The blind music of my love...
N. Gumilev
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov is a wonderful poet of our century. He left us an interesting and significant literary heritage and influenced the further development of our national poetry. His tragic death in August 1921 at the hands of the Bolsheviks is a tragedy for our people.
Throughout his life - both real and poetic - N. Gumilyov sought to personify the strong-willed masculine principle. In search of the unknown and unknown, the “muse of distant wanderings” led him across countries and continents. He died on takeoff, not yet reaching Pushkin's age.
In the minds of readers, the poet is usually perceived as a great traveler, “discoverer of new lands,” or as a poet-warrior, but his love lyrics, in my opinion, are just as full-blooded and subtle, although they are always somewhat in the shadow in comparison with the rest of his work . But what is worth only the fact that the recognized queen of Russian poetry, Anna Akhmatova, was his beloved, wife and mother of his children. He dedicated a beautiful poem to her:
I love you, forget your dreams! - In silence
She, trembling slightly, raised her eyelids,
And I heard the sonorous lyres jingling
And the thunderous screams of the eagle.
Eagle Sappho at the White Cliff
Solemnly soared, and beauty
Wallless vineyards of Lesbos
She closed her blasphemous lips.
It seems to me that Gumilyov’s love lyrics emanate a certain pristineness, wild will and passion.
It is noteworthy that the poet’s love lyrics were written by him as if taking into account the fact that the words would be set to music. I feel in his poems a special melodic pattern, close to romance.
For example:
Here I am alone in the evening quiet hour,
I will only think about you, about you.
I’ll take up the book, but I’ll read: “she”,
And again the soul is drunk and swept away.
He widely uses epic images and the very form of epics in love poems:
From the lair of the serpent,
From the city of Kyiv,
I didn't take a wife, but a sorceress.
I thought I was funny
I told fortunes to the wayward one,
A cheerful songbird.
When you call, he winces,
If you hug him, he will puff up,
And the moon will come out - it will become dark,
And he looks and groans,
It's like he's burying
Someone - and wants to drown himself.
Through pagan images, as we see, the magical state of love for a woman is conveyed. The author knows well that love in Rus' is a feeling that includes the elemental forces of nature. Moreover, in Gumilev, unlike Yesenin, for example, these elemental forces are always formidable, inaccessible to human will. As they say, it executes whom it wants and has mercy on whom it wants, love often has the same property.
I would also like to note, in my opinion, a very important point in the poems about love of this poet. They do not contain vulgarity, rudeness, or at least some kind of disrespect for women, which sometimes plague the poems of other poets. The hero-lover of Gumilyov is a noble knight with a sword and a rose. He bows to the woman. Not only does he not make any claims to her, but on the contrary, he reaches the point of self-abasement and sacrifice. These feelings, I believe, were especially clearly manifested in Gumilyov’s poem “Poisoned”:
Know that I won't be cruel anymore
Be happy with whoever you want, even with him,
I'll go far, far away,
I won't be sad and angry.
To me from paradise, cool paradise,
White reflections of the day are visible...
And it’s sweet to me - don’t cry, dear, -
To know that you poisoned me.
Gumilyov threw his hero-lover all the way to the distant star Venus. This has a double and even triple meaning: Venus is real in space, Venus is the goddess of love and Venus is fate.
On Venus, ah, on Venus,
There is no death, tart and stuffy.
If they die on Venus -
Turns into air steam.
Fate was cruel, but it could not destroy Gumilyov’s love. Getting acquainted with his poems about love, you begin to relate more deeply and responsibly to this great and mysterious feeling.
The poetry of the Silver Age cannot be imagined without Nikolai Gumilyov. His poems fascinate with the magic of their words, giving these words a special sound and meaning. His name is associated with one of the literary movements of the Silver Age - Acmeism, but the work of this poet is so unique that it cannot be limited to one direction. Gumilyov really stood at the origins of Acmeism, being one of the organizers of the new poetic union “Workshop of Etov”, whose representatives were A. A. Akhmatova, O. E. Mandelstam, I. N. Odoevtseva, S. A. Gorodetsky and others. This new literary movement replaced symbolism. It arose from the denial of the mystical worldview of symbolism, proclaiming the value of the earthly world. The Acmeists saw their main task in returning the word to a simple meaning, free from symbolic interpretations. Gumilev became one of the theorists of this type of art, writing the article “The Heritage of Symbolism and Acmeism,” but later the canons of Acmeism became only a convention for the poet.
