SOURCE: "In the Middle of the Journey of Life: Gumilev's Pillar of Fire," in Russian Literature Triquarterly, No. 1, Fall, 1971, pp. 283-96.

In the following essay, Sampson characterizes Pillar of Fire as the volume most representative of Gumilev's poetic skill.

Artistic careers may be divided into two main types: those which sometime during the artist's active life reach a peak, after which the artist does not develop further, but either declines or maintains more or less the level of that peak; and those which are or seem to be interrupted by the artist's death, i.e. those in which the artist's last creations are his best, and give promise of still greater potential achievement. Examples of the first type might be Turgenev and Tolstoy, Gogol and Goncharov, Bryusov and Bely; of the second: Pushkin, Lermontov, Dostoevsky, Chekhov, and the subject of this article, Nikolai Gumilev, who was executed in...