Luxury apartment 1919-1920

Preobrazhenskaya, 5, is house number 5 on the current Radishcheva Street, and it has been preserved intact to this day. In the spring of 1919, Gumilev and his young wife really moved into this house, into an apartment on the second floor, which, they say, previously belonged to the brother of the recent, still “Rasputin’s” prime minister of Russia, Shturmer. The apartment was, as they would say today, “elite,” but what good was that if you could only live, escaping the cold, in one room and the hallway, which the poet turned into his study. And yet both Gumilev and Anya Engelhardt had recently been quite well-off people. Before the revolution, the Engelhardts had a house in Smolensk, land, and even a dacha in Finland. The estate was intended as a dowry for Anya, and the house in Smolensk for her brother, but all was lost in an instant. The family happiness, however, turned out to be dubious, because Gumilev not only almost immediately began to cheat on her but also quickly lost all interest in her. Gumilev could even say to her in front of others: “You, Anya, better be silent! When you are silent, you become twice as beautiful.” What to say if Anya’s own brother wrote half a century later in a letter that Gumilev “made a mistake choosing my sister,” he “was seduced by her appearance.” Exactly! She was beautiful—that is, as they say, a fact. And she gave birth to a beautiful daughter for him right here, on Preobrazhenskaya. By the way, the poet was present at the birth and apparently wanted a daughter to be born. They say that when handing the newborn to Gumilev, the doctor said: “Here is your dream…”

During the blockade, the accountant of the state farm of the 2nd Medical Institute, Elena Gumileva, lost the family bread ration cards, abandoned her mother, who died alone of starvation, and then she herself died of exhaustion in 1942… No, it was even worse—his wife was found in an empty apartment, gnawed by rats, and it is still unknown whether she died of starvation or became a helpless victim of the long-tailed creatures…

Meanwhile, Gumilev, having sent his young wife with the child to her mother in Bezhetsk, where food was easier to get, lived alone on Preobrazhenskaya for a whole year. How did he live? As he admitted in a questionnaire circulated among writers, he “retail sold household items.” He lived alone, but was rarely alone. He visited Lozinsky, the Engelhardts, his wife’s parents, with whom he stayed in the first days after returning from London, and finally, he frequented the Palace Square, in the General Staff building, at a certain Boris Kaplun’s, where he went to “forget himself”—to sniff ether. And to his home, apart from women, came poets Mandelstam, Bely, Khodasevich, Otsup. “The apartment was shabby and furnished with whatever was at hand,” writes Georgy Ivanov. “Gumilev ran the household cheerfully. He loved to invite people to dinner and ceremoniously treated them with millet porridge and herring. If a lady dined, he would definitely dress in a tailcoat and white vest and converse in French.” Once Chukovsky fainted from hunger on the doorstep of his building. He woke up, as he wrote, in a luxurious bed, where Gumilev solemnly served an old, matte-gold-painted, almost museum-quality dish. “On it was the thinnest, like cigarette paper, not a slice but a petal of clay-like bread, the greatest treasure of that winter.” And when Gumilev began to read his play to Chukovsky, the electricity suddenly went out in the house—the lamp went out. “And then,” Chukovsky recalled, “I witnessed a miracle: the poet continued to read the tragedy and all the prose stage directions in parentheses even in the dark…”

Gumilev also visited Chukovsky—he lived nearby with his wife and three children, in a corner house on the third floor with a balcony. Once at Chukovsky’s, he met Blok, with whom relations were already quite tense at that time. Nothing, however, happened, writes Chukovsky; at his place, they began to sweetly “coo,” Blok spoke kind words to Gumilev, and Gumilev apparently said to Blok: our tastes are the same, but our temperaments are different…

The times were hungry, so hungry that in November 1919, right near Chukovsky’s house, a horse fell, from which someone immediately cut out about ten pounds of meat from the rump. Chukovsky assumed that someone did it not for themselves but “for sale.” So, in this hungry time, in that same November 1919, Gumilev brought “as a gift” half a pound of grain to Chukovsky’s children. That year, it was expensive. At the same time, he mentioned to Chukovsky that he had run out of firewood and had just burned a cabinet in the stove, which, alas, gave little heat. Chukovsky lent him 36 logs and even helped tie them to his son’s children’s sled—otherwise, Gumilev wouldn’t have been able to carry them…