A. A. Akhmatova dedicated one of her best poems to N. S. Gumilyov:
He loved three things in the world:
Behind the evening singing, white peacocks
And erased maps of America...
These lines very accurately reflect the originality of Gumilyov the poet, in whose poems the theme of the sublime, passion for travel, and exotic motifs sound.
I am an eternal brother to abysses and storms.
But I will weave into a warlike outfit
Star of the valleys, Blue Lily.
Gumilyov considered V. Bryusov his teacher, therefore, traces of symbolic poetry are visible in his early work. The poet's first books are filled with pathetic romance: conquistadors, captains, knights and other romantic characters of his early lyrics are the embodiment of fantastic strength and passion. A striking example of this is the hero of the poem “The Old Conquistador”, surprising with his fortitude, knowing “neither horror nor anger” in any trials.
Death came, and the warrior invited her to play with broken bones. The poet's entire life corresponded to the canons of his passionate poetry. Suicide attempts, duels, participation in military battles, travel to distant countries - all this became the theme of his poems.
...I have to tell you again and again,
How sweet it is to live, how sweet it is to win
The sea and girls, enemies and the word.
Gumilev introduced an exotic African theme into Russian poetry. Impressions from his travels to Africa formed the basis of his collections “Romantic Flowers”, “Pearls” and “Alien Sky”. In these poems, Gumilyov the poet, while remaining a romantic and a dreamer, was already a professional researcher - an ethno-grapher, an archaeologist, and a folklorist.
When reading poems about Africa, one is captivated by the exquisite picturesqueness of what is described:
On the mysterious Lake Chad
Among the centuries-old baobab trees
Carved felucca stirrups
At the dawn of the majestic Arabs.
The poet revives ancient legends, introduces us to a world filled with the indescribable flavor of African folklore. And exotic motifs are heard later not only in African poems. Already habitual aspirations for the unusual helped to form a fresh look at everyday life, to find in it something that provided themes for new works.
Later lyrics - poems included in the collection "Quiver" - reflect the poet's philosophical views. He asks questions that have not bothered him before: about the meaning of human existence, about what awaits a person beyond life.
I feel like it will be autumn soon,
Sunny's labors will end
And people will take the spirit from the tree
Golden, ripe fruits.
This was greatly facilitated by Gumilyov’s participation in hostilities. The senseless death of his comrades, the constant feeling of danger became the reason for the poet’s appeal to the eternal problems of humanity: the search for the meaning of life and happiness, the contradiction of soul and body, ideal and reality.
Each book of the poet is not only a reflection of his own impressions and emotions. This is an understanding of the stage passed, summing up the results, and an expression of a subtle worldview.
Gumilyov cannot be called a poet-citizen. All Gumilyov's poems are far from reality. As a poet, he did not see her as a source of inspiration:
I am polite to modern life,
But there is a barrier between us...
Politics and social conflicts remained away from his lyrics, but this only emphasizes the originality of his work, which reveals such an unusual world of words and feelings.
romanticism literary Gumilyov poetry
Love for Africa, passion for travel, and thirst for adventure determined the themes and motives of Gumilyov’s work, among which one of the leading ones is the exotic motif. An exotic theme is present in all the poet's books. Let's try to trace how the exotic theme, the motif of the Muse of Far Wanderings evolved in Gumilyov's poetry from collection to collection, and what role exotic motifs play in the poems of the romantic poet.
The first collection of poems, “The Path of the Conquistadors,” published by Gumilev, a high school student, in 1905, was later considered immature by the young poet. He needed an image, and Gumilyov, who was never distinguished by either health or beauty, but had the will and loved the exotic, created this image: the image of a conquistador - a conqueror of life, a conqueror of fate:
I am a conquistador in an iron shell,
I'm happily chasing a star
I walk through abysses and abysses
And I rest in a joyful garden.
Already in this book of poems exotic and extraordinary characters appeared: proud kings and mocking trolls, enchanted maidens and fearless knights.
In the poet’s second collection, “Romantic Flowers” (1908), Bryusov noted Gumilev’s hard work on poetry, “the fantasy is even freer, the images are even more transparent here, the psychology is even more bizarre... It should be noted that in his new poems he has largely freed himself from the extremes of his first creatures and learned to close my dreams into more specific outlines. Over the years, his visions acquired more plasticity and convexity. At the same time, his verse has clearly become stronger... Almost all of his poems are written in beautiful, thoughtful and refined-sounding verse.”
Mythological Cuculin, historical Pompeii, Sinbad the Sailor, Rhea Mab, Lucifer, the Serpent, knights, princesses, emperors, priests, pirates and, naturally, conquistadors filled the pages of the collection.
