Nikolai Gumilev was a writer of poetry, prose, and drama, as well as a translator, theorist, and teacher. He established a place for himself in Russian literary history as a creator of Acmeism, a literary school that occupies an important transitional position in Russian modernism. Gumilev's active life and his violent death at the hands of Bolshevik executioners correspond to the themes of travel, adventure, and war that are prominent in his work. As a result, early critics and nostalgic commentators often took his conquistador persona and his warrior-poet posture at face value. In the last fifty years scholarly analysis of his total literary output reveals a continual evolution of thought, an expanding sensibility, and a deepening psychological and spiritual insight that was cut short by his early death.

Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev was born on 3 April 1886 in Kronstadt, at the naval base where his father, Stepan Iakovlevich Gumilev...