“Providential” Narrative in the Poem “Adam’s Dream” by N.S. Gumilev. Article First

The article examines the narrative poetics of N. Gumilev’s poem “Adam’s Dream” as a realization of the poet’s historiosophical and eschatological views at the turn of 1909–1910. The fi rst article explores the conceptual foundations of Gumilev’s lyrical narrative, coupled with the concept of “adamism”. “Adamism”, which appears as a semantic basis formed in the poet’s work of the acmeistic paradigm of worldview, turns out to be the principle of artistic verifi cation of the interaction of the microcosm and the macrocosm. Ideas about Adam in the poetics of N. Gumilev’s 1909–1910s grow out of an early symbolist refl ection on the dichotomy of reality and ideal, reality and origins, time and eternity, becomes a sign of dynamic being and genuine metamorphoses. In the poem “Adam’s Dream”, which is a conceptual realization of the “providential” narrative in N. Gumilev’s poetry, the First Man Adam appears as the bearer and embodiment of the primordial virginity of the world. Gumilev’s narrative thinking, focused on opening the event horizon of human existence, places Adam at the epicenter of the ontological development of the world. In the poetic world of N. Gumilev, this biblical character is thought of not only as the source of anthropology, but also as the eventful self-realization of man in the world order. Gumilev’s Adam is both an “integral” of humanity’s event perspectives and an invariant of human self-determination, which is explicated in the poetics of the poem “Adam’s Dream”. Accordingly, the poet’s “Adamism” conceptually outlines the contours of the mythopoetic, historical and aesthetic essence of the “the self”, associated with the birthright of Adam. The Eden depicted in Gumilev’s poem appears not only and not so much as a space of harmony, but as a spatial reference point – the movement from eternity into the abyss of time.