Is it true that Nikolai Gumilyov predicted his own execution?

There is a legend that one of the main poets of the Silver Age reflected in his works a foreboding of his own execution, which occurred in 1921. We checked whether there is reason to think so.

The allegations that Gumilyov foresaw his own execution is in the materials dedicated to the poet published on the portals Pravda.ru And "Paranormal News", they talked about this on the air "Radio Liberty". On the resource "Fakrum" Gumilyov Included The list of "poets and writers who predicted their death."

Even a hundred years after the death of Gumilyov, we do not know all the details of his death. On August 3, 1921, the poet was arrested on suspicion of participating in a conspiracy. On September 1, a resolution of the Petrograd Privia on the execution issued on August 24 was published. Gumilyov, along with other sentenced ones, was executed before the end of August, but the exact date was unknown for a long time. Only in 2014 Petersburg historians Installedthat the poet was shot on the night of August 26, 1921. Where exactly this happened and where to look for the grave of Gumilyov - Unknown still. In 1992, the executed poet posthumously Rehabilitated.

The authors of many texts, where Gumilyov’s prediction of his own execution is mentioned, refer to the poem “Worker”. In this work, the poet Writes About the pool, which "whistles over Sedoy, foamed Dvina" and "will find my chest." The execution in the vicinity of Petrograd Dvina definitely has nothing to do with the execution. Everything becomes more understandable if you take into account the year of writing the poem-1916. Just in the spring of that year Gumilyov was At the front, on the territory of modern South Latvia - there is the West Dvina River (aka Daugava) there. Apparently, in the passage it is not at all about the execution, but about the death in the war.

The list of “prophetic” poems by Gumilyov is not limited to “workers”. In particular, the poem of 1917 “I and you”, also known as “Yes, I know, I am not a couple”, in which There is Lines: "And I will not die on the bed, // with a notary and a doctor, // and in some wild gap, // drowned in a thick ivy." With real events, this “prediction” is only united by the fact that the poet really died not his death. There was no reliable information that he was shot "in a wild gap, drowning in a thick ivy", ". As an example of a prophecy bring also the poem "My readers" - in it, as in the already mentioned, Present The motive of death, but no details with the execution of Gumilyov coincide.

We failed to find other poems in which Gumilyov was certainly predicting his own execution. The opinion about the prophetic poem (or even prophetic poems) appeared shortly after the execution - for example, in article Julia Aichenwald in 1922, where the author discusses, among other things, about the topic of death, which is often found in the work of Gumilyov. The widow of the poet Anna Akhmatova in her memoirs I wrotethat “Gumilyov is the poet not yet read. Visioner and Prophet. He predicted his death with details up to the autumn grass. ” Perhaps a more accurate “prediction” took place in a private conversation or not preserved to this day of the poem, but it was not possible to find formal confirmation.

Legend

What do our verdicts mean?

Read on the topic:

1. D. Ognev. The image of the death of the slave at N. S. Gumilyov in the light of creative evolution
2. E. Stepanov. The poet in the war
3. Notes by Anna Akhmatova about Nikolai Gumilyov