The departure from life (“Suicides”) is picturesquely presented, the story of the wife of a mighty leader who fell in love with a European (“Lake Chad”) is romantic, and the historical scenes (“The Founders,” “Caracalla,” “Pompeii with the Pirates”) are spectacular. These poems are a response to a person’s need for something extraordinary, something not here, something that takes us away from the gray boredom of everyday life.
Today, I see, your look is especially sad
And the arms are especially thin, hugging the knees.
Listen: far, far away, on Lake Chad
An exquisite giraffe wanders.
He is given graceful harmony and bliss,
And his skin is decorated with a magical pattern,
With whom only the Moon dares to equal,
Crushing and swaying on the moisture of wide lakes.
In the distance it is like the colored sails of a ship,
And his run is smooth, like a joyful bird's flight.
I know that the Earth sees many wonderful things,
When at sunset he hides in a marble grotto.
I know funny tales of mysterious countries
About the mountain maiden, about the passion of the young leader,
But you've been breathing in the heavy fog for too long,
You don't want to believe in anything but rain,
And how can I tell you about the tropical garden,
About slender palm trees, about the smell of incredible herbs...
Are you crying? Listen... Far away, on Lake Chad
An exquisite giraffe wanders.
In this collection, Gumilyov, according to the critic A. Pavlovsky, slowly brings “poetry down the golden ladder of symbolism to the ground, trying to saturate the word, tired of ether and allegories, with objectivity, flesh and solid meaning.”
The book “Pearls” (1910) marks the end of the first period of Gumilyov’s work. It is a kind of elegiac forgiveness with the symbolism and romantic settings of the early poems. There is nothing contrived, artificial, secondary here. The fact is, V. Bryusov believes, that the poet “creates countries for himself and populates them with creatures he himself created: people, animals, demons. In these countries - one might say, in these worlds - phenomena obey not the usual laws of nature, but new ones, which the poet commanded to exist ... "
In this world we meet names: ancient heroes like Odysseus, Agamemnon, Romulus, historical figures like Timur, Dante, Don Juan, Vasco de Gama, some areas of the globe, like the Gobi steppe, or Castile, or the Andes - but they have changed, become new, unrecognizable.
Bryusov, to whom the book was dedicated, wrote: “Gumilev’s country is some kind of island, somewhere behind the “whirlpool” and “bubbling foam” of the ocean. There are captivating, always “night” and always “evening” mountain lakes. There are “groves of palm trees and thickets of aloe” all around, but they are full of “mandrakes, flowers of horror and evil.” Free wild animals roam the country: “royal leopards”, “light wolves”, “wandering panthers”, “desert elephants”, “gray bears”, “boars”, “monkeys”. From time to time “dragons” are visible, spreading on a bare cliff... Heroes of N. Gumilyov or some dark knights, in whose coat of arms there are “crimson flowers” and whom even the women of that country call “strange paladins”, or old conquistadors, lost in unknown chains mountains, or captains, “discoverers of new lands,” in high boots, with a pistol in their belt, or a queen reigning over unknown peoples with the spell of her unprecedented beauty, or men, “distinguished by the sign of the highest shame,” or, finally, simply wanderers in the deserts, rivaling Heracles in death. Right there, next to them, there are creatures that are completely fantastic, or at least encountered very rarely: “gloomy druids commanding stones,” “witch girls” casting spells at the window on a quiet night, someone “accustomed to gloomy victories,” and a mysterious wanderer across all seas, the “flying Dutchman”. And amazing events take place in this world among these amazing heroes...”
The call of the Muse of Distant Wanderings is clearly heard in the poem “The Discovery of America,” included in the collection “Alien Sky” (1912):
With the fresh wind the heart is drunk again,
In front of the door over a bush of weeds
The sky is cloudless and blue,
Every puddle smells of the ocean,
The spirit of the desert is in every stone.
Funny, unexpected and bloody
Joys, sorrows and fun
Wild and captivating land;
But the most beautiful thing is the thirst for glory,
Kings will be born for her,
Ships sail on the oceans.
By the time “Alien Sky” was released, Gumilyov was traveling around Italy, and a year later he went to Africa, confirming with his own biography his desire for “wonderful countries, protected Tabernacles.”
In 1918, Gumilyov’s collection “Bonfire” was published. The poems in the book are much more earthly in thought and form. Again his thoughts rush to foreign countries. (“Sweden”, “Norwegian Enchantment”, “On the North Sea”, “Stockholm”).
