Analysis of the poem “The Sixth Sense” by Gumilyov. “The Sixth Sense” Nikolay Gumilyov
Having, like many good poets, the gift of foresight, Nikolai Gumilev even dedicated a poem to this talent called “The Sixth Sense.” A brief analysis of “The Sixth Sense” according to plan will show 10th grade students what thoughts the poet put into his work and what means helped him realize his artistic plan. In a literature lesson, this analysis can be used as main or additional material.
Brief Analysis
History of creation- the poem was written in 1920, and first published in the following year. It was included in the collection “Pillar of Fire”.
Theme of the poem- a special feeling that a person needs to comprehend the beauty of the world and beyond.
Composition- this six-stanza poem is divided into three parts, which are connected by a common idea.
Genre- philosophical elegy.
Poetic size- iambic pentameter with cross rhyme.
Epithets – “wine in love”, “good bread”, “rosy dawn”, “cold skies”, “unearthly peace”, “immortal poems”, “mysterious desire”, “slippery creature”.
Metaphors – “under the scalpel of nature and art”, “the flesh is exhausted”, the spirit is screaming”, “the moment runs uncontrollably”.
Comparison – "like a boy".
History of creation
The poem “The Sixth Sense” was written by Gumilev in 1920, two years before the execution. But at the same time, there is no mysticism or prophecy in it; it contains only reflections on what this special feeling is and what its nature is.
This work was published in Gumilyov’s last lifetime collection of poetry entitled “Pillar of Fire.”
Subject
Like any creative person, Nikolai Stepanovich was always concerned with the topic of perception of beauty. In this poem, he expresses the idea that a person has developed a certain feeling that helps him do this. And although people do not always realize its nature, denying the existence of this feeling is stupid and pointless.
Composition
The three-part composition of this poem has a classic structure: beginning, main idea and conclusion. In the first part (first stanza), the poet says that it is easy for a person to appreciate simple and pleasant things - good bread, good wine, a beautiful woman.
The second part reveals the meaning of the poem: the author argues that there are things that cannot be known with the help of the usual five senses. This is the beauty of nature, the transience of time, art. He compares the sensations from them to the feelings of a child who looks at naked women and experiences desire without understanding its nature. Gumilev also draws a metaphorical image of a creature born to crawl, which senses non-existent wings.
And in the last part - this is the final stanza - he says that a person is like this creature: in pain he gives birth to an organ that should help him perceive beauty. This is the main meaning of the ending.
Genre
The poet created a refined example of philosophical lyricism, based on Plato’s ancient dialogues on the nature of beauty. The genre is elegy. The poem is written in iambic pentameter. The pyrrhichis used by the author clothe a thought that is complex in nature into a relatively simple, close to colloquial form.
Means of expression
In order to more accurately convey the main idea and following the precepts of Acmeism, Gumilyov filled the verse with paths:
- Epithets- “wine in love”, “good bread”, “rose dawn”, “cold skies”, “unearthly peace”, “immortal poems”, “mysterious desire”, “slippery creature”.
- Metaphors- “under the scalpel of nature and art,” “the flesh is exhausted,” the spirit is screaming,” “the moment runs uncontrollably.”
- Comparison- "like a boy" .
Poem test
Rating Analysis
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"The Sixth Sense" Nikolai Gumilyov
The wine we love is wonderful
And the good bread that sits in the oven for us,
And the woman to whom it was given,
First, after being exhausted, we can enjoy.But what should we do with the pink dawn?
Above the cooling skies
Where is the silence and unearthly peace,
What should we do with immortal poems?Neither eat, nor drink, nor kiss.
The moment flies uncontrollably
And we wring our hands, but again
Condemned to go by and by.Like a boy, forgetting his games,
Sometimes he watches the girls' bathing
And, knowing nothing about love,
Still tormented by a mysterious desire;As once in the overgrown horsetails
Roared from the consciousness of powerlessness
The creature is slippery, sensing on the shoulders
Wings that have not yet appeared;So century after century - how soon, Lord? —
Under the scalpel of nature and art
Our spirit screams, our flesh faints,
Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense.
