"Two voices call out the roll": on the decoding of N.Gumilev's "The lost tram"

In the present article an attempt to interpret one of the key poems of the mature Gumilev is made. A mysterious poem «The Lost Tram» has being regarded by philologists as some culture paradigm contamination, where "the other's word' controls and provokes many semantic processes. The author of the article gives her own interpretation of the poem, analyzing the text oriented on A. Akhmatova's lyric poem "The Way of All the Earth" which was written about 20 years later. The reconstruction of the dialogue between two key texts of the epoch, the analysis of the conception of paradoxical correlation of alive and dead in their basis allows the author of the present article to perceive Gumilev's poem as the basic prototext for Akhmatova's poem as well as to reveal new sides and senses, to put both of them into "St. Petersburg myth" of Russian poetry.