Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev (also Gumilyov; Russian: Лев Никола́евич Гумилёв; 1 October [O.S. 18 September] 1912 – 15 June 1992) was a Soviet and Russian historian, ethnologist, anthropologist and translator. He had a reputation for his highly unorthodox theories of ethnogenesis and historiosophy. He was an exponent of Eurasianism.

Life

Lev Gumilev's parents, the prominent poets Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova, divorced when he was 7 years old and his father was executed by the Cheka when he was just 9. Gumilev spent much of his adulthood, from 1938 until 1956, in Soviet labor camps. He was arrested by the NKVD in 1935 and released, but rearrested and sentenced to five years in 1938. Osip Mandelstam's "Stalin Epigram" is said to have played a role in his arrest.[1] After release, he joined the Red Army and took part in the Battle of Berlin of 1945. However, he was arrested again in 1949 and sentenced to ten years in prison camps. Aiming to secure his freedom, Akhmatova published a dithyramb to Joseph Stalin, which did not help to release Gumilev, although it possibly prevented her own imprisonment. The Soviet secret police had already prepared an order for her arrest, but Stalin decided not to sign it. Relations between Gumilev and his mother became strained, as he blamed her for not helping him enough. She described her feelings about her son's arrest and the period of political repressions in Requiem (published in 1963).

Young Gumilev with his parents in 1913
Lev Nikolayevich Gumilev. son of Nikolai Gumilev and Anna Akhmatova.

After Stalin's death in 1953, Gumilev joined the Hermitage Museum, whose director, Mikhail Artamonov, he would accept as his mentor. Under Artamonov's guidance, he became interested in Khazar studies and in steppe peoples in general. In the 1950s and 1960s, he participated in several expeditions to the Volga Delta and to the North Caucasus. He proposed an archeological site for Samandar as well as the theory of the Caspian transgression[clarification needed] in collaboration with geologist Alexander Aleksin as one of the reasons for Khazar decline.[2] In 1960, he started delivering lectures at Leningrad University. Two years later, he defended his doctoral thesis on ancient Turks. From the 1960s, he worked in the Geography Institute, where he would defend another doctoral thesis, this time in geography.

Although the official Soviet authorities rejected his ideas and banned most of his monographs from being published, Gumilev came to attract much publicity, especially in the Perestroika years of 1985–1991. As an indication of his popularity, the Kazakh president Nursultan Nazarbayev ordered the L. N. Gumilev Eurasian National University (Евразийский Национальный университет имени Л. Н. Гумилёва, founded in 1996) to be erected just opposite his own palace on the central square of the new Kazakh capital, Astana.

Ideas

Senior researcher in the Department of Ethnology at the University of Tartu, Aimar Ventsel, states the following:

Influence

The "Eurasian vision" of president Vladimir Putin has allegedly been influenced by Gumilev's ideas.[22]

Personal life

Gumilev identified himself as an Orthodox Christian.[23]

Gumilev used to have personal and professional relationships with bibliographer and medievalist Natalia Varbanets.[24]

Gumilev married in 1967, the year after his mother died.[25]