Analysis of Gumilev’s poem “The Sixth Sense”
It is no secret that the Russian poet Nikolai Gumilyov had a certain gift of foresight. In any case, in one poem he very accurately described his own death and the person who would end his life. The poet did not know only the exact date of death, although he foresaw that it would happen quite soon.
It was to this amazing gift that Nikolai Gumilyov dedicated his poem “The Sixth Sense,” written in 1920 - less than a year before his own death. There are no mystical prophecies in this work that literary scholars would subsequently have to decipher. The author is only trying to understand what this notorious sixth sense is and what exactly it is based on.
With his inherent fundamentalism, Nikolai Gumilev examines various aspects of human life, emphasizing that each of us strives, first of all, for material wealth. “Good bread”, women and wine – this is the minimum that any man who knows perfectly well how to manage these priceless gifts of life can be satisfied with. The situation is much more complicated with spiritual values, which cannot be “neither eaten, nor drunk, nor kissed.” In fact, what to do with the pink dawn and immortal poems that are intangible, but fill the soul with trembling excitement? Nikolai Gumilev does not have an answer to this question either. However, the poet is convinced that it is the ability to enjoy beauty that influences the development of not only the five basic senses of a person, but also endows him with the gift of foresight.
The author compares it to the wings of an angel, believing that the sixth sense is of divine origin. And the purer a person is spiritually, the easier it is for him to see what is hidden from us by fate itself. However, Nikolai Gumilyov does not deny that people lacking high moral qualities can also have a similar gift. And the “wings that have appeared” on the shoulders of the “slippery creature” cause her a feeling of complete powerlessness, as well as pain and suffering, because now she will have to make a huge sacrifice to the world - to give up her spiritual dirt, to become better and purer.
The process of acquiring the sixth sense, according to Nikolai Gumilyov, is very long and painful. Using a very colorful metaphor, the poet compares its appearance with an operation, thanks to which “under the scalpel of nature and art” a person eventually gains the ability to foresee the future. However, this knowledge is very burdensome, because under its weight “our spirit screams, our flesh faints.” The author does not consider it necessary to explain in this work why exactly the fate of the one who is called clairvoyant these days is so unenviable. But, according to the recollections of eyewitnesses, this gift greatly depressed Nikolai Gumilyov, who foresaw many events in his own life, but could not change them. In particular, it is known for certain that his love for the poetess Anna Akhmatova, whom he considered the product of dark forces, and called his wife nothing more than a witch, forced the poet to make three suicide attempts. Thus, Nikolai Gumilyov tried to break the vicious circle, realizing that he could not exist without his chosen one, and at the same time knowing for certain that by agreeing to marry him, Akhmatova would turn his life into a complete nightmare. That is why the poet subconsciously sought death and was ready to accept it, knowing that his life was short. AND it was Gumilyov’s sixth sense that he would not die in his own bed in the company of a notary, as a decent citizen, but will be shot (in the name of or in spite of?) his own love less than a year after the creation of this poem.
Arie Olman
...So century after century - how soon, Lord? –
Under the scalpel of nature and art
Our spirit screams, our flesh faints,
Giving birth to an organ for the sixth sense.
In the poem “The Sixth Sense,” written in the last year of his life, Nikolai Gumilyov discusses the limitations of the usual senses that give a person the opportunity to perceive the material world, and predicts the inevitable formation of some other, additional sense, without which the world is incomplete. Gumilyov, apparently, meant by the “sixth sense” something that helps to fully experience the “pink dawn over the cold skies” and “immortal poetry” - a sense of beauty. This is how Friedlander and Zholkovsky understand this poem, defining it as “a rhetorical treatise on the need for a sixth – aesthetic – sense.” You can also call it a feeling of poetry and harmony. The imagery of this poem by Gumilyov most likely reflected the statements of the popular art critic Walter Pater (Pater) of his time, who also spoke about a new organ for the perception of beauty: “Hegel in the Philosophy of Art when assessing his predecessors<...>expressed a remarkable judgment about Winckelmann’s works: “<...>He should be considered one of those who managed to invent a new organ for the human spirit in the field of art.” The best that can be said about critical activity is that it has opened a new feeling, a new organ."
