Nikolai Gumilev’s Africa gathers, for the first time in any language, all the poetry and prose that one of Russia’s great Silver Age poets devoted to the continent that obsessed him. Founder of the Acmeist movement and once married to Anna Akhmatova, Gumilev called himself a servant of the Muse of Distant Travels, and no distance drew him like Africa.
Between 1908 and 1913 he made four journeys to North and East Africa, the last a full ethnographic expedition to Abyssinia, today’s Ethiopia, on assignment from the Imperial Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography in St Petersburg. He returned with folklore, artefacts, and more than two hundred photographs. This volume collects his African poems and prose alongside a selection of those images, a rare window onto Ethiopia at the dawn of the twentieth century. Translated by Slava I. Yastremski, Michael M. Naydan and Maria Badanova.
“A little time machine which will take you travelling back to the Ethiopia of the early twentieth century, highly recommended,” wrote Kaggsy’s Bookish Ramblings. Executed by the Soviet secret police in 1921 on charges later proven fabricated, Gumilev became a symbol of artistic resistance. A singular volume of Russian poetry in translation, for readers of travel writing, verse and history alike.
