1 1912 October, the
Born in St. Petersburg Lev Gumilev — poet, philosopher, historian. Author of the theory of passionarity.
For a passionate person, a goal, even an illusory one, is more valuable than one's own life, and even more so than the lives and happiness of one's contemporaries and fellow tribesmen.
Parents are poets of the Silver Age, Anna Akhmatova и Nikolay Gumilyov. Grew up in Bezhetsk (Tver region) under the supervision of my grandmother.
In 1921, at the age of 9, he lost his father: Nikolai Gumilyov was executed on trumped-up charges for participating in an anti-Soviet conspiracy. He attended several schools. At one of them, as "the son of a counterrevolutionary and a class alien," he was denied access to his textbooks.
In 1929 he moved in with his mother and her common-law husband (an art critic) To Nikolai Punin) to a Leningrad communal apartment. He huddled on a trunk in an unheated hallway. Having failed his entrance exams to the Pedagogical Institute (his grandfather's noble origins and his father's execution prevented him), he found work as a laborer. He didn't consider himself an intellectual.
An intelligent person is a person who is poorly educated and compassionate towards the people. I am well educated and have no compassion for the people.
He completed a geology course and spent 20 years participating in scientific and archaeological expeditions. In 1934, he entered the history department at Leningrad State University, where he worked as a translator.
Survived four arrests and 14 years in Stalin's camps.
The first one, in 1933, at 21, was released after 9 days without interrogation or charges.
The second, in 1935, was accused of creating a youth terrorist group on the basis of a denunciation.
Among students, he was a "black sheep." He saw Russia's "salvation" only in the restoration of the aristocratic system, declaring that "there are still nobles who dream of bombs."
(from the interrogation of the author of the denunciation and classmate Arkady Borin)
He confessed, but was released thanks to a letter from his mother to Stalin and the support of literary figures.
Husband in the grave, son in prison,
Pray for me
(Anna Akhmatova, "Requiem")
In 1938, after another denunciation and a third arrest, he was accused of counterrevolution. His mother's letter to Stalin never reached him this time—Gumilyov was sentenced to five years in the camps and served his sentence in Norilsk.
The adit seemed like a blissful haven to us, for the temperature inside was a constant minus 4. Compared to the 40-degree frosts outside or the raging blizzard that knocked you off your feet, the working day in the adit passed painlessly.
In 1944 he was called up for war as an artilleryman and took part in the Berlin operation.
Compared to Eastern Siberia, the front line is a resort
After the war, he graduated from the history department as an external student and defended his dissertation.
In 1949, he was arrested for the fourth time and sentenced to 10 years in a labor camp (the charges were carried over from a 15-year-old case). He served his sentence in Kazakhstan, Altai, and Siberia. He worked as a draftsman, fitter, loader, sculptor, actor, and camp librarian. He became seriously ill and became disabled. He was not yet 40.
I have resigned myself to my fate and hope that I will not last long, since I am not able to fulfill the quota for earthworks and I have no will to live
I heard the news of Stalin’s death in the camp library and just waved it off:
Go and mourn, go and mourn
In 1956, at 44, he was released and rehabilitated. He said that before the war, he was in prison "for my dad," and after the war, "for my mom." For the rest of his life, he blamed Akhmatova for not securing his release sooner.
He worked at the Hermitage and in the geography department at the state university. At 49, he defended his doctorate in history. He spoke six languages, wrote poetry and verse, and studied the history of the East.
I don't want tragedy, it's of no use to me. I'm tired, I want to rest and study the history of distant centuries.
While still in prison, he developed the passionary theory of ethnogenesis—a doctrine of the key influence of geography and space on the development of ethnic groups and the emergence of passionaries (leaders, reformers) within them. His defended dissertation on this topic was never approved by the Soviet Union. Some scholars still consider it pseudoscientific.
Sitting in my cell, I saw a beam of light falling from the window onto the cement floor. And then I realized that passionarity is an energy, the same as that absorbed by plants.
Died in Petersburg in 1992, three and a half months short of his 80th birthday.