We find similar motives for the limitations of our feelings and the inability to properly perceive and express the beauty of the world in Zhukovsky:
That our earthly language is before the wondrous one
nature?
With what careless and easy freedom
She scattered beauty everywhere
And diversity agreed with unity!
But where, what brush painted it?
Barely one of her features
With effort you will be able to catch inspiration...
But is it possible to transfer living things to the dead?
Who could recreate a creation in words?
Is the inexpressible subject to expression?..
Holy sacraments, only the heart
knows you.
Is it not often at the majestic hour
Evening land of transformation -
When the troubled soul is full
By the prophecy of a great vision
And carried away into the boundless, -
A painful feeling lingers in my chest,
We want to keep the beautiful in flight,
We want to give a name to the unnamed -
And art is silent and exhausted?..
And Gumilyov’s senior contemporary Konstantin Balmont declared – quite in the spirit of Russian symbolism – that to “express the inexpressible” an additional, sixth sense is needed:
The five senses are the road of lies.
But there is a delight of ecstasy,
When the truth itself is visible to us.
Then mysterious to the slumbering eye
The depths of the night burn with patterns...
N. Gumilev.
However, a completely different meaning of the concept of “sixth sense” has taken hold in modern consciousness. According to dictionary definitions, the “sixth sense” is “a way of perception independent of the five senses, intuition,” “a way of determining the true nature of a person or situation.” Why do we understand these words differently than Pater and Gumilev?
I asked myself this question when, to my great surprise, I discovered the “Humilean” definition of the sixth sense in Abraham ibn Ezra’s commentary on the book of Koeles (Ecclesiastes). Abraham ibn Ezra (1089–1164) was born in Muslim Spain but traveled throughout the world from Algiers to London. He was a poet, mathematician, astrologer, philosopher, Torah commentator and doctor - like every educated Jew of that era. He was distinguished by a sharp mind and wide education, but he was an eternal loser and a wanderer, in particular due to his quarrelsome character and caustic tongue. Commenting on the books of the Tanakh, he often deviated from the main topic, and in one of these lyrical digressions (commentary on Koeles, 5:1), Ibn Ezra carefully, point by point, demolishes the art of traditional Jewish religious poetry - piyut. He identifies four fundamental disagreements with Piyut, but we will focus on one that is important for our topic. Piyut authors sometimes allowed imprecise rhymes, for example, the great Elazar Ha-Kalir sometimes rhymed yom (“day”) and pidyon (“redemption”). This grated on Ibn Ezra’s ears, and he sarcastically remarks:
After all, what is the purpose of rhyme? Be pleasing to the ear, so that the end of one word is felt to be similar to the end of another. And he probably had a sixth sense (kargasha shishit), with which he felt that the meme was similar in pronunciation to nun. But they belong to different places of sound production!
(it should be clarified that according to the ancient Palestinian book Seifer Yetzirah, which laid the foundations of Hebrew grammar, the sound “m” refers to “labial” and “n” to “dental”).
Ibn Ezra here calls the sense of rhyme, consonance, and harmony of a verse the “sixth sense.” The meaning of his remark is this: Ibn Ezra in his commentary suggests that Elazar a-Kalir felt rhyme differently than he did, which is why his consonances were so strange. And since from the point of view of common sense, taste and grammar, Kalir’s rhymes cannot be considered perfect, it remains to be assumed that he used some kind of sixth sense when writing poetry. Ibn Ezra uses this expression with a certain shade of disdain, since (as will be shown below) he did not believe in the real existence of the sixth sense. In contrast, Gumilyov, the heir of romanticism and the son of his century, which had already realized the limitations of human knowledge, seriously suggests the possibility of the manifestation of such a feeling.
It is noteworthy that the phrase “sixth sense” no longer appears in all Jewish post-biblical and medieval literature. To understand its possible origins in the commentary of Ibn Ezra, let us turn to the works of classical philosophy in which it could appear.
The first of the thinkers of the Ancient world to speak about the five senses was, apparently, Democritus in his work “Small Cosmos,” which has survived only in fragments. This is what they say on his behalf: “Democritus said that animals, sages and gods have more (five) senses.” Aristotle, in his treatise “On the Soul,” judged that there are five senses: “That there are no other [external] senses except the five (I mean sight, hearing, smell, taste, touch), this can be seen.” .
