned their territorial claims to Mongolia, Central Asia and Siberia. Then I wrote the book “Search for a Fictitious Kingdom” about the kingdom of Prester John, which was false and fictitious. I tried to show how you can distinguish truth from lies in historical sources, even without having a parallel version. This book had a very big resonance and caused a very negative attitude from only one person - academician Boris Aleksandrovich Rybakov, who wrote a 6-page article on this matter in Voprosy istorii, where he very much reviled me. I managed to respond through the magazine “Russian Literature”, which was published by the Pushkin House, to respond with an article where I showed that on these 6 pages the academician, in addition to three fundamental errors, made 42 factual ones. And his son later said: “Dad will never forgive Lev Nikolaevich for 42 mistakes.” After that, I managed to write a new book, “The Huns in China,” and complete my cycle of the history of Central Asia in the pre-Mongol period. It was very difficult for me to publish it, because the editor of Vostokizdat, who was given to me - Kunin was like that - he mocked me the way editors can mock, feeling completely safe. Nevertheless, the book, although crippled, came out without an index, because he changed the pages and spoiled even the index I had compiled. The book was published, and thus I finished the first part of my life’s work - a blank spot in the history of Inner Asia between Russia and China in the pre-Mongol period.”

Anna Akhmatova and Lev Gumilev.

Since 1959, Lev Nikolaevich’s works began to be published in small editions. Under these conditions, he plunged into the work of the Leningrad branch of the All-Union Geographical Society. Through the society's collections, he managed to publish a number of his works that were not admitted to official scientific periodicals. “This last period of my life was very pleasant for me scientifically,” he wrote, “when I wrote my main works on paleoclimate, on individual private histories of Central Asia, on ethnogenesis...”

Unfortunately, in terms of everyday life, the situation for Lev Nikolaevich was not very favorable. He still huddled in a small room in a large communal apartment with twelve neighbors, and his relationship with his mother, Anna Akhmatova, still did not work out. Here is what he wrote about those years of his life: “My mother was under the influence of people with whom I had no personal contacts, and most of them were not even familiar, but she was interested in them much more than I was, and therefore our relationship was During the first five years after my return, things invariably worsened, in the sense that we grew apart from each other. Until, finally, before defending my doctorate, on the eve of my birthday in 1961, she expressed her categorical unwillingness for me to become a doctor of historical sciences, and kicked me out of the house. This was a very strong blow for me, from which I fell ill and recovered with great difficulty. But, nevertheless, I had enough endurance and strength to defend my doctoral dissertation well and continue my scientific work. I did not meet my mother for the last 5 years of her life. It was during these last 5 years, when I did not see her, that she wrote a strange poem called "Requiem". Requiem in Russian means funeral service. According to our ancient customs, it is considered sinful to serve a memorial service for a living person, but they serve it only when they want the one for whom the memorial service is served to return to the one who serves it. It was a kind of magic that the mother probably did not know about, but somehow inherited it as an ancient Russian tradition. In any case, for me this poem was a complete surprise, and, in fact, it had nothing to do with me, because why serve a memorial service for a person whom you can call on the phone. The five years that I did not see my mother and did not know how she lived (just as she did not know how I lived, and apparently did not want to know) ended with her death, which was completely unexpected for me. I fulfilled my duty: I buried her according to our Russian customs, built a monument with the money that I inherited from her on the book, reporting the money that I had - the fee for the book “Xiongnu”.

Funeral of Anna Akhmatova on March 10, 1966. Lev Gumilyov says goodbye to his mother, on the left are poets Evgeny Rein and Arseny Tarkovsky, on the far right is Joseph Brodsky.

