Nikolay Gumilev - Later Poems and Death

Later Poems and Death

"Despite the hard experiences of real travels and battles, he remained, to the end of his life, a schoolboy entranced by the Iliad of Childhood - the adventures of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer. He never outgrew the influence of Mayne Reid, Alexandre Dumas, père, Jules Verne, Gustave Aimard and others." In 1920 Gumilev co-founded the All-Russia Union of Writers. Gumilev made no secret of his anti-communist views. He also crossed himself in public and didn't care to hide his contempt for half-literate Bolsheviks.

On August 3, 1921 he was arrested by Cheka on allegation of participation in monarchist conspiracy known as "Petrograd military organization" or Tagantsev conspiracy. On August 24 Petrograd Cheka decreed execution of all 61 participants of the case, including Nikolai Gumilev. They were shot on August 25 in the Kovalevsky Forest. The case was officially declared as "completely fabricated" and all victims rehabilitated by Russian authorities only in 1992.

Hayward, in an introduction to a book of Akhmatova's poetry, writes that the execution placed a stigma on Anna and her son with Nikolai, Lev. Lev's arrest in the purges and terrors of the 30s were based on his being his father's son.

Although "banned in the Soviet times, Gumilev was loved for his adolescent longing for travel and giraffes and hippos, for his dreams of a fifteen-year-old captain" and was "a favorite poet among geologists, archaeologists and paleontologists." His "The Tram That Lost Its Way" is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century.