The sea waves its gray mane,
Deserts and cities rise...
Tormented by love for a woman, the poet seeks to find peace in the beautiful Cairo garden:
I was exhausted by the woman then,
And not the salty, fresh wind of the sea,
Not the roar of exotic bazaars -
Nothing could console me.
But this garden, it was similar in everything...
“Pillar of Fire” (1921) is the poet’s best collection, in which critics noted the perfection of form, the magic of words, “strong, cheerful motives, fresh, not broken, even primitive power.”
The collection mainly presents the philosophical lyrics of a person who perceives existence in all its fluidity, the variety of various metamorphoses. Exoticism is reflected here too. The Eastern theory of transmigration of souls was embodied in the poem “Memory”. In the poem “Forest”, a fairy-tale creature “a woman with a cat’s head” emerges from a mysterious forest, as if demonstrating the richness of the author’s imagination.
Many works written on exotic themes were published after the poet’s death. Among them are the cycle “Sentimental Journey”, the poem “Invitation to a Journey”, “Acrostic”, “Lake of Trasilina”, “Villo Barise”. And here the author paints us wonderful pictures, full of exoticism:
And guests will come to us,
When the rains come in spring,
Dressed in ivory
Great leaders.
In the mountains, where there is fun, where the winds are
They shout, I’ll start cutting down the forest -
The resin-smelling cedars,
Sycamore trees rising to the skies.
I'll change the movement
Rivers flowing along the steepness,
Showing them service,
From now on it's pleasing to me. (“Invitation to a Journey”).
Gumilyov's exotic lyrics are replete with a variety of visual images. It is not for nothing that V. Bryusov called Gumilev “a poet of visual paintings, who may not always be able to say something new and unexpected, but who always knows how to avoid shortcomings in his poems” due to his masterful mastery of the form of verse, as well as rethinking, “re-feeling” the usual ones already introduced into poetic arsenal of images. Visuality is one of the first places in the poet’s work, but he does not strive to bring poetry closer to the spectacle of paintings. In Gumilyov’s poems, one is impressed by the visibility of the phenomena of the soul, their “fantastic authenticity.”
Gumilyov creates his own poetic world of weightiness and fullness, a concrete sensual world, in which the visibility of the phenomena of the soul and the visibility of real pictures of the world, earthly landscapes and even the creations of masters of painting are perceived as a single organic whole.
So, we examined the exotic poetry of N.S. Gumilev in the context of his entire creativity, his consciousness, his life. Each of the poet’s collections contains an exotic theme, because exoticism and associated travel, distant countries, unusual heroes have always lived in Gumilyov’s soul and consciousness.
The exotic theme, like all of the poet’s work, evolved: from decorative, multi-colored images and paintings, the poet came to philosophical reflections about the world and himself, and exoticism became in the late period of Gumilyov’s activity the background and means of conveying thoughts, sometimes tragic.
But throughout N.S. Gumilyov’s work, his poetry did not leave the world of beautiful and noble romance, the fresh wind of courage, the love of life, its eternal and mysterious beauty.
Gumilyov expands the world of knowledge for us with the unknown and tempting.
For many decades, we fed only rumors about the fate of Nikolai Gumilyov, about his life, and even more so about the circumstances of his death. At the hour when he was born, the sea fortress of Kronstadt was shaking under the onslaught of a storm. The old nanny saw this as a kind of sign, saying that the newborn “will have a stormy life.” And she turned out to be right:
searching, wandering, passion for travel - the short but stormy 35 years allotted by the Almighty.
I am an eternal brother to abysses and storms.
But I will weave into a warlike outfit
I drink the blue star of the valleys.
Gumilyov's poetry is apolitical, and this is what, perhaps, attracts me most of all in his work. His poems reflect love, travel, war, and exoticism. Only politics remained on the sidelines. Gumilyov was not concerned about the structure of society, but about the amazing and unknown world that surrounded man. He created the theory of Acmeism, calling to perceive the world unconditionally, but he himself did not become an Acmeist. It seems that the canons of this art movement were only a convention for him.
And what kind of teachers he had! Annensky, Villon, Gautier, Bryusov. Nikolai Gumilyov is a born poet who has built his own world of words and feelings. Time has proven that this world is not alien to us, just as love and sadness, happiness and disappointment are not alien. But the sadness of his works is remarkably lyrical, bewitching and touching:
Today, I see, your look is especially sad
And the arms are especially thin, hugging the knees. Listen:
Far, far away, on Lake Chad Exquisite, a giraffe wanders.