In 1974, Gumilyov defended his second doctoral dissertation, this time in geographical sciences, which the Higher Attestation Commission did not approve due to the fact that “it is higher than a doctoral dissertation, and therefore not a doctoral dissertation.” This work, known as “Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth,” was published 15 years later in 1989 as a separate book and was sold out within one or two days from the warehouse of the Leningrad State University publishing house. The merits of Lev Gumilyov, both in the field of scientific research and in teaching activities, were stubbornly ignored. This was one of the reasons that Gumilyov was not even awarded the title of professor, or any government awards or honorary titles. But, despite all these troubles, Lev Nikolaevich gave lectures to both students and ordinary listeners with great pleasure. His lectures on ethnogenesis enjoyed constant success. Gumilyov said: “Usually students often sneak out of lectures (this is not a secret; this was often raised at the Academic Council: how should they be recorded and forced to attend). Students stopped leaving my lectures after the second or third lecture. After that, employees of the institute began to come and listen to what I was reading. After this, when I began to present the course in more detail and worked it out in a number of preliminary lectures, students from all over Leningrad began to come to me. And finally, it ended with me being called to Academgorodok in Novosibirsk, where I gave a special short course and was a great success: people came even from Novosibirsk itself to Akademgorodok (it’s an hour’s ride by bus). There were so many people that the door was locked, but since everyone in Academgorodok was mostly “technical”, they quickly managed to open the lock and entered the room. People were allowed into the hall only with tickets, but there were two doors - one was allowed in, the other was closed. So, the newcomer approached the closed door, slipped a ticket under it, his friend took it and walked through again. How do I attribute the success of my lectures? Not at all with my lecturing abilities - I’m burry, not with recitation and not with many details that I really know from history and which I included in lectures to make it easier to listen and perceive, but with the main idea that I conveyed in these lectures. This idea was a synthesis of the natural and human sciences, that is, I elevated history to the level of natural sciences, studied by observation and verified in the same ways that we have adopted in well-developed natural sciences - physics, biology, geology and other sciences. The main idea is this: an ethnos differs from society and from a social formation in that it exists parallel to society, regardless of the formations that it experiences and only correlates with them and interacts in certain cases. I believe that the reason for the formation of an ethnos is a special fluctuation of the biochemical energy of living matter, discovered by Vernadsky, and a further entropic process, that is, the process of attenuation of the impulse from the influence of the environment. Every shock must die out sooner or later. Thus, the historical process appears to me not as a straight line, but as a bundle of multi-colored threads intertwined with each other. They interact with each other in different ways. Sometimes they are complimentary, that is, they sympathize with each other, sometimes, on the contrary, this sympathy is excluded, sometimes it is neutral. Each ethnic group develops like any system: through a phase of ascent to the acmatic phase, i.e., the phase of greatest energy intensity, then there is a rather sharp decline, which smoothly reaches the direct - inertial phase of development, and as such it then gradually fades, being replaced by other ethnic groups . This does not have a direct relationship to social relationships, for example to formations, but is, as it were, the background against which social life develops. This energy of the living matter of the biosphere is known to everyone, everyone sees it, although I was the first to note its significance, and I did this while reflecting on the problems of history in prison conditions. I have discovered that some people have, to a greater or lesser extent, a craving for sacrifice, a craving for loyalty to their ideals (by ideal I mean a distant forecast). These people, to a greater or lesser extent, strive to achieve what is more dear to them than personal happiness and personal life. I called these people passionaries, and I called this quality passionarity. This is not a "hero and crowd" theory. The fact is that these passionaries are found in all layers of this or that ethnic or social group, but their number gradually decreases over time. But sometimes their goals are the same - correct, prompted by the dominant behavior that is necessary in a given case, and in other cases they contradict them. Since this is energy, it does not change because of this, it simply shows the degree of their (passionaries) activity. This concept allowed me to determine why nations rise and fall: rises when the number of such people increases, recessions when it decreases. There is an optimal level in the middle, when there are as many of these passionaries as are needed to fulfill the general tasks of the state, or nation, or class, and the rest work and participate in the movement with them. This theory categorically contradicts the racial theory, which assumes the presence of innate qualities inherent in certain peoples throughout the existence of mankind, and the “theory of the hero and the crowd.” But the hero can lead it only when in the crowd he meets an echo from people who are less passionate, but also passionate. When applied to history, this theory has justified itself. And it was precisely in order to understand how Ancient Rome, Ancient China or the Arab Caliphate arose and died that people came to me. As for the application of this in modern times, any person who has sufficient competence in the field of modern history can do this and realize what prospects there are in, say, the Western world, China, Japan and our homeland Russia. The fact is that to this I added a geographical element - the rigid connection of the human collective with the landscape, i.e. the concept of “Motherland”, and with time, i.e. the concept of “Fatherland”. These are, as it were, 2 parameters that, intersecting, give the desired point, focus, characterizing the ethnic group. As for our modernity, I will say that, according to my concept, the advantage of passionary tension is on the side of the Soviet Union and its fraternal peoples, who have created a system that is young relative to Western Europe, and therefore have more prospects for surviving in that a struggle that has arisen from time to time since the 13th century and, apparently, will continue to arise. But, naturally, I cannot talk about the future...”

