Film Screening: Nikolai Gumilev. The One Who Finished Reading the Iliad

🔔 “Nikolai Gumilyov: The One Who Finished Reading the Iliad” — a film by Yelena Yakovich

Premiere screening in Tel Aviv, marking the 140th anniversary of the poet’s birth.

Nikolai Gumilyov opened the horrific martyrology of Russian poets murdered in the 20th century. He lived only 35 years, but they would have been enough for a dozen lifetimes. He always walked on the edge, challenging death.

The film tells the story of his extraordinary life. The persona of the “Tsarskoye Selo Kipling,” the “Russian André Chénier,” and the “last nobleman of Russian poetry” was surrounded by legends during his lifetime. After his tragic death, it became the “Gumilyov myth,” which this film attempts to unravel. His love and marriage to Anna Akhmatova, his affair with Larisa Reisner, his duel with Maximilian Voloshin—the only literary duel to take place in the 20th century—and the endless adventures of one of the brightest poets of the Silver Age. And his three journeys to Africa.

Few people know that his passion for distant shores led him to become a serious researcher. In 1913, commissioned by the Museum of Anthropology and Ethnography (the Kunstkamera), he set out on a dangerous, six-month expedition to Abyssinia. He brought back an ethnographic collection of objects and unique photographs that he took along the way with his nephew Nikolai Sverchkov, little Kolya. The objects were so valuable that some of them are now displayed in the museum’s galleries.

Gumilyov was the only one among St. Petersburg’s writers of the 1910s to volunteer for the First World War. He was awarded two St. George Crosses for bravery, created frontline chronicles, and wrote his Notes of a Cavalryman. After the February Revolution, he found himself in France with a representative of the Provisional Government. He witnessed the uprising of the Russian Expeditionary Corps and made unimaginable efforts to return to Russia in April 1918, at the height of the Civil War.

Akhmatova learned of Gumilyov’s arrest on August 10, 1921, at Smolensk Cemetery, during Blok’s funeral, where the entire literary community of St. Petersburg had gathered. Thus their Silver Age came to an end: two of its key figures disappeared practically at the same time.

Gumilyov was executed on August 26, 1921, accused of involvement in the “Tagantsev conspiracy”—whether genuine or fabricated remains disputed. The film recounts the details of his death and presents previously unknown documents from his investigation file.

The text is read by Andrey Smolyakov.

The film will be presented by its director, Yelena Yakovich.

📅 Tuesday, September 22
🕖 19:00
🎫 ₪55
🔔 Tickets: anumuseum.org.il/ru/events/nikolai-gumilyov/
📱 Ticket orders and additional information: 03-5008080

Yelena Yakovich is a documentary filmmaker and the author of dozens of documentary films and series, including Walks with Brodsky, The Brest Ghetto, The World After Auschwitz, Kristallnacht: The Jewish Pogrom of 1938, and The Motifs of Moses Beregovsky, as well as films about Vasily Grossman, Alexander Galich, Anna Akhmatova, Andrei Sakharov, and others. She is a laureate of the TEFI-95 Award, a recipient of prizes at numerous Russian and international film festivals, and the recipient of the Honorary Award “For Outstanding Contribution to the Development of Jewish Cinema in Russia” (2021). She is also the author of several books.

Yelena Yakovich’s documentary series Resistance consists of films about members of the resistance, featuring previously unknown footage, documents, and photographs from private and state archives, as well as unique testimonies from people who knew them and witnessed their lives and destinies. The heroes of her films are very different, but they share one essential quality: each was at the height of success in their field, enjoyed the authorities’ favor without being required to commit particular acts of depravity, and could have lived comfortably—but chose to give up everything for freedom and the ability to speak openly, paying for it with their lives. Above all, this is the great triad of Grossman, Galich, and Sakharov.