Each book by Gumilyov is the result of what he has done at the time of its publication, it is a comprehension of life and serious work of the soul, which “hears the voice of God in military alarm and calls its paths to God.” In one of the philosophical poems in the collection “Quiver,” the poet says:
I am polite to modern life,
But there is a barrier between us.
Everything that makes her, arrogant, laugh,
My only joy.
Despite his great passion for the exotic countries of Africa and Asia, Nikolai Gumilyov is infinitely devoted to his homeland. At a time when people had already left or were about to leave Russia, he returned, heading towards the first wave of emigration. I don’t know what his fate would have been like outside his homeland, but for Russian poetry he did the maximum that he could do, precisely because he returned. And Nikolai Gumilyov could not help but return, because one day he made a discovery for himself:
I scream and my voice is wild
This is copper hitting copper,
I, the bearer of great thought,
I can't, I can't die.
Like thunder hammers
Or the waters of angry seas,
Golden Heart of Russia
Beats rhythmically in my chest.
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The blind music of my love...
N. Gumilev
Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilyov is a wonderful poet of our century. He left us an interesting and significant literary heritage and influenced the further development of our national poetry. His tragic death in August 1921 at the hands of the Bolsheviks is a tragedy for our people.
Throughout his life - both real and poetic - N. Gumilyov sought to personify the strong-willed masculine principle. In search of the unknown and unknown, the “muse of distant wanderings” led him across countries and continents. He died on takeoff, not yet reaching Pushkin's age.
In the minds of readers, the poet is usually perceived as a great traveler, “discoverer of new lands,” or as a poet-warrior, but his love lyrics, in my opinion, are just as full-blooded and subtle, although they are always somewhat in the shadow in comparison with the rest of his work . But what is worth only the fact that the recognized queen of Russian poetry, Anna Akhmatova, was his beloved, wife and mother of his children. He dedicated a beautiful poem to her:
I love you, forget your dreams! - In silence
She, trembling slightly, raised her eyelids,
And I heard the sonorous lyres jingling
And the thunderous screams of the eagle.
Eagle Sappho at the White Cliff
Solemnly soared, and beauty
Wallless vineyards of Lesbos
She closed her blasphemous lips.
It seems to me that Gumilyov’s love lyrics emanate a certain pristineness, wild will and passion.
It is noteworthy that the poet’s love lyrics were written by him as if taking into account the fact that the words would be set to music. I feel in his poems a special melodic pattern, close to romance.
For example:
Here I am alone in the evening quiet hour,
I will only think about you, about you.
I’ll take up the book, but I’ll read: “she”,
And again the soul is drunk and swept away.
He widely uses epic images and the very form of epics in love poems:
From the lair of the serpent,
From the city of Kyiv,
I didn't take a wife, but a sorceress.
I thought I was funny
I told fortunes to the wayward one,
A cheerful songbird.
When you call, he winces,
If you hug him, he will puff up,
And the moon will come out - it will become dark,
And he looks and groans,
It's like he's burying
Someone - and wants to drown himself.
Through pagan images, as we see, the magical state of love for a woman is conveyed. The author knows well that love in Rus' is a feeling that includes the elemental forces of nature. Moreover, in Gumilev, unlike Yesenin, for example, these elemental forces are always formidable, inaccessible to human will. As they say, it executes whom it wants and has mercy on whom it wants, love often has the same property.
I would also like to note, in my opinion, a very important point in the poems about love of this poet. They do not contain vulgarity, rudeness, or at least some kind of disrespect for women, which sometimes plague the poems of other poets. The hero-lover of Gumilyov is a noble knight with a sword and a rose. He bows to the woman. Not only does he not make any claims to her, but on the contrary, he reaches the point of self-abasement and sacrifice. These feelings, I believe, were especially clearly manifested in Gumilyov’s poem “Poisoned”:
Know that I won't be cruel anymore
Be happy with whoever you want, even with him,
I'll go far, far away,
I won't be sad and angry.
To me from paradise, cool paradise,
White reflections of the day are visible...
And it’s sweet to me - don’t cry, dear, -
To know that you poisoned me.
Gumilyov threw his hero-lover all the way to the distant star Venus. This has a double and even triple meaning: Venus is real in space, Venus is the goddess of love and Venus is fate.
On Venus, ah, on Venus,
There is no death, tart and stuffy.
If they die on Venus -
Turns into air steam.
Fate was cruel, but it could not destroy Gumilyov’s love. Getting acquainted with his poems about love, you begin to relate more deeply and responsibly to this great and mysterious feeling.