But, according to Aristotle, there is a certain “general feeling” that unites and synthesizes information received from five ordinary ones:
“For general properties, we have a common feeling and perceive them in a non-accidental way; therefore, they do not constitute the exclusive property of any feeling: otherwise we would not feel them in any way.”
Muslim philosophy, which took shape in the 8th–9th centuries, was based on the writings of Greek thinkers, initially in retellings by Syrian philosophers, and later in translations into Arabic. In the Muslim world, the great “Aristu” was a model thinker, and his writings were the basis for numerous independent and semi-independent philosophical concepts. With reference to Aristotle, the concepts of “five senses” and “sixth sense” became widespread in medieval philosophy, and they were used by adherents of many religions, who treated Stagirite with equal reverence. For example, the Spanish Muslim philosopher Ibn Hazm (994–1063) believed that the sixth sense is the soul’s knowledge of primary concepts, axioms that do not require proof. “So, the soul knows that the part is smaller than the whole, because even a baby, who has just learned to distinguish things, cries if you give him only two dates, but calms down if you give him more. After all, the whole is greater than the part, although the child does not yet know the limits of applicability of this position... The same feeling tells the child that two things cannot occupy the same place: we see how he fights for a place to sit, realizing that the place is not enough for another and that while another occupies that place, he himself cannot occupy it...” Another Islamic philosopher, Ibn Rushd (1126–1198), also believed that the “common sense” is responsible for the perception of objects that cause the reaction of several senses immediately, helps to distinguish and compare the data of these senses and thus contributes to a comprehensive knowledge of the object.
Some followers of the great Hellene dared to argue with him: since there are only five senses, then there cannot be a sixth. This is how the 12th century Arab Aristotelian thinker Ibn Bajjah (1082–1138) retells the great teacher, adding something of his own:
Further, if some kind of sixth sense really existed, then it would necessarily have to exist in some animal. But this animal would necessarily have to be not a man, but some other creature, for man by nature has only these five senses. This animal, therefore, would have to be some kind of imperfect living being. However, it is impossible for an imperfect being to have something that a perfect being does not have.
Works of Abraham ibn Ezra.
Title page.
Muslim philosophy, in turn, contributed to the formation of Jewish medieval philosophy - initially also in Arabic. This latter was fed by the ideas of Islamic philosophers and used their terminology.
Jewish thinkers quoted and paraphrased their Arab colleagues, sometimes without even indicating the source of their words. The great Aristo was as revered by Jews as by Muslims. Apparently, Ibn Ezra was based on the ideas of Aristotle (in Arabic translation, of course) when he sarcastically assumed that his predecessor had some kind of non-existent “sixth sense”.
Muslims, Christians and Jews reverently revered the Stagirite and recognized his almost unquestionable authority. Aristotle’s “general sense” appears under the name “sixth sense” and in Christian theology, in Augustine the Blessed (354–430), in the treatise “On Free Will”:
I believe that it is also obvious that this inner sense perceives not only what it receives from the five bodily senses, but also these senses themselves are perceived by it ... (chapter 4). After all, you cannot say that this sixth sense should be attributed to that class of these three varieties of living beings that also has understanding, but only to that which exists and lives, although it is devoid of understanding; for this feeling is also inherent in animals that do not have understanding... (chapter 5).
Aristotle. Illustration from the Nuremberg Chronicle, late 15th century.
The idea of "general feeling" dominated medieval epistemology and physiology. Even in the 18th century, physiologists Albrecht von Haller and Charles Bonnet searched for the center of “general feeling” in the brain, but without success. However, the term “sixth sense” as an expression of a separate, isolated instrument of perception was not recorded until the 18th century. Scientists of the New Age expanded the boundaries of knowledge, and at the same time, of course, the area of the unknown expanded. People began to think that there are forces of nature that Aristotle did not indicate. During this period, the concept of “animal magnetism” became widespread - “the power with which all animals are gifted to act one over the other and each on its own organization, with greater or lesser power, judging by their mutual strength and the perfection of the animal... This liquid is weightless and so thin and transparent that it is invisible to our eyes... This liquid is warm, but incombustible and has the ability to travel like light... All Mesmer's theories are based on this moisture... This liquid of the vital principle, or mesmeric, like rays of light, does not linger on paths with opaque bodies, as already mentioned above; it penetrates through them like a calorific fluid... can be reflected, intensified and transferred by transparent bodies, like mirrors...” The healer F.A. mentioned in this passage. Mesmer called the sixth sense a certain “way of communication with cosmic magnetic fluids” he proposed through this “animal magnetism.”
