The only child of Anna Andreevna Akhmatova was the son of Leo, born to a poetess in her first marriage with the famous Russian poet and traveler N. S. Gumilyov. “Eight bitter years” spent by the “northern star” together with the “wayward swan” became truly fateful for Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov.
The famous Soviet and Russian historian-ethnographer, orientalist and geographer, writer and translator Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov lived a difficult and complex life. He died several months before his 80th birthday. In the museum-study of the scientist, whom his colleagues called "a Eurasian", not only his works and evidence of numerous merits and achievements are collected. Many documents and facts from the biography are associated with the fact that he was the son of two famous Russian poets - Anna Akhmatova and Nikolai Gumilyov.
Turned out to be of no use to anyone
Lyovushka, born on October 1, 1912, was already in infancy left by his mother with Akhmatova's mother-in-law, Anna Ivanovna Gumilyova (nee Lvova). His childhood years were spent in a wooden house with a mezzanine, located on the Kamenka river, in the small village of Slepnevo (Bezhetsk district of the Tver region). It is interesting how the Gumilev family celebrated the birth of their grandson. The villagers were ordered to pray for the safe delivery of their daughter-in-law: if there is an heir, they will receive forgiveness of debts. The lady kept her word - having learned about the birth of her grandson, she forgave the peasants' debts and organized a generous meal. After the revolution in 1928, they lived in Bezhetsk, the boy studied at the gymnasium on Sadovaya Street.
The proposal to give the child to be raised by the grandmother was not even discussed with relatives. Everyone understood that he would be better there. Those who know Akhmatova noted that in everyday life she was always distinguished by disorder and absolute inability. She gave money, things, books, jewelry, gifts from friends, even rare and valuable works to those who, in her opinion, needed them more. She didn't even know how to take care of herself: cook food, sew up stockings, clean up after herself. And when she wrote poetry, she became completely unpredictable. Either self-confident, regal and stately, or feminine, fragile and defenseless.
The husband's relatives took good care of Levchik. The boy called his grandmother Anna Ivanovna "the angel of kindness and trustfulness." Paying tribute to the nobility with which women raised her son, the poetess dedicated one of the best poems, dating back to 1921, to her sister-in-law: “Don’t wear your heart with earthly joy, don’t get addicted to your wife or home, take bread from your child to give his stranger."
Lev's parents only occasionally visited their son in Slepnevo and Bezhetsk. There were several reasons. Both of them were like white crows in this patriarchal family. The mother was upset that her son did not go to serve either in the guard or in the diplomats, but became a poet. There is no home, disappears in Africa. Anna Ivanovna was also dissatisfied with his wife: “I brought some wonderful one. She walks either in a dark chintz dress, like a sundress, or in extravagant Parisian toilets. Everything is silent and also writes poetry”.
Despite the outward friendliness of her husband's relatives, Anna felt like a stranger here. In the year Leva was born, she had already published her first collection of poems "Evening", was inspired by the success and completely immersed herself in poetry. Nikolai traveled a lot. Anyway, some time after the wedding, he began to feel burdened by family ties. Once, in despair, when his mother did not come to him for 4 years in a row, Lyova wrote: "I realized that no one needed it."
Two poets and one love
The love of the future poet Nikolai Gumilyov for the young schoolgirl Anya Gorenko was the most ominously romantic of all Akhmatova's subsequent relationships with men. And the 21-year-old young lady got married, giving her consent to the boyfriend after three refusals from his insistent proposal. In a letter to a friend, the girl wrote that this was not love, but fate. She has not yet experienced the collapse of her ardent and unrequited feelings for the tutor, a student at St. Petersburg University Volodya Golenishchev-Kutuzov. And there were no other candidates for her hand and heart at that time.
In the opinion of their entourage, the marriage of two rival creative personalities could not become a union of "cooing doves" and was doomed. Ardent and demanding and self-affirmation, the nature of Nicholas, who had long and passionately sought his muse, longed for the worship of the new goddess. Anna, from her youth, chose the path for herself, about which the following lines were subsequently laid down by “the most tender friend of other people's husbands and many an inconsolable widow”. “Soon after the birth of Lyova, we silently gave each other complete freedom and ceased to be interested in the intimate side of each other’s life,” Akhmatova wrote in her memoirs. The couple broke up in 1917, upon Gumilyov's return from Paris, when Akhmatova announced that she was marrying Shuleiko.
It should be noted that the poetic alliance of Leo's parents was more successful than the family one. Gumilyov gave Akhmatova a "ticket to poetry", approving her first poems. After the death of her first husband, the poet was engaged in the collection and design of his literary heritage: she sacredly kept manuscripts, published collections of poems, and collaborated with his biographers. She always called herself the widow of Gumilyov.
The harsh northern capital
The mother took her son to Leningrad only in 1929, when the question arose about his further education. By that time, Akhmatova was in a civil marriage with the scientific secretary of the Russian Museum, art critic, avant-garde theorist Nikolai Punin. His attitude towards the boy could not be called paternal, although he took some part in the life of a teenager. Punin's brother Alexander was the director of the school, which Lev managed to get to complete his studies in grade 10. Problems with obtaining an education due to social origin became the first link in the chain of tragic events that took place in the life of Akhmatova's only child.
