to Petrograd. There he published several new collections, Tabernacle and Bonfire, and finally divorced Akhmatova (August 5, 1918), whom he had left for another woman several years prior. The following year he married Anna Nikolaevna Engelhardt, a noblewoman and daughter of a well-known historian. Execution In 1920 Gumilev co-founded the All-Russia Union of Writers. He made no secret of his anti-communist views. He also made the Sign of the Cross in public and didn't care to hide his contempt for "half-literate Bolsheviks". On August 3, 1921, he was arrested by the Cheka on charges of participation in a nonexistent monarchist conspiracy known as the "Petrograd military organization". On August 24, the Petrograd Cheka decreed execution of 61 participants of the case, including Nikolay Gumilev. They were shot on August 26 in the Kovalevsky Forest (the actual date was established only in 2014; previously it was thought he died on August 25). Maxim Gorky, his friend and fellow writer, hurried to Moscow and appealed to Lenin, but was unable to save Gumilev. Legacy Gumilev's execution placed a stigma on Akhmatova and on their son, Lev. Lev was arrested later in the purges of the 1930s and spent almost two decades in a gulag. Despite Gumilev's execution, Gondla was again performed in Petrograd in January 1922: "The play, despite its crowd scenes being enacted on a tiny stage, was a major success. Yet when the Petrograd audience called for the author, who was now officially an executed counter-revolutionary traitor, the play was removed from the repertoire and the theatre disbanded." In February 1934, as they walked along a Moscow street, Osip Mandelstam quoted Gondla's words "I am ready to die" to Akhmatova, and she repeated them in her "Poem without a Hero." Cultural influence Although banned in the Soviet times, Gumilev was loved for his adolescent longing for travel and giraffes and hippos, for his dreams of a fifteen-year-old captain" His "The Tram That Lost Its Way" is considered one of the greatest poems of the 20th century. The Russian progressive rock band Little Tragedies used the poetry of Gumilev in many of their songs, and had four albums which were entirely based on Gumilev's poetry (The Sun of the Spirit, Porcelain Pavilion, Return, Cross). In 2016 an English translation of his verse drama Gondla was published by the Irish poet and diplomat Philip McDonagh and a production toured in Ireland. See