The story of Anna Akhmatova’s inheritance turned out to be a difficult situation, for which Lev Nikolaevich had to sue for three years, spending a lot of energy and health. Lev Gumilyov said: “After the death of my mother, the question arose about her heritage. I was recognized as the only heir, however, all of my mother’s property, both things and what is dear to the entire Soviet Union - her drafts, was seized by her neighbor Punina (by her husband Rubinstein) and appropriated by her for herself. Since I turned to the Pushkin House and offered to accept the entire literary inheritance of my mother for storage in the archive, the Pushkin House filed a lawsuit, from which for some reason it quickly moved away, leaving the trial to me personally, as an offended person. This process lasted three years, and Punina’s seizure of this property and sale, or rather, sale of it to various Soviet institutions (far from completely, she kept some for herself), it caused condemnation in the Leningrad City Court, which ruled that the money was received by Punina illegal. But for some reason, the Supreme Court of the RSFSR, Judge Pestrikov, announced that the court considers that everything stolen was donated, and ruled that I have nothing to do with my mother’s inheritance, because she gave everything to Punina, despite the fact that not only There was no document for this, but Punina herself did not claim this. This made a very difficult impression on me and greatly influenced my work in terms of its effectiveness.”

In 1967, fate gave Lev Nikolaevich an acquaintance with a graphic artist from Moscow, Natalia Viktorovna Simonovskaya. She was a famous graphic artist, a member of the Moscow Union of Artists, but left her comfortable life in Moscow and shared with Lev Gumilyov twenty-five years of persecution, surveillance and silencing of his works. And all these years she was nearby, living in his world, between his real and imaginary friends, true and pseudo-students, “observers” and simply curious ones. She fed and watered everyone who came to Lev Nikolaevich. I was upset when my students betrayed me, when they didn’t publish my husband’s books and spoiled them with edits. She was not only a wife and friend, but also a colleague. In an interview, she said: “We met Lev Nikolaevich in 1969. Our life began in a terrible “bedbug infestation” - a communal apartment, the likes of which no longer exist even in St. Petersburg. We lived a happy life together. This does not contradict what I wrote: happy - and tragic. Yes, all his life he was bothered and attracted by the truth. Historical - and he set out in search of it, writing many books. And human - because he is a believer and a very theologically gifted person, he understood that man is subject to the influence of passions and the temptation of the devil, but that the Divine in him must prevail.”

Lev Gumilev on a walk with his wife Natalya Viktorovna.

At the end of his life, Lev Nikolaevich wrote in his Auto-Necrology: “My only desire in life (and I’m already old now, I’m soon 75 years old) is to see my works published without bias, with strict censorship checks and discussed by the scientific community without bias, without interference individual interests of certain influential people or those stupid people who treat science differently than I do, that is, who use it for their own personal interests. They are quite capable of breaking away from this and discussing the issues properly - they are qualified enough to do this. Hearing their impartial feedback and even objections is the last thing I would like in my life. Of course, the discussion is advisable in my presence, according to the defense procedure, when I answer each of the speakers, and with the loyal attitude of those present and the presidium. Then I am confident that those 160 of my articles and 8 books with a total volume of over 100 printed sheets will receive proper assessment and will benefit the science of our Fatherland and its further prosperity.”

Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov can only conditionally be called a historian. He is the author of deep, innovative studies on the history of the nomads of Middle and Central Asia in the period from the 3rd century BC to the 15th century AD, historical geography - climate change and landscape of the same region for the same period, the creator of the theory of ethnogenesis, the author of problems of paleoethnography Central Asia, the history of the Tibetan and Pamir peoples in the 1st millennium AD. In his works, great attention was paid to the problem of Ancient Rus' and the Great Steppe, illuminated from new positions.

Unfortunately, the general public became acquainted with the poetic heritage of Lev Nikolaevich only recently. And this is not surprising, because Gumilyov was engaged in poetic creativity only in his youth - in the 1930s and later, in the Norilsk camp, in the 1940s. Vadim Kozhinov wrote: “Several of his (L.N. Gumilyov’s) published poems in his last years are not inferior in their artistic power to the poetry of his illustrious parents” - that is, the classics of Russian literature Nikolai Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova.

The old memory is shaking
In the space of river lanterns
The Neva fur flows down like stones,
Lying by the iron doors.

But the street stone is bloody
Lights burst from horseshoes
And they burned into it the chronicle of glory
Forever gone centuries.

Parsing this stone cipher
And recognizing the meaning in the tracks,
Think that the share is holy
And the best is a memory for centuries.

1936

One of his poems, “The Search for Eurydice,” was included in the anthology of Russian poetry of the 20th century, “Strophes of the Century,” edited by Evgeny Yevtushenko.

THE SEARCH FOR EURYDICE

Lyrical memoirs

Introduction.

The lanterns were burning, but time was disappearing,
The corridor was lost in the wide street,
From the narrow window my greedy gaze caught
The sleepless bustle of the station.
The last time she breathed on my face
My disgraced capital.
Everything is mixed up: houses, trams, faces
And the emperor is on horseback.
But everything seemed to me: the separation was fixable.
The lights flashed and time suddenly became
Huge and empty, and torn out of my hands,
And it rolled away - far, past,
To where the voices disappeared in the darkness,
Alleys of linden trees, fields of furrows.
And the stars told me about the loss there,
The constellation Serpent and the constellation Canis.
I thought about one thing in the middle of this eternal night,
Among these black stars, among these black mountains -
How to see the eyes of sweet lanterns again,
Hear human, non-star conversation again.
I was alone under the eternal blizzard -
Only with that one alone,
That she's been my friend for ages
And only she told me:
“Why should you work and get hurt?
Barren, in the dark?
Today your dowry
I wanted to go home, just like you.
There he's delirious about the scarlet constellations
The sunset is gone on the windows.
There the wind wanders over the canals
And it carries aroma from the sea.
In the water, under humpbacked bridges,
Lanterns float like snakes,
Similar to winged dragons
There are kings on rearing horses.”
And the heart, as before, is stupefied,
And life is fun and easy.
My dowry is with me -
Fate, and soul, and longing.

1936

The list of such authoritative reviews could be continued. True, Lev Nikolaevich himself did not really value his poetic talent, and perhaps he did not want to be compared with his parents. Therefore, a significant part of his creative heritage was lost. But at the end of his life, Lev Nikolaevich returned to this side of his work and even planned to publish some of his poetic works. Possessing a phenomenal memory, Gumilyov restored them, arranging them in cycles. But he did not have time to fulfill this plan, and during his lifetime only two poems and several poems were published, and even then in small-circulation collections that were practically inaccessible to the general reader. On the occasion of the 90th anniversary of the birth of Lev Gumilyov, the collection “So that the Candle Doesn’t Go Out” was published in Moscow, which for the first time, along with cultural studies articles and essays, included most of his poetic works. However, not a single complete collection of his literary works has yet appeared, although he was an excellent expert on Russian literature in general, and poetry in particular. It’s not for nothing that he once called himself “the last son of the Silver Age.” Lev Gumilyov also did quite a lot of poetic translations, mainly from Eastern languages. It was a job that he did mainly to earn money, but he nevertheless took it very seriously. At one time, his translations earned praise from some famous poets. But they were also published in small-circulation collections and are therefore not very accessible to a wide audience.