Works

References

  1. ↑ Vengeance of Kremlin's Highlander (Russian) Archived 2013-04-19 at the Wayback Machine by Semion Kiperman, publication of Russian Jewish on-line Center.
  2. ↑ (in Russian) Лев Гумилёв. Открытие хазарии. Москва. Айр Пресс, 2006.
  3. ↑ Ventsel, Aimar (2018). "The Base Text for Modern Eurasianism".
  4. ↑ Вяземский, Юрий (1 June 2023). Vooruzhenie Odisseya. Filisofskoe puteshestvie v mir evolyutsionnoi antropologii Вооружение Одиссея. Философское путешествие в мир эволюционной антропологии (in Russian). Litres. pp. 698f. ISBN 9785045516136. Retrieved 8 September 2024.
  5. ↑ Pizzolo, Paolo (28 January 2020). "From Early Eurasianism to Neo-Eurasianism: A Historical and Philosophical Overlook". Eurasianism: An Ideology for the Multipolar World. Russian, Eurasian, and Eastern European Politics. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield. p. 58. ISBN 9781793604804. Retrieved 8 September 2024. In Gumilev's theoretical framework, each ethnos is a bio-social organism that presents a hierarchical structure that divides it into several sub- and supra-entities. The smallest ethnic entity is that of the sub-ethnos, then comes the ethnos, followed by the greater superethnos, and finally the biggest entity is that of the meta-ethnos.
  6. ↑ Vasilyeva, Nataliya A.; Lagutina, Maria L. (2019). The Russian project of Eurasian integration: geopolitical prospects. Lanham: Lexington Books. p. 82. ISBN 9781498525657.
  7. 1 2 Bassin, Mark (2016). The Gumilev mystique: biopolitics, Eurasianism, and the construction of community in modern Russia. Ithaca. ISBN 978-1-5017-0339-3. OCLC 945976904.{{cite book}}: CS1 maint: location missing publisher (link)
  8. ↑ Rossman, Vadim, et al. Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post Communist Era (Studies in Antisemitism Series). University of Nebraska Press, 2005
  9. ↑ Klier, John. "The Myth of the Khazars and Intellectual Antisemitism in Russia, 1970s–1990s". The Slavonic and East European Review, Volume 83, Number 4, 1 October 2005, pp. 779–781(3).
  10. ↑ Yasmann, Victor. "The Rise of the Eurasians". The Eurasian Politician Issue 4 (August 2001) Radio Free Europe, 1992
  11. ↑ Yasmann, Victor. "Red Religion:An Ideology of Neo-Messianic Russian Fundamentalism". Demoktratizat: The Journal of Post-Soviet Democratization. Volume 1, No. 2. p. 26.
  12. ↑ Shnirelman, Victor A. "The Story of a Euphemism: The Khazars in Russian Nationalist Literature". The World of the Khazars: New Perspectives. Brill, 2007. p. 353-372
  13. ↑ Malakhov, Vladimir. Racism and Migrants. Translated by Mischa Gabowitsch. Neprikosnovennij Zapas, 2003
  14. ↑ Russia between East and West: scholarly debates on Eurasianism. Leiden, Boston: Brill. 2007. p. 121. ISBN 978-90-04-15415-5.
  15. ↑ "Выбор веры" (in Russian)
  16. ↑ Tripolsky, Mihail. "ОБ ИЗВРАЩЕНИИ ИСТОРИИ: Хазарский каганат, евреи и судьба России"
  17. ↑ Rossman, Vadim. The Ethnic Community and Its Enemies: Russian Intellectual Antisemitism in the Post-Communist Era Archived 2005-09-21 at the Wayback Machine
  18. ↑ Памятник Льву Гумилёву [Monument to Lev Gumilyov].
  19. ↑ Внешний вид (фото), Оглавление (Содержание) книги Еникеева Г.Р. "По следам чёрной легенды.
  20. ↑ Pohorilov, Stanislav (2023). "Putin claims Mongol invaders were better for Russia than 'Western conquerors'".
  21. ↑ Gali Yenikeev (2007). Корона ордынской империи (The Crown of the Horde Empire).
  22. ↑ Clover, Charles (2016). "Lev Gumilev: passion, Putin and power". Financial Times.
  23. ↑ Garaev, Danis (2017-04-03). "Jihad as Passionarity: Said Buriatskii and Lev Gumilev". Islam and Christian–Muslim Relations. 28 (2): 203–218. doi:10.1080/09596410.2017.1288460. hdl:11245.1/d9f3aa9c-aa41-456b-8e1b-fe799cc463e0. ISSN 0959-6410. S2CID 151507081.
  24. ↑ Belyakov, S. S. (2013). Гумилёв сын Гумилёва: [биография Льва Гумилёва] (additional 3000 copies ed.). Moscow: АСТ (AST). p. 797. ISBN 978-5-17-077567-5
  25. ↑ Clover, Charles (2016-03-11). "Lev Gumilev: passion, Putin and power". Financial Times. Retrieved 2021-11-10.
source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lev_Gumilyov