“Death must be earned,” said Gumilev. One cannot leave life for a mere puff of tobacco. But how do poets manage to sense, and sometimes even “see,” their own death? Gumilev, finding himself at the front, suddenly wrote in a letter: “I know death is not here – not on the battlefield. It, like a thief, lurks for me unexpectedly, suddenly. I see it in the distance in the meager and dim dawn.” This is hard to grasp. How could he, seven years in advance, foresee the “meager and dim dawn” at the abandoned training ground where the Chekists would execute him; how could he, on another occasion, already in verse, predict that he would die:

Not on a bed,

With a notary and a doctor,

But in some wild crevice,

Drowned in thick ivy”?..

In Liteyny Street, at house number 31, in August 1916, Gumilev settled for three months. He arrived in Petrograd from the active army to hold exams for cornet at the Nikolaev Cavalry School. He failed the exams, and there were fifteen of them. He feared the artillery test (he even wrote about this in a note to Akhmatova), but he failed “tactics” and “topography,” and he didn’t even take “fortification.” The last subject was exclusively about defensive structures, and as life showed, Gumilev was irresistible not in defense but in offense. One can only smile at the fact that the man who earned two soldier’s St. Georges for bravery in just one year of war failed the cornet exams. Isn’t that the real exam for a man? Strangely, Gumilev later often said about himself: “I am a coward.” Akhmatova would say about this: “In essence, this is the highest coquettishness.” “Nikolai Stepanovich,” Luknitsky later recorded, “spoke of ‘physical courage.’ He meant that sometimes the bravest people by character and soul lack physical courage... For example, during reconnaissance, a man falls from his saddle – a truly noble man who will go through to the end and do everything necessary, but still will pale, tremble, almost fall from the saddle... I think he was endowed with physical courage...”

Surprisingly, even before the front, Gumilev was sure he would become a St. George cavalier. The poet Mikhail Zenkevich, who met him in July 1914 at Gostiny Dvor where he was buying officer’s boots for the front, heard from him that he had volunteered for the cavalry, that Zenkevich should go into aviation, and that there, at war, he would definitely receive the St. George. In general, after Africa, Gumilev chose highways, not back alleys; roads, not sidewalks; proud solitude, not the backs of crowds flashing before his eyes. He now walked exclusively on the roadway – many noticed this. His older brother’s wife, also named Anna Andreevna (another coincidence!), wrote that when he returned from his last trip, he brought not only a parrot and a stuffed black panther but also a fur coat made from two leopard skins (one of the leopards was killed by him personally), which he wore open “not on the sidewalk, but on the roadway.” And always – with a cigarette in his teeth.

With a cigarette in his teeth, he strolled, more than once, along the parapets of trenches, for which he was constantly reprimanded. He was a brave man! Much later, in 1926, the poet Benedikt Livshits, also brave, decorated with military awards, but then, according to Chukovsky, “a plump elderly Jew,” said: “Only we honestly faced the war: me and Gumilev. We fought. The others acted like swindlers. Even Blok signed up somewhere as a clerk.”

Holy truth! Mayakovsky, who not long ago so loudly welcomed the war, was placed by friends in an automobile company constantly quartered in Petrograd; Yesenin – in a sanitary train; Mandelstam and Pasternak generally “dodged” the army, as we would say today – they were ill. Of course, we know: the war was imperialist, the throne was despised, refusal to serve could even be a matter of pride. And only Gumilev and Livshits plunged into the very furnace. Moreover, Gumilev had to fight for this: since 1907 he had been completely exempted from service due to astigmatism, and when volunteering he had to get permission to shoot from his left shoulder because of strabismus. He got it, of course!

“He was one of the few,” writes critic Levinson, “whose soul the war found in the highest combat readiness. His patriotism was as unconditional as his religious faith was cloudless.” To Lozinsky, a friend, Gumilev wrote from the front: “This is the best time of my life. It… reminds me of my Abyssinian escapades, but is less lyrical and much more stirring. To be under fire almost every day, to hear the whistling of shrapnel, the clicking of rifles aimed at you – I think such pleasure is felt by a hardened drunkard before a bottle of very old, strong cognac.” Of course, cavalrymen, as Gumilev wrote in “Notes,” published in the “Stock Exchange Gazette,” “are a merry wandering guild, with songs, finishing a long job in a few days.” Of course, he slightly hinted in letters to “dear Anichka”: “If only there were battles more often, I would be quite satisfied with fate. And ahead is such a brilliant day, the day of entering Berlin!” And to the red-haired beauty with green eyes, Vera Nevedomskaya, with whom he had an undeniable connection before the war even for Akhmatova (she found her letter to Gumilev that allowed no double interpretation), he said that the war for him was just a game, a merry game where the stake is life. All true! But only in 1916 did he start attending churches alone for some reason. And once, under bullets, at full gallop, he unconsciously composed some prayer to the Virgin Mary…

“The road to the junction was cut off,” he recalled. “There was nothing left but to gallop straight at the Germans. It was a difficult moment in my life. The horse stumbled, bullets whistled past my ears, one scratched the bow of my saddle. I looked at the enemies without looking away. I could see their faces, confused at the moment of loading, focused at the moment of firing. A short officer, strangely stretching out his arm, fired at me with a revolver. Two horsemen jumped out to block my way. I drew my saber, they hesitated. I remembered all this only by visual… memory, realized it later. Then I only… muttered a prayer to the Virgin Mary, composed by me right then and immediately forgotten after the danger passed.” Yes, “death must be earned.” But honor must also be “earned”…

