After Gumilyov's execution in Soviet Russia in 1921, Georgi Ivanov, one of his followers, paid him the following tribute:

Why is it that he traveled to Africa, went to war as a volunteer, took part in a conspiracy, and demonstratively, with a sweeping gesture, made a sign of the cross in front of every church he passed in Soviet Petrograd, and told the examining official to his face that he was a monarchist, instead of attempting to exonerate and save himself?

His close friends know that there was nothing of the warrior or the adventurer in Gumilyov. In Africa he was hot and bored, as a soldier he was painfully miserable, and he had very little faith in the conspiracy for which he perished. His attitude to all these matters was that of a typical Chekhov intellectual. He really loved and was interested in only one thing in the world—poetry. But he was firmly convinced that only that man has the right to call himself a poet who will endeavor to be first in any human undertaking and who, more deeply aware than others of human weakness, selfishness, mediocrity and fear of death, will strive afresh each day to overcome the old Adam in himself.

And so this naturally timid, gentle, sickly, bookish man commanded himself to become a big game hunter, a soldier—and as such he was twice awarded the Order of St. George—and a conspirator who risked his life to re-establish the monarchy. What he did with his life, he also did with his poetry. A dreamy, melancholy lyricist, he stifled his lyrical strain and changed the pitch of his not overly strong but remarkably clear voice in an endeavor to return to poetry its former majesty and direct effect on men's souls, to be a ringing dagger, and to set men's hearts afire.… He sacrificed himself to his ideal of unflinching strength of will, high human integrity and conquest of the fear of death.

Originally a disciple of Bryusov, to whom the architectonics of verse was an end in itself, Gumilyov strove for virtuosity merely as a means of expressing thought and "the will principle." He studied at the Sorbonne and translated Théophile Gautier, but his early poetry—The Way of the Conquistadors (1905) and Romantic Flowers (1908)—is reminiscent rather of Edgar Allan Poe and Rider Haggard.

Pearls (1910) is an excursion of a romantic dreamer into the epoch of the discovery and conquest of new territories, in which the exotic past comes suddenly alive with a flapping of ships' sails, cracking of pistols and muskets, and whistling of arrows.

The Quiver (1916), which contains Gumilyov's war poems (he had enlisted in a cavalry regiment in 1914), voices his belief in the righteousness of Russia's cause and in the duty of every Russian to fight in her defense.

I shout, and my voice is savage,
Like brass on brass—and free;
A vessel of living thought,
I cannot cease to be.
Like thunderous hammer blows,
Like tides that never rest,
The golden heart of Russia
Is beating in my breast.

In battle the poet is sustained by a deep religious feeling:

Our cause is great and blessed,
In pride our banner flies,
And shining winged seraphim
Behind each warrior rises.

Here a white-faced soldier kisses
His fallen comrade on the lips,
There a priest in tattered robes
Chants a psalm, beatified.

Give him strength, oh Lord, on earth below,
Give him victory in war's alarms
Who can say unto the conquered foe:
"Let me clasp you in a brother's arms!"

Gumilyov has been accused of giving expression to tsarist Russia's imperialist aspirations in his narrative poem Mik (1918) and in The Tent (1921), both of which were based on his travels in Africa before World War I (his last trip, in 1913, had been made as chief of an expedition organized by the Academy of Sciences).

The Soviet writer A. Volkov, in his Poetry of Russian Imperialism (1935), treated Gumilyov as a disciple of Kipling, that "bulldog of His Britannic Majesty," and asserted that Gumilyov undertook his journey to Africa with a view to impressing the colonial experience of British imperialists into the service of their Russian counterparts. To be sure, Gumilyov at one time looked upon Abyssinia as a logical area for the extension of Russian rule. He was incapable of remaining a passive observer of the collapse of the Russian state, and had mourned the downfall of the monarchy even before its occurrence:

Burdensome, burdensome, shameful—
To live, having lost our king.
("Agamemnon's Warrior")

Years of disaster followed
The end of the kingly race,
As freedom, that will-o'-the-wisp,
Led us a merry chase.
(Gondla)

In the belief that the stability of the British throne was in part the result of Great Britain's colonial policy, Gumilyov desired to see that policy in operation in Africa. The observations which he expressed symbolically in Mik, however, are far from bearing out the opinions on racial superiority ascribed to him.

Just as Lermontov had admired the conquered Caucasian mountain tribes for their courage, heroism and sense of honor, Gumilyov admires the same qualities in the Africans. And in Mik, although the young French boy, symbol of "white supremacy," is at first made king of the beasts of the forest, it is the native slave boy Mik, son of a defeated Abyssinian chieftain, who finally returns to civilization as a triumphant prince, having given himself to the forest forces which Louis had deserted and which had finally killed him.

Gumilyov found that Russian imperialism was more merciful and humane than British, but that Great Britain too was progressing toward friendly treatment of the conquered. He also saw Great Britain beginning to overcome a defect which threatened the Russian state as well—the sharp cleavage between the government and the intellectuals on the one hand and the people on the other. The antiquated Russian monarchy, he concluded, could maintain itself only in a union with the Russia of the peasants.

Gumilyov's political views were set forth not in the conventional medium of political articles, but in his poems, and before the revolution little attention was paid to that side of him; in 1921, however, he was shot for counterrevolutionary activities.

In time, the flowering of Gumilyov's talent coincided with the revolution, and the volume entitled Pillar of Fire (1921) contains some of the best poems he ever wrote. Their common denominator is hatred of the revolution, which coerced people into surrender of the individual will principle and turned them into a mob blindly obeying the organizers.

The mood is surrealist:

Look, there's a vegetable store,
Its sign in letters dripping red;
Those are not pumpkins on the floor—
Each object is a human head.
The blank-faced executioner
Chopped off my head as well, you know.
It lay with all the others there
In staring-eyed and grinning show.

The presentiment of death, which gave a bitter tang to his early Romantic Flowers but which disappeared from Gumilyov's poetry for a long time, is strong in Pillar of Fire, as in his other poems of the revolution.

In "The Worker" the poet foretold his own death at the hands of those schooled to destruction by the new leaders:

He stands before his flaming forge,
An aging man of middle height.
His eyes have a submissive look
From blinking at the reddish light.
His comrades are asleep in bed.
He wakes alone, he will not rest,
Intent on fashioning the lead
That will fly homing to my breast.

In a collection of poems published posthumously, in Petrograd, To the Blue Star (1923), Gumilyov once more returned to his delicate lyricism.

His prose has not received the recognition it deserves. It has had an undoubted influence on Soviet literature, in particular on the work of Tikhonov and Grin in his later period. Gumilyov's last stories were published after his execution in the book entitled Shade from a Palm, 1922.

Despite his hostility to the new regime, Gumilyov served as associate in Gorki's publishing firm World Literature, for which he made several brilliant translations, notably of Coleridge's Rime of the Ancient Mariner and of the Babylonian legend of Gilgamesh (from a French translation). He also issued some of his own work and several collective volumes under the imprint of the Poets' Guild [Tsekh poetov], the name adopted by the Acmeist group in 1912. For a time he taught younger writers although, unlike Blok, who wanted to bring the semi-literates in Red Army helmets into the stream of Russian culture, Gumilyov desired to protect that culture from the onslaught of the Bolsheviks. The disagreements between the two poets after the Revolution arose largely from their difference of opinion on that score.