The feeling that there was something not described by the usual “geography of feelings” required verbal expression. What, for example, should we call the way in which a lover senses the presence of his beloved? None of the five senses are suitable, so there is a sixth? This was the opinion of the great gastronomer Brillat-Savarin, who listed five senses in his “Physiology of Taste” and added to them “sexual, or the feeling of physical love, attracting people of different sexes to each other.” In modern times, experimental science also began to study the human sensory system. Physiologist Bell in 1826 called the sixth sense muscle sensitivity, proprioceptive reflexes. Indeed, we perceive the stretching or contraction of our muscles, we feel it, but Aristotle saw in this only a manifestation of touch, and until the 19th century no one identified this sensation as an independent feeling. In the 18th century, studies of the sense of balance began, and in the 19th century they were supported by the study of the anatomy and physiology of the middle ear and the entire vestibular apparatus. The sense of balance has also been called the sixth sense by some researchers.
Physiologist Charles Bonnet.
From science and philosophy, the concept of the “sixth sense” moved into literature and became common property. In English literature, the familiar understanding of the “sixth sense” as intuition was first attested at the beginning of the 19th century, according to the authoritative The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms. Pisemsky ironically writes in 1853: “in St. Petersburg, a person, no matter what his situation, develops a sixth sense: the thirst for money... How much temptation!..” Tuzenbach dreams of the future “discovery and development” of the sixth sense in “Three sisters": "After us they will fly in hot air balloons, their jackets will change, they will perhaps discover a sixth sense and develop it, but life will remain the same, a difficult life, full of secrets and happy..."
In Erskine Childers' novel The Riddle of the Sands (1903), which pioneered the "spy thriller" genre, the sixth sense is the ability to navigate in fog.
Illustration of the concept of “living magnetism” by F.A. Mesmer.
Thinkers and scientists described ever new methods of extrasensory perception, complementing the usual five senses - “animal magnetism”, sexual instinct, muscle sensitivity, and the work of the vestibular apparatus. But our language responds even more sensitively to the desire to go beyond the world of sensations. The “naive picture of the world,” reflected in the turns of speech and the combination of words in the language, testifies to the confidence that there are ways of understanding the world that do not fit into the Procrustean bed of the five senses; what to call them is a secondary question. The language retains the expressions “feel with the soul”, “feel with the gut”, “feel with the heart”, even “with the spinal cord”, as they sometimes say today - we call all this intuition. But two great poets - the Russian Nikolai Gumilyov and the Jew Abraham ibn Ezra - did not mean this meaning at all, which has already been erased in our time by pseudo-psychologists and occultists of all stripes. For them, the main flaw in the system of sensory organs of the species homo sapiens was the lack of a sense of poetry, the key to the world of harmony, without which a person who is not indifferent to beauty is blind and deaf.
“What should we do with immortal poems?..”
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The poem “The Sixth Sense” was written by Gumilyov in 1920 and published in the collection “Pillar of Fire” in 1921.
Literary direction and genre
The poem belongs to the literary movement of Acmeism. The images of wine in love, good bread, and a woman are both material and close to symbols. The writer even suggests how they can be “used” - eaten, drunk, kissed. But the lyrical hero would like to touch the intangible. This integrity of his worldview is so consistent with the idea of Acmeism!
The genre of the poem is philosophical elegy. The philosophical question of how to define beauty was raised in one of Plato’s ancient dialogues. Aristotle was interested in beauty as a value. The ancient concept of “aestheticos,” that is, “relating to feeling,” was not thought of separately from knowledge or practical activity, from art. It turns out that, according to Gumilyov’s logic, in antiquity the sixth sense was already born, but not yet born.
