This thick volume concludes the four-volume edition of Nikolai Gumilev’s complete poetry, prose, and plays, edited by Professor Gleb Struve and B.A. Filippoff. Considering that this popular poet is still largely proscribed in his native country and that the editors were barred from using essential materials kept in secret Soviet archives, the four volumes represent an astounding, even heroic, achievement. The whole corpus of Gumilev’s poetry, collected for the first time in Volumes 1 and 2, proved to be far more interesting and significant than was generally expected. Volume 4 contains Gumilev’s memoirs and prose fiction, by far the weakest part of his output (an exception from this statement can be made for the amusing and startlingly modern psychedelic fantasy “Voyage to the Land of Ether”), and also his literary criticism. As a literary critic, Gumilev can occasionally be bombastic, vague, or uninformed. That much granted, it must be added that in the majority of his critical essays he is perceptive, persuasive, eloquent and, by and large, right. His ability to discern future major poets in unfledged beginners (Khlebnikov, Khodasevich, Tsvetaeva) is particularly evident and admirable. The introductory essay to Volume 4 by Wladimir Weidle is in its own right a subtle and valuable essay in literary history. The appended notes and comments are exhaustive and informative. The editors and everyone else connected with the project deserve the gratitude of all students of Russian literature for this badly needed and most welcome complete edition of Gumilev.

Simon Karlinsky
University of California, Berkeley