Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov

About museum

Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov – a Soviet and Russian scholar, historian-ethnologist, Doctor of Historical and Geographical Sciences, poet, translator from Persian, and the founder of the passionarity theory of ethnogenesis. He was born on October 1, 1912; he was the son of poets Nikolay Gumilyov and Anna Akhmatova. In childhood he was raised by his grandmother at the Slepnevo estate in the Tver region. From 1917 to 1929 he lived in Bezhetsk, and from 1930 in Leningrad. 

From 1930 to 1934 he worked on expeditions in the Sayan Mountains, the Pamirs and in Crimea. In 1934 he enrolled in the Faculty of History at Leningrad State University. In 1935 he was expelled from the university and arrested, but released after some time. In 1937 he was reinstated at LSU. In the autumn of 1944 he voluntarily joined the Soviet Army, served as a private on the First Belorussian Front, and ended the war in Berlin. In 1946 he graduated from the university and entered graduate school at the Institute of Oriental Studies of the Academy of Sciences, but was soon expelled from there. In 1948 he defended his Candidate of Historical Sciences dissertation and was accepted as a research associate at the Museum of Ethnography of the Peoples of the USSR. On November 6, 1949 he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in labor camps for anti-Soviet activity. In May 1956 he was released and rehabilitated, and worked for several years at the Hermitage. 

In 1961 he defended a doctoral dissertation in history ("The Ancient Turks"), and in 1974 a doctoral dissertation in geography ("Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth"). From 1963–1986 he worked as a research associate at the Faculty of Geography of Leningrad State University. Lev Gumilyov is the author of 12 monographs and over 200 articles. Among his best-known works are: "Hunnu: 'Central Asia in Ancient Times'" (1960), "The Ancient Turks" (1967), "In Search of an Imaginary Kingdom" (1970), "Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of the Earth" (1979–1980, 1989), "Ancient Rus' and the Great Steppe" (1989). In December 1991 he was elected a full member of the Russian Academy of Natural Sciences. Lev Nikolayevich Gumilyov died on June 15, 1992 in Saint Petersburg in his 80th year of life.