Африканская охота

by Nikolay Gumilyov, Николай Гумилёв

Воспоминания Николая Степановича Гумилёва (1886—1921), впервые опубликованные в Ежемесячных литературных и научно-популярных приложениях к журналу «Нива», 1916, № 8 (август).

Genres: Russia, Poetry

35 pages, Kindle Edition

First published January 1, 1909

About the author

Николай Гумилев

An influential Russian poet, literary critic, traveler, and military officer. He was the cofounder of the Acmeist movement. Nikolay Gumilev was arrested and executed by the Cheka, the secret Soviet police force, in 1921.

Reviews

[Станислав · Rating 4 out of 5]

Об охоте или нет. Вот Николай Пржевальский бы написал, что "загнал на скалу стадо газелей, потратил около полу-часа на их отстрел, истратил больше 50 пуль, большинство упало в пропасть. Хорошая охота". У Гумилев же смотрит в себя. Подцепляет читателя последним абзацем:
А ночью мне приснилось, что за участие в каком-то абиссинском дворцовом
перевороте мне отрубили голову и я, истекая кровью, аплодирую умению палача и радуюсь, как все это просто, хорошо и совсем не больно. Так и прожил.

[Miguel W.]

There are a few issues with this book as a book, not simply as poems and writings of Gumilev. Some are quite basic. For example, the font changes partway through a poem. There are some minor typos. There are also some more significant ones. The footnotes are either not useful, repeating what is about to be said by Gumilev himself in the text, or copying a quote of the online edition of the Merriam-Webster dictionary to explain a word. Finally, from my non-Russian speaking perspective, the translation seems quite poor. Some word choices in the poems were extremely unpoetic and in general, most of the poems didn't flow smoothly.

I must admit that the poems were also the least interesting aspect of this work. They were fixated on an exoticized image of Africa that brought in the same images over and over and fixated on the notion of Africa as a landscape that has not been tamed. Much of the poetry simply felt like descriptions of a place with lists of entrancing imagery. I must admit that the Abyssinian songs were enjoyable and an interesting glimpse into early 20th-century Ethiopia, but they were likely also limited by their multiple layers of weak translation.

His prose works were more interesting. It is clear that Gumilev's fascination with Africa stems from this romantic notion that Africa is a place where the human spirit must battle with the full elemental power of the world, including those people that are inherently shaped by the landscapes. The earlier ones (fiction stories) revealed little more than that and the contemporary obsession with women's virginity and rape.

However, Gumilev's diaries, free of an attempt to create a romantic fictional narrative, actually combat some of those same narratives he was pursuing in his poetry. There is one moment in which he pushes back against acquaintances in St. Petersburg regarding the wildness of Ethiopia. You are not simply going to encounter a lion at every corner, he claims, in near contradiction to his earlier writings. And when he depicts his travels, they are refreshingly normal and punctuated by daily difficulties (bureaucratic, weather-related, dealing with a mutual lack of confidence regarding cross cultural interactions) and pleasures of a European in the last non-colonized piece of Africa. It is not a swashbuckling affair and in fact he recounts as many encounters with Europeans and Middle Easterners in these waypoints and towns as he does encounters with native Africans. All of this portrays Ethiopia at a very particular point in time. The empire attempts to control far ethnic regions while courting or accepting non-African investment and keeping a wary eye on their designs on this very land it is attempting to consolidate.

That last section was the jewel of this collection and for that I am grateful.