Хунну (The Xiongnu), published 60 years ago, was not the first book by Gumilyov that I read. However it was thanks to it that I got interested in Chinese history. Why Chinese? Well, the Xiongnu had long and complex relationships with China, and practically everything that was known about them came from Chinese sources. Now Gumilyov himself did not read or speak Chinese, so he’s got the material for his book second- (or third-, or higher order) hand, with 19th-century works by Nikita Bichurin, aka Hyacinth (Иакинф), being his main references. So what? That does not make Хунну any less readable. No matter matter what you think of his theories, Gumilyov is a brilliant storyteller. At times, he is even convincing.
Хунну is blissfully free of moralising (something that Gumilyov could not quite avoid in his later works) as well as of Marxist-Leninist ideas which permeated practically all history books published in Soviet times. That could explain why Gumilyov’s own books were not published until perestroika.
Curiously, throughout the book Gumilyov mentions his ethnogenesis theory (to be developed in his 1979 monograph Ethnogenesis and the Biosphere of Earth) as if it were something widely known and accepted. Which, obviously, was not the case in 1960.
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