In 1990, Lev Gumilev suffered a stroke, but continued to work. Lev Nikolaevich's heart stopped on June 15, 1992.

Lev Gumilyov was buried at the Nikolskoye cemetery of the Alexander Nevsky Lavra.

After the death of her husband, Natalya Viktorovna took care of perpetuating his name and developing ideas, and joined the board of trustees of the Lev Nikolaevich Gumilyov Foundation. Concerned about the scientific continuation of ethnological research, she participated, as long as her health allowed, in the Gumilyov readings regularly organized by the Foundation at St. Petersburg State University. She managed to leave memories of life with Lev Nikolaevich. Having become the heir to the copyright to Gumilyov's works, she found herself in a difficult situation with the publication of his works. Gumilyov’s ideas, hushed up during his lifetime, after his death it became possible to turn into money and use them in political games. The interests of many people intersected on his manuscripts; Natalya Viktorovna and Gumilyov’s students found themselves at the center of these conflicts. The result was numerous non-academic publications by the scientist. And - disdain for his memory. Suffice it to say that the monument in the cemetery and the memorial plaque on the house where he lived were installed by philanthropists (the mayor's office of St. Petersburg and the permanent mission of Tatarstan in St. Petersburg). Natalya Viktorovna donated Lev Nikolaevich’s apartment to the city to organize not just a museum, but also a scientific center. She dreamed that her husband’s ideas would live and work for our multinational country. However, so far there is no scientific center, but there is a branch at the Anna Akhmatova Museum, and there is a danger that the scientific works of Lev Gumilyov will be lost under the weight of the poetic legacy of the great mother. And for posterity there will be no scientist Lev Gumilyov, but only the hero of “Requiem”...

On September 4, 2004, Natalya Viktorovna died at the age of 85, and the urn with her ashes was buried next to the grave of her husband.

In August 2005, a monument to Lev Gumilyov was erected in Kazan. On the initiative of the President of Kazakhstan, Nursultan Nazarbayev, in 1996, in the Kazakh capital Astana, one of the country’s leading universities, the Lev Gumilyov Eurasian National University, was named after Gumilyov. In 2002, the office-museum of Lev Gumilyov was created within the walls of the university. Secondary school No. 5 in the city of Bezhetsk, Tver Region, also bears the name of Lev Gumilyov.

Bezhetsk Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and Lev Gumilyov.

A documentary film “Overcoming Chaos” was shot about Lev Gumilyov.

Your browser does not support the video/audio tag.

Text prepared by Tatyana Halina

Materials used:

Materials from the site www.levgumilev.spbu.ru
L.N. Gumilyov “Auto necrology”
Materials from the site www.gumilevica.kulichki.net
Materials from the site www.kulichki.com
Lurie Y.S. Ancient Rus' in the works of Lev Gumilyov. Scientific and educational magazine "Skepticism". Published in Zvezda magazine, 1994
Sergey Ivanov “Lev Gumilyov as a phenomenon of passionarity” - Emergency reserve. - 1998. - No. 1.

Poetess Anna Akhmatova and her son Lev Gumilev - prisoner of the Karaganda prison, 1951

25 years ago, on June 15, 1992, a prominent orientalist scientist, historian-ethnographer, poet and translator, whose merits remained underestimated for a long time, passed away - Lev Gumilyov. His entire life was a refutation of the fact that “the son is not responsible for his father.” What he inherited from his parents was not fame and recognition, but years of repression and persecution: his father Nikolai Gumilev was shot in 1921, and his mother, Anna Akhmatova, became a disgraced poetess. Despair after 13 years in the camps and constant obstacles in pursuing science was aggravated by mutual misunderstanding in his relationship with his mother.

Poet Anna Akhmatova

Nikolai Gumilyov, Anna Akhmatova and their son Lev, 1915

On October 1, 1912, Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilev had a son, Lev. In the same year, Akhmatova published her first poetry collection “Evening”, then the collection “Rosary Beads”, which brought her recognition and brought her to the literary avant-garde. The mother-in-law suggested that the poetess take her son to raise her - both spouses were too young and busy with their own affairs. Akhmatova agreed, and this became her fatal mistake. Until the age of 16, Lev grew up with his grandmother, whom he called “the angel of kindness,” and rarely saw his mother.