Theme, main idea and composition
The poem consists of 6 quatrains.
The first stanza talks about the pleasures of human life: wine, bread and woman. These pleasures contain their opposite: you can enjoy a woman only by “first being exhausted.”
The second stanza is an interrogative sentence. This is the main problem that the lyrical hero raises: what to do with things that cannot be used utilitarianly? Among these unearthly, heavenly things are poems.
In the third stanza, the lyrical hero regrets that these intangible things pass by. This is painful, this is “condemnation”.
The next three stanzas represent a period syntactically. The fourth and fifth are examples from the human world and from the animal world, from the past and from the present. We are talking about the development of the entire living and specific person, when the necessary quality has not been formed in an individual living being, but the need for it is already beginning to arise. The last stanza is the conclusion that the “organ for the sixth sense” is being born in pain right now, but slowly, “century after century.”
The theme of the poem is the need for a sixth sense, with the help of which a person is able to comprehend beauty.
It is unlikely that Gumilev allowed the idea that he personally lacked some organs to perceive beauty. And you don’t need a special organ to feel the beauty of the dawn or the harmony of a verse. So the main idea of the poem is in the subtext: man, the crown of creation, is perfect. It is in the cry of the spirit, in the exhaustion of the flesh, that the path to seeing the beautiful is found. But a non-utilitarian attitude towards the world must be born. According to Gumilyov, this happens in pain through the joint efforts of “nature and art,” that is, biological and cultural evolution.
Paths and images
In the first two stanzas, epithets are important that characterize opposing phenomena: those perceived by our senses - and the sense of aesthetic that is not subject to them. In love with us wine, Kind bread - and pink dawn, growing colder heaven, unearthly peace, immortals poetry. The first and second stanzas are contrasted with each other using the conjunction But. The antithesis is also contained in the first stanza. She emphasizes that human pleasure can never be perfect. This taste of bitterness (“first exhausted”) is a necessary stage of development.
In the third stanza, the hopelessness and despair of the lyrical hero are expressed in repeated prefixes Not And neither, union But. This stanza is contrasted with the previous one on the principle of statics and dynamics. The second stanza describes the static skies, the dawn, the third - the unstoppable running of the moment. The infinity of our movement is determined by the repetition of the word by.
In metaphors we wring our hands, we are condemned contains the torment of a person who does not have a need, but has a presentiment of its necessity.
The next two extended comparisons, expressed by comparative sentences, explain the image of the previous stanza. The boy may not want a woman, but he has a presentiment of his future.
Likewise, the “slippery creature,” which has not yet evolved into a bird, dreams of the sky (but the thoughts of the lizard are on Gumilyov’s conscience) Epithets of the fifth stanza ( slippery creature, overgrown horsetails) transfer the beginning of the process of the birth of the sixth sense into the depths of centuries, to the beginning of the evolutionary process.
The sixth stanza contains not just the conclusion of the poem, but also the result of the syntactic period, which is built according to the scheme how - so.
This is an appeal to the Lord, in metaphorical images ( under the scalpel of nature and art, the spirit screams, the flesh faints) describing the birth of the sixth sense. The exclamation is the hope that the pain from the perception of beauty will disappear when the organ for the sixth sense appears. But the birth of beauty, a work of art, poetry is associated with pain, which is associated with the cataclysms of the early 20th century.
In the poem, Gumilyov, through a sense of beauty, connects opposite concepts: earthly and heavenly, useful and selfless, earthly and heavenly, material and spiritual.
Meter and rhyme
The poem is written in iambic pentameter with pyrrhichs, bringing the rhythm closer to conversational. The rhyme pattern in the poem is cross, male rhyme alternates with female rhyme.
This famous poem by Gumilyov, written in 1920, was first published in the collection “Pillar of Fire”, compiled by him in the last months of his life and published after his arrest in August 1921. Closely connected in its content with the “Poem of the Beginning”, the poems “Memory”, “The Lost Tram”, “Soul and Body”, it belongs to the most philosophically and artistically profound works of Gumilyov of the last period of his life, imbued with specific features of the poetry of the late Gumilyov “ cosmic" insights.
