Paris, regarded for centuries as the literary capital of the world, the literary ‘homeland of choice’, gave shelter (permanently or temporarily) to many great writers. Poets all over the world have dreamed of gaining access to the French reader; it has tacitly been considered a special stepping stone to global recognition. At the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, the paths of many Russian poets crossed in Paris. It was there that Gumilyov met A. Tolstoy, M. Voloshin, A. Bely and others.