Anna Akhmatova with her son

His parents soon separated, and in 1921 Lev learned that Nikolai Gumilyov had been shot on charges of counter-revolutionary conspiracy. That same year, his mother visited him and then disappeared for 4 years. “I realized that no one needed me,” Lev wrote in despair. He could not forgive his mother for being left alone. In addition, his aunt formed his idea of ​​an ideal father and a “bad mother” who abandoned an orphan.


Lev Gumilyov at 14 years old

Many of Akhmatova’s acquaintances assured that in everyday life the poetess was completely helpless and could not even take care of herself. She was not published, she lived in cramped conditions and believed that her son would be better off with his grandmother. But when the question arose about Lev entering the university, she took him to Leningrad. At that time, she married Nikolai Punin, but was not the mistress of his apartment - they lived in a communal apartment, together with his ex-wife and daughter. And Lev was there as a bird, he slept on a chest in an unheated corridor. In this family, Leo felt like a stranger.


Lev Gumilyov, 1930s.

Gumilyov was not accepted into the university because of his social background, and he had to master many professions: he worked as a laborer in the tram department, as a worker on geological expeditions, as a librarian, archaeologist, museum worker, etc. In 1934, he finally managed to become a student Faculty of History at Leningrad State University, but a year later he was arrested. He was soon released “for lack of evidence of a crime,” in 1937 he was reinstated at the university, and in 1938 he was again arrested on charges of terrorism and anti-Soviet activity. This time he was given 5 years in Norillag.


Photo of Lev Gumilyov from the investigative case, 1949

At the end of his term in 1944, Lev Gumilyov went to the front and spent the rest of the war as a private. In 1945, he returned to Leningrad, returned to Leningrad State University, entered graduate school, and after 3 years defended his Ph.D. dissertation in history. In 1949, he was arrested again and sentenced to 10 years in the camps without charge. Only in 1956 was he finally released and rehabilitated.


Lev Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova, 1960s.

Lev Gumilyov, 1980s.

At this time, the poetess lived in Moscow with the Ardovs. Lev heard rumors that she spent the money received from the transfers on gifts for Ardov’s wife and her son. It seemed to Leo that his mother was saving money on parcels, rarely writing, and treating him too frivolously.

Lev Gumilev

Lev Gumilyov was so offended by his mother that he even wrote in one of his letters that if he were the son of a simple woman, he would have become a professor long ago, and that his mother “does not understand, does not feel, but only languishes.” He reproached her for not working for his release, while Akhmatova feared that petitions on her behalf could only worsen his situation. In addition, the Punins and Ardovs convinced her that her troubles could harm both her and her son. Gumilyov did not take into account the circumstances in which his mother had to live, and the fact that she could not write to him frankly about everything, since her letters were censored.


Akhmatova's son Lev Gumilev

Historian, geographer, orientalist, ethnographer, translator Lev Gumilev

After his return, the misunderstanding between them only intensified. It seemed to the poetess that her son had become overly irritable, harsh and touchy, and he still accused his mother of indifference to him and his interests, of neglecting his scientific works.


Poet Anna Akhmatova and her son Lev Gumilyov

They had not seen each other for the last 5 years, and when the poetess fell ill, strangers looked after her. Lev Gumilev defended his doctorate in history, followed by another in geography, although he never received the title of professor. In February 1966, Akhmatova fell ill with a heart attack, her son came from Leningrad to visit her, but the Punins did not let him into the ward - supposedly protecting the poetess’s weak heart. On March 5 she passed away. Lev Gumilyov outlived his mother by 26 years. At the age of 55, he got married and spent the rest of his days in peace and quiet.


Lev Gumilev with his wife Natalya, 1970s.

Lev Gumilev at his desk. Leningrad, 1990s.

They never found a way to each other, did not understand and did not forgive. Both became victims of a terrible time and hostages of a monstrous situation in which Lev Gumilev was forced to pay for the rest of his life for being the son of his parents.