Loving and idolizing his father, Lev was deprived of his textbooks while still in the Bezhenskaya gymnasium, as the son of a "class enemy and an alien element." In the northern capital, the noble son was refused admission to the Pedagogical Institute. The circumstances of the death of his father, who was shot on suspicion of a counter-revolutionary conspiracy in 1921, became an obstacle to entering the Leningrad University. Until 1934, when the guy still managed to become a student of the Faculty of History, he worked wherever he had to: in a library, in a museum, as a laborer in a tram depot, as a worker on geological expeditions and at archaeological excavations. The young man did not even imagine that his only fault in the following years would be only that he was "the son of his parents."
Was the son of his parents
The events of the 1930s and 1940s, which swept the whole country, did not escape the son of two poets. 1934 - in the presence of Akhmatova, Josip Mandelstam was arrested. In 1935, after the murder of Kirov, Lev Gumilyov was detained together with Nikolai Punin. The poet's husband and son are accused of being members of a counter-revolutionary militant organization. Anna Andreevna manages to convey a petition to the Kremlin through Boris Pasternak, and both are released. The fatal year 1938 brings new shocks: Gumilyov was expelled from the university and arrested. On charges of terrorism and anti-Soviet activities, Lev Nikolaevich was under investigation for a year and a half. It was then, standing in endless queues every day to receive the program for her son, Akhmatova began to write the Requiem cycle.
Nikolai Gumilyov took part in the case together with students Theodor Shumovsky and Nikolai Erekhovich and was sentenced to death. But at this time, his judges themselves were repressed, and the sentence was changed to 5 years in the camps. In conclusion, he works as an excavator, a miner of a copper mine, a geologist in the geophysical group of the mining department. After serving the term in the 4th department of the Norillag - exile to Norilsk without the right to leave.
Upon his return to Leningrad, 32-year-old Gumilyov enlists in the Red Army and fights on the First Belorussian Front. Among the military awards of a soldier of the Great Patriotic War, a private of the 1386th anti-aircraft mortar regiment - the medal "For the capture of Berlin."
After the war, Akhmatova's son was reinstated at Leningrad State University, completed his postgraduate studies and three years later defended his Ph. D. thesis in history. The diploma of St. Petersburg State University (A. A. Zhdanov Leningrad State University) states that the student L. N. began his studies in 1934 and completed it in 1946. This year marks the beginning of the most difficult period in the life of his mother - the Central Committee of the Communist Party issued a decree on the "mistakes" of Zoshchenko and Akhmatova. The disgrace of the poetess will last for 8 long years.
Lev Nikolaevich is hired in his specialty at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR. But the new arrest of 1949 turned into a sentence without charge for Akhmatova's husband and son: Lefortovo prison and 10 years in the camps. Punin was destined to die there in four years. Gumilyov left for corrective labor for 7 years: a special purpose camp in Sherubai-Nura near Karaganda, Mezhdurechensk, Kemerovo region, Sayany, Omsk.
All attempts by a mother to help her son are in vain. The petition addressed to Kliment Voroshilov is returned to Akhmatova six months later with a refusal. He also says in letters that the only chance to get out is the efforts of loved ones. In 1950, breaking herself, in the name of saving her son, she wrote a cycle of poems glorifying Stalin - "Glory to the world." But that didn't help either. Gumilyov was released "for lack of corpus delicti" only in 1956, largely thanks to the efforts of Alexander Fadeev.
After rehabilitation, Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov worked in the Hermitage Museum, and from 1962 until the end of his life - at the Geographic and Economic Institute at the Faculty of Geography of Leningrad University. The 60s for him were associated with active scientific work - participation in expeditions, defense of two dissertations, development of the theory of passionate tension of the ethnic system. The scientist explained the laws governing the emergence and development of peoples and civilizations. He studied the history of Ancient Rus and the Turks, Khazars and Xiongnu. Using the example of Lev Gumilyov's life - both personal and scientific - one can study the history of Russia in the 20th century. More than once he recalled with a bitter grin the words spoken in 49 by one of the GB investigators: "You are dangerous because you are smart."
Loved and did not understand each other
Gumilyov returned from the Gulag at the age of 44, having spent years in prison that are considered the best in terms of periods of human activity. The relationship with my mother was strained. The son was sure that Akhmatova, with her capabilities and character, did not try too hard to rescue him. Rumors reached him that the poetess led a bohemian life, spent the received fees on friends, saved on transfers to her son. And in general, he believed that it was his mother who was guilty of his fate. It seemed to her that he had become overly irritable, harsh, touchy, pretentious. Anna Andreevna declared that she was tired of bothering about him, called Leo "you are my son and my horror."
