Nikolay Stepanovich Gumilev was born this day. He was an influential Russian poet who founded the acmeism movement.Nikolai was born in the town of Kronstadt on Kotlin Island, into the family of Stepan Yakovlevich Gumilev (1836–1920), a naval physician, and Anna Ivanovna L'vova (1854–1942). His childhood nickname was Montigomo the Hawk's Claw.He studied at the gymnasium of Tsarskoe Selo, where theSymbolist poet Innokenty Annensky was his teacher. Later, Gumilev admitted that it was Annensky's influence that turned his mind to writing poetry.
In 1910, Gumilev fell under the spell of the Symbolist poet and philosopher Vyacheslav Ivanov and absorbed his views on poetry at the evenings held by Ivanov in his celebrated "Turreted House". His wife Anna Akhmatova accompanied him to Ivanov's parties as well. Gumilev and Akhmatova married on April 25. On September 18, 1912, their child Lev was born. He would eventually become an influential and controversial historian.
Dissatisfied with the vague mysticism of Russian Symbolism, then prevalent in the Russian poetry, Gumilev and Sergei Gorodetsky established the so-called Guild of Poets, which was modeled after medieval guilds of Western Europe. They advocated a view that poetry needs craftsmanship just like architecture needs it. Writing a good poem they compared to building a cathedral. To illustrate their ideals, Gumilev published two collections, The Pearls in 1910 and the Alien Sky in 1912. It was Osip Mandelstam, however, who produced the movement's most distinctive and durable monument, the collection of poems entitled Stone (1912).
According to the principles of acmeism (as the movement came to be dubbed by art historians), every person, irrespective of his talent, may learn to produce high-quality poems if only he follows the guild's masters, i.e., Gumilev and Gorodetsky. Their own model was Théophile Gautier, and they borrowed much of their basic tenets from the French Parnasse. Such a program, combined with colourful and exotic subject matter of Gumilev's poems, attracted to the Guild a large number of adolescents. Several major poets, notably Georgy Ivanov and Vladimir Nabokov, passed the school of Gumilev, albeit informally.
Georgy Timofeyevich Beregovoy (April 15, 1921 – June 30, 1995) was born on this day. He was a Soviet cosmonaut who commanded the space mission Soyuz 3 in 1968. At the time of his flight, Beregovoy was 47 years of age: he was the earliest-born human to go to orbit, being born three months and three days earlier than the second earliest-born man in orbit – John Glenn, but later than X-15 pilot Joe Walker who made 2 (or 3, according to USAF definition) suborbital space flights.
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