Oh, how they welcomed him at the “Stray Dog”! He came from the front on a business trip. With Akhmatova, he came to the basement for the last time – the “Dog” would close in 1915. A magical evening! Candles, blue rings of cigar smoke, the quiet clink of glasses, poems, words of admiration, and again – poems… Gumilev was in cavalry uniform and with his first St. George on his chest. Both the uniform and the award suited him very well, “the poet-warrior.” A snowstorm swirled over Petrograd, a veil of snowy wind like a curtain between war and peace, and in the basement – music, friends’ witticisms, bursts of laughter, eyes shining in the half-darkness of women in love with him. Also a peculiar front, if you know how many romances he juggled simultaneously. In 1916, he conquered a girl to whom Mandelstam dedicated a madrigal and whom Yesenin rusticly asked to marry, the one with whom the barricades of the revolution would separate him a year later – Larisa Reisner, a student of the Psychoneurological Institute, a beauty, a poetess.

They met at the “Comedians’ Rest,” from where Gumilev went to see her home, where she lived with her parents and published a “family” magazine, “Rudin.” Very soon Gumilev began calling her Leri, and she called him Hafiz. “Don’t forget me,” he wrote her from the front. “I often gallop across the fields, shouting your name to the wind, and you appear to me almost every night.” Larisa replied: “It’s hard for me to forget you. You bury everything in order, so that there is a flat place, and suddenly some trifle, well, my old perfume or something of yours, and… it all starts again.” Later his letters became more tender: “I remember all your words, intonations, movements, but it’s not enough, not enough. It’s because I love you.”

“I loved him so much that I would have gone anywhere,” confessed Reisner, who considered herself his fiancée. Three years later she would come to Akhmatova and, like a “wounded beast,” tell that “she was innocent,” and he “acted very badly – took her to some hotel and there did ‘everything’ with her…” He did propose marriage, but she said she adored Akhmatova and did not want to upset her. In 1922, after Gumilev’s execution, she wrote to his mother: “If I had seen him before his death – I would have forgiven him everything, I would have said that I never loved anyone with such pain, with such a desire to die for him, as for him, the poet, Hafiz, the freak and scoundrel…”

Larisa found herself a husband – Fyodor Raskolnikov, a sailor who in January 1918 became deputy People’s Commissar for Naval Affairs. She herself was offered two months later, in March 1918, to become a commissar of the Baltic Fleet, and in 1919 Trotsky personally appointed her commissar of the Naval General Staff. However, Larisa soon left Raskolnikov – for the old Comintern “fox,” the long-married Karl Radek: in “Izvestia,” where she came to work, he was a big boss.

…In April 1917, Hafiz and Leri met for the last time. After that, they only bumped into each other. Gumilev was eager to go to the Salonika front, to the Russian expeditionary corps, to special infantry brigades – he got himself a business trip to the West. He told Akhmatova at the station that maybe he would get to Africa again. And to Larisa, in a short postcard sent already on the road, he advised: “Have fun… don’t get involved in politics.” She did not listen; she already had other authorities…

They say that in London Gumilev began working in Russian military intelligence – such rumors circulate among some literary scholars. This is also used to explain his return to revolutionary Russia. In reality, he ended his military career working in the cipher department of the Russian Government Committee in Great Britain. There in London, he met Chesterton, Yeats, Lawrence, who had not yet written the scandalous novel “Lady Chatterley’s Lover,” Aldous Huxley, who also had not yet thought about the famous dystopia “Brave New World.” The “New World” – socialism – simply did not exist yet: Russia was only writhing in pre-revolutionary struggles. And in spring 1918, several Russian officers gathered in a café. Somehow immediately and together they decided: there is nothing more to do here, we must leave. Where? Some said – to Africa, to shoot lions, others – to continue the war in foreign armies. “And you, Gumilev, where?” The poet answered: “I have fought enough, and I have been to Africa three times, but I have never seen the Bolsheviks. I am going to Russia – I don’t think it will be more dangerous than hunting lions.” Alas, writes Georgy Ivanov, it turned out to be much more dangerous!..

A legend? Possibly. But don’t we know that legends are born where there is a legendary personality?! They say Gumilev was discouraged from returning, frightened by chaos, devastation, unmotivated killings. He knew all this anyway, could not not know as an employee of the cipher department. But, as Alexander Kuprin wrote about him, “he was not alien to old, now ridiculous prejudices: love for the Motherland, a sense of living duty to it, and a sense of personal honor.

And the old-fashioned thing was that he was always ready to pay with his own life on these three points…”

In general, there are different opinions about the reasons for Gumilev’s return to Russia in 1918. The poet’s son, Orest Vysotsky, claimed that his father returned out of patriotic motives. It was written that he returned “to fight the Bolsheviks,” that he was involved “in Russian intelligence.” But in reality, everything seems much simpler. First, it was an order from his superiors in London, based on the financial difficulties of the Russian military mission; second, Gumilev’s return was influenced by France’s refusal not only to accept Russian officers who were abroad on service but even to allow them to transit through its territory. And third, and possibly the main reason, was the banal lack of money for living, as salary payments were abruptly and permanently stopped. It is known that on January 1, 1918, the Russian military agent in England, General Yermolov, wrote to another general – Zankevich: “Due to the impossibility of sending him back to France, I am sending him on the first ship to Russia.” The poet was given, apparently from General Yermolov’s personal funds, 54 pounds sterling for the road, on which he managed to survive until May 1918, trying to find work in London, but in the end was forced to return to Russia – by ship, via Murmansk.

Source:

http://esenin-lit.ru/esenin/articles/nedoshivin-sankt-peterburg/gumilev-litejnyj-pr-31-kv-14.htm