Another reason for the coldness of the relationship was the persistent memory that in childhood and adolescence, the boy was completely deprived of parental love. Akhmatova, who did not take part in raising a child under 16, did not find a place for a young man in her new family. Anna lived in a communal apartment in the Fountain House with her common-law husband, along with his wife and daughter. She was not the mistress here, and Punin did not need an "extra mouth". Even arriving for a short time, the guest slept on a chest in an unheated corridor. It is difficult to forget and forgive such an attitude towards oneself. In his soul there was a resentment against his mother, who was indifferent to him and his interests.
In the last five years of Akhmatova's life, she and Gumilyov practically did not communicate. Neither the son nor the mother, who became victims of the terrible time, lacked the spirit of humility and patience to understand and forgive each other. By an incredible coincidence, the day of the poet's death coincided with the date of Stalin's death, which Akhmatova always "celebrated as a holiday."
As for the filial duty, having said goodbye to his mother on March 5, 1966, Lev Nikolayevich took upon himself the trouble of burying her in the Komarovsky necropolis. Rejecting the official standard monument provided by the authorities, Gumilyov ordered part of the work to the sculptors Ignatiev and Smirnov. He built the monument on his own. Together with the students, he collected stones and laid out a wall as a symbol of the fence of the Kresty remand prison, where Gumilyov was kept during his next arrest. In the wall there was a niche in the form of a prison window, under which a mother stands with a parcel. Later, a bas-relief with a portrait of the poetess was placed in the niche. Fulfilling Akhmatova's will according to her will, Gumilyov sued the Ardovs and Punins for not splitting up his mother's archive. The son made sure that all of her literary heritage was kept in one place.
None of the biographers of Anna Akhmatova writes about how anxiously and enthusiastically Leo perceived her poetic talent. They are also silent about the son's assessment of the mother's many love adventures. In her old age, she claimed that she was proud of “her Lyovushka”. At the same time, people who entered the circle of the poetess noted that the "Sappho of the XX century", paying much attention to the development of young poetic talents, was neglectful of the scientific works of Lev Nikolaevich, suggesting that they be engaged exclusively in translations from Farsi. But the “son of his parents”, recognized by his colleagues as “the main Eurasianist,” in addition to his achievements in history and geography, was a good writer and even wrote poetry. When all his books were published in Russia, it turned out that there were 15 of them, according to the number of years in the camp.
And in her youth, and in later years, the mother did not approve of either the amorousness of her son or his chosen ones. One of the most unpleasant stories was Akhmatova's attempt to denigrate his beloved Natalia Vorobets. That, giving hope to the exiled Gumilyov, met with another and was not going to connect her fate with Lyova. When parting, Gumilyov, in despair, wrote on each of the letters from his beloved Muma: "and why was there so much time to lie." Akhmatova, wanting to console him, slanders Vorobets, attributing to the woman "snitching" on the GB. This did not do honor to the mother - the son stopped trusting her and dedicating her to his personal life.
Gumilyov married only after Akhmatova's death, at the age of 55. He found a quiet and peaceful marriage with Natalia Viktorovna Simonovskaya. The age couple did not have children. Natalya Viktorovna for the sake of her husband left her job as a book graphic artist and devoted herself to taking care of him. Coziness in the house was added by a four-legged friend named Altyn. Family life lasted 24 years, until the death of Lev Nikolaevich. All loved ones called their marriage perfect.
Alien - alien
Complex and ambiguous relations of Anna Akhmatova (family name Gorenko) were not only with her son. Despite her blood relationship, she could not get along with her only close relative, her younger brother Viktor Gorenko. As a nineteen-year-old boy, he went to serve as a midshipman on the destroyer Zorkiy. The insurgent revolutionary sailors sentenced the officers to be shot. The family was informed that the son was among the dead. But he managed to escape and flee abroad.
Over the course of a number of years, the brother sought in every possible way to communicate with his sister, tried to "glue family relations", which were interrupted in 1917 not by their will. Akhmatova refused contact with an American relative, fearing that this would affect her career and might harm her son. Correspondence was managed only in 1963 thanks to the assistance of Ilya Ehrenburg. But for fear of censorship, Anna's letters to her brother were short and dry. He was upset and could not understand why his sister was so cold to him.
Viktor Gorenko was really close to his nephew, Lev Gumilyov. A correspondence began between them, which continued for many years after Akhmatova's death, until Gorenko died. In one of the messages Viktor Andreevich recalled: "I was 15 years old when I came to the hospital on Vasilievsky Island, the day after your birth." Akhmatova's brother wrote: “Lyova, you were in the family the same as I was with our parents and your mother -“a stranger, a stranger”. My father, and your grandfather lived with another woman, the admiral's widow, he didn't really need me. And that woman is not at all suitable for the court, and she decided to send Victor to the navy. In 1913 I took the exam and entered Vasilievsky Island. You know what happened next. " To the questions of the "American uncle" (as Lev Nikolayevich called him), why he did not even come to his mother for so many years, Gumilyov always answered with silence.
Anna Akhmatova had to pay for her talent, for success, and for an unusual gift, dooming herself to suffering and sacrificing the fate of loved ones …