Later, when food became easier to get, in the “Shturmer” apartment on Preobrazhenskaya, in the hallway turned into a small study, he treated everyone with bread toasted in the stove—he skewered it like shashlik on his son’s child’s saber. Right above the little sofa hung a painting depicting Gumilev’s ancestors, where some uncle of his, languidly leaning on a piano, had no legs (the artist either didn’t have time or forgot to paint them), and right there on the shelf stood his son’s toy drum. “I can’t get used to it,” joked Gumilev, “a military man, I play it in the evenings.” Maybe he really did play; after all, he was forever thirteen years old, remember. But after midnight, poets read poetry here and argued about love. “Gumilev was always in love,” writes Ivanov. “He didn’t understand how it could be otherwise. For a poet, it is even more important than traveling…”

Always in love! His wife threatened him from Bezhetsk that she would hang herself or poison herself if he didn’t take her back, but he calmly received women here all year round. Including those with whom he “messed around”: the poetess Odoyevtseva (whom he once sat on a cabinet and forgot to take down), Natalia Grushko, Ida Nappelbaum, Olga Vaksel. And those he loved seriously: the gypsy singer Nina Shishkina, his “secret haven,” to whom he gave the typesetting of the collection “Pearls” with the inscription: “To the dearest of the dearest, my Slavic blood, my last happiness,” on whose lap, they say, he wrote poems, or the already familiar to us Olechka Arbenina.

It was here that he brought Olechka, seeing her after a long break at the Alexandrinsky Theater, where she was already an actress. But suddenly he saw her in a long dress “for the play” and a hat with ostrich feathers. He called her along, she threw on an old blue coat and went. “I was like dead and walked like a sheep to the slaughter.” Olga spent almost a year with him and, as she wrote, left for another. But did she really? Years later, she admitted: “Did I want to part with Gumilev? No and no. He took me by force, but I didn’t want to replace him with anyone.” Arbenina does not write that he abandoned her. She writes more cautiously: “He didn’t hold me back.” And adds: “Why didn’t he say simple words like ‘don’t go’ or ‘don’t leave me’? What is this, pride? Shame? Why can one say flattering words when one needs to put a woman to bed, and not say a word to stop her?” A woman leaving who in fact doesn’t want to leave anywhere…

However, she would always write about him either exaltedly: “He is brave, wise, courageous like a knight. He goes straight to the goal, overcoming obstacles,” or, speaking of his flaws (“loved to lie and make things up” and “generally unfaithful”), almost with tenderness. Strangely enough, writes a contemporary, but women loved him passionately, despite him being ugly, “cross-eyed,” as the poet himself called his strabismus, lisping—the word “yesterday” he pronounced as “vcerla.” Maybe for his passion for inventions, for his recklessness, for his drive and boldness in relationships with them. Or maybe for his independence and deadly bravado in those days…

“In the freezing halls, scant lighting and frosty steam,” recalled Khodasevich. “In the fireplaces, damp firewood smoked. Music roared. My God, how this crowd was dressed! Felt boots, sweaters, worn coats, which it was impossible to part with even while dancing. And then, fashionably late, Gumilev appeared arm in arm with a lady trembling from the cold in a black dress with a deep neckline.” Straight and haughty, in a tailcoat, Gumilev walked through the halls. He shivered from the cold but bowed majestically and courteously left and right. He conversed in a social tone. He played the ball. His appearance said: “Nothing happened. Revolution? Never heard of it…”

Another time, at a Baltic Fleet sailors’ evening, he unexpectedly read a poem: “I gave him a Belgian pistol // And a portrait of my sovereign…” A crazy, really, act! The sailors, they say, jumped up from their seats, grabbing their Mausers, threatening shouts rang out in the hall. Odoyevtseva, who came to the evening with Gumilev, turned pale with horror (lynching still happened in those days). And the poet, having finished reading, crossed his arms on his chest and stood motionless on the stage waiting for the outcome. He seemed ready for anything. And—the hall exploded with applause. That’s what is amazing. Strength respects strength.

Source:

http://esenin-lit.ru/esenin/articles/nedoshivin-sankt-peterburg/gumilev-ul-radischeva-5.htm