The poet examines in his poem the history of nature and humanity from an angle that is unusual for him: he portrays man as a link in the thousand-year creativity of nature - in its movement from inert and unconscious matter through the difficult millennium of development of the plant and animal kingdom to the spiritually endowed with the highest abilities of feeling and reason. - a corporeal, consubstantial, integral being. This same creature - man - is taking, according to Gumilev, today a new step in its development - a step towards acquiring the powerful “sixth sense” potentially contained in it, but which has not yet received its mature development. Only now, finally - this is Gumilyov’s thought - under the double combined influence of nature and art, this “sixth sense” - the feeling of Beauty, an aesthetically disinterested attitude towards the world, is born, and the feeling of its birth (like the feeling of any birth in nature and life) is connected with the felt modern people through difficult trials of their spirit and flesh.
There is no doubt that - for all the complexity of Gumilyov’s attitude to the Russian revolution - the poem “The Sixth Sense” is to some extent connected with the poet’s experiences of 1918-1921. Feeling “lost in the abyss of time,” Gumilyov, at the same time, like Blok, Mandelstam, Khodasevich, Voloshin, recognized himself in these tragic days as experiencing difficult and painful, “fatal” (in Tyutchev’s words) moments of the birth of a new thing, unknown to the people of the past generations in the history of mankind, a sense of life that is catastrophic and at the same time full of a definite higher meaning.
Gumilyov's poem "The Sixth Sense" is important in another respect. A careful reading of it casts a new and unexpected light on the mutual relations in the last period of their lives of two great contemporaries, who, according to the long-established historical and literary tradition, are usually considered as people who were not only extremely distant from each other, but who were also direct antagonists in art and life - Blok and Gumilev. And although it is precisely this idea of the relationship between Blok and Gumilyov - especially in the last years of his life - on the one hand, it would seem to receive clear confirmation in the choice of Gumilev, inspired by Gumilyov’s friends and students, to the post of chairman of the St. Petersburg branch of the All-Russian Union of Poets (which he previously held Blok), and on the other hand, is reflected in Blok’s famous article “Without deity, without inspiration (the Acmeist guild)” (1921), directed against Gumilyov; in fact, their creative relationship was more complicated than it seemed to contemporaries.
Despite Blok’s undisguised hostility towards him and his almost complete rejection of Gumilyov’s poetry, the latter believed that next to Blok (whose talent he compared in strength to Lermontov’s), he himself was just one of his younger, and, moreover, modest, contemporary poets . Moreover, in the last years of Gumilyov’s life, his attitude towards the legacy of the Symbolists changed compared to 1910-1913. This is especially clearly evidenced by his posthumously published article on Baudelaire, as well as his translation of Coleridge’s “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner” and a number of already named poems included in the collection “The Pillar of Fire” (the very name of which, as one might assume, has a symbolic meaning and directly is connected with the theme of the close phenomenon in the fields of Russia of the “New Jerusalem” - the “temple”, of which Gumilyov counts himself among the “architects!”
Romanticism (from Schiller to Vladimir Solovyov) - according to Blok - is not just one of the historical phenomena of literature of the last century, but a synonym for that “sixth sense” that has always moved humanity forward, encouraging it to live a “tenfold life”. And this romanticism - “the spirit that flows under every solidified form” and which manifested itself already “in the first manifestation of the curiosity of primitive man” - is especially necessary for modern times, for only it can impart a new impetus to that “popular movement”, “which has lost life and turned into dead inertia."
These reflections by Blok contain an undoubted hint of his assessment of the political situation that has developed in Russia after the October revolution. And this assessment was to a certain extent supported by Gumilyov in the poem “The Sixth Sense.” From the state of “dead inertia” that had engulfed life, both poets called on their contemporaries to acquire an eternally old and at the same time eternally new spiritual value - the “sixth sense”, in the final victory of which they both believed, despite the difficulties they recognized that accompanied the entire path of the development of life from its first spontaneous manifestations in dead, inanimate nature to its painful search in the modern era - the tragic era of wars and revolutions. And although today we can recognize the views of Blok and Gumilyov as a historical utopia, it is impossible not to pay tribute to the height of the spirit of both of these wonderful poets, shown by them on the eve of their tragic death.