Poetry
The Pillar of Fire
Огненный столп
Nikolay Gumilev · 1921
Opening lines
Только змеи сбрасывают кожи,
Чтоб душа старела и росла.
Мы, увы, со змеями не схожи,
Мы меняем души, не тела.
Only snakes shed their skins
So that the soul may age and grow.
We, alas, are not like snakes,
We change our souls, not our bodies.
Translation by Erostrate
Text quoted from ru.wikisource.org
Synopsis
The last book the author saw published opens with “Mémoire” and gathers pieces from his last years: “Le Tramway égaré”, “El sexto sentido”, “La Parole”, “L'Âme et le Corps”, “La Forêt”, canzones, a Persian imitation and a Persian miniature, “الفهد”, “Le Derviche ivre”, “L'Éléphanteau” and “La Prière des maîtres”. Several pieces deal with memory, the soul and the word.
Context
The collection appeared in Petersburg from the publisher Petropolis in 1921, in a small volume of about seventy-five pages. It came out at the time when its author, arrested at the beginning of August, was about to be shot on the 26th of that month. In English as in French, his poems are read today in selections that bear the title of the collection: that of Richard McKane in 1999, that of Christine Zeytounian-Beloüs in 2025.
Who it is for
A slim volume of short poems, to be read in Russian or in anthologies of selected works.
Prizes and reception
Published in the very year of the author's death; its title was taken up by the two main selections of his poems in translation.