Alexander Veltman
Alexander Fomich Veltman | |
---|---|
Born | 30 July [O.S. 18 July] 1800 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire |
Died | 23 January [O.S. 11 January] 1870 Moscow, Russian Empire |
Occupation | novelist |
Alexander Fomich Veltman (Russian: Алекса́ндр Фоми́ч Ве́льтман) (20 July [O.S. 8 July] 1800[1] — 23 January [O.S. 11 January] 1870) was one of the most successful Russian prose writers of the 1830s and 1840s, "popular for various modes of Romantic fiction — historical, Gothic, fantastic, and folkloristic".[2] He was one of the pioneers of Russian science fiction.
Life
Veltman was born in
In 1814, he resumed his education. He graduated in 1817 from the Korpus kolonnovozhatykh, a school established by General Nikolay N. Muravyov in his home to train staff officers, and was commissioned as an ensign (praporshchik) in the army. (While still a student at the Korpus, he wrote an arithmetic textbook that was published in 1817.) He was posted to the Second Army at
In Bessarabia, Veltman became popular among his fellow officers for his humorous verse, but he was eclipsed when
Veltman married his second cousin Anna Pavlovna Veidel in 1832 (after some difficulty with her family) and his daughter Nadezhda was born in 1837, so he needed more financial support than his military pension and his literary career could provide; though his work was extremely popular in the mid-1830s, it didn't bring in much income, and an attempt to create a journal, Kartiny sveta [Pictures of the world, 1836-37], was a financial failure.[6] In 1842 he became assistant director of the Kremlin Museum of Armaments, a post that provided him with a good salary, a government apartment, and the rank of court councilor, so that he was free to write and pursue his antiquarian interests. In 1848 his friend Mikhail Pogodin invited him to help edit the journal Moskvityanin (The Muscovite), and from January 1849 through March 1850 its pages "bear his considerable imprint in the form of the numerous articles and reviews written by him as well as through his rather arbitrary editorial treatment of the contributions to the magazine written by others."[7]
Anna Pavlovna died in 1847, and in 1850 he married Elena Ivanovna Kube, who had been a successful writer under her maiden name and now took Veltman's. (In 1919
Work
Veltman's first novel, Strannik (The wanderer, 1831–32), had extraordinary success. Laura Jo McCullough wrote: "The Wanderer is, in a sense, Veltman's artistic manifesto and reflects his debt to both Sterne and Jean Paul."[9] Set mainly in Bessarabia, it is "a parodic revival of the travel notes genre, a combination of an imaginary journey taking place on a map in the narrator's study with details derived from a real journey over the same territory some years before."[10] In it, Veltman "gives whole conversations in Yiddish, Modern Greek and Rumanian, as well as in the more readily intelligible German and French."[11]
He followed Strannik with Koshchei bessmertny: Bylina starogo vremeni (Koshchei the immortal: a
Also in 1833, Veltman published MMMCDXLVIII god: Rukopisʹ Martyna-Zadeka (3448 A.D.: a manuscript by Martin Zadek), a
In 1834, he published Lunatik: Sluchai (The sleepwalker: an incident), a love story set against the background of Napoleon's invasion; the sleepwalker of the title is a university student who "undergoes a series of hair-raising adventures as he searches for his lady-love, only to discover in the end that she is his sister".
Svetoslavich: Vrazhii pitomets (Svetoslavich: the devil's foster child, 1835) is another historical fantasy; its hero,
In 1836, Veltman published Predki Kalimerosa: Aleksandr Filippovich Makedonskii (The forebears of Kalimeros: Alexander, son of Philip of Macedon), which had considerable success; it has been called the first original Russian science fiction novel and the first novel to use
Virginiya, ili poezdka v Rossiyu (Virginia, or a journey to Russia, 1837) and Serdtse i dumka: Priklyuchenie (Heart and head: an adventure, 1838) returned to a contemporary setting and marked a turning point for Veltman: "Henceforth he exercised greater control over his plots and style, curbing his earlier fondness for extravagant digression and verbal play.[19] Virginiya is a simple love story that satirizes foreign attitudes toward Russia; Serdtse i dumka is a fairy-tale allegory in which "the devil intends to marry off all the bachelors in the town, but miscalculates: they all fall in love with the same young girl, the novel's heroine. The incident reveals the way in which pandemonium has taken over from pantheon: for here, in effect, the devil has assumed the role of Cupid."[20] The adventures of the heroine, Zoya Romanovna, "illustrate the perennial split in human consciousness between what one feels and what one thinks".[21] Serdtse i dumka was one of Dostoevsky's favorite novels.[22]
The theme of Predki Kalimerosa was carried on in Veltman's General Kalomeros: Roman (General Kalomeros: a novel, 1840), in which Napoleon (alias General Kalomeros), during his invasion of Russia, falls in love with Klavdia, the daughter of a Russian adventurer named Lovsky, and attempts to double himself, so that Napoleon can conquer Russia while the unknown "General Kalomeros" can remain with his beloved. However, historical necessity separates the lovers.
During the 1840s, Veltman was drawn again to poetry, and published verse folktales based on the folklore of the West and South Slavs, including "Troyan and Angelitsa" and "Zlatoi and Bela: A Czech Tale". He also translated the tale of
In the late 1840s, Veltman began a new series of novels to which he dedicated the rest of his life. The overall title was Priklyucheniya, pocherpnutye iz morya zhiteiskogo (Adventures drawn from the sea of life), and it consisted of four novels published from 1848 to 1862, plus a fifth that survives in manuscript form. The first was Salomeya, which Aleksey Pleshcheyev called "a first-rate work", writing to Dostoevsky:
It's been a long time since I read such a forceful, biting satire on our society. Education, Moscow family life, and, finally, army officers in the person of the hero are thoroughly scourged. Under some of the scenes one could boldly write the signature of Gogol. There is so much humor and typicality in them. And, along with this, it's tremendously engrossing.[25]
The sequels were Chudodei (The miracle worker, 1856), a comic novel satirizing the lower middle class; Vospitanitsa Sara (Sara, a ward, 1862), the story of a girl who is taken into an aristocratic household and becomes a kept woman; and Schast'e - Neschast'e (Fortune - misfortune, 1863), about Mikhailo Gorazdov and his friends, who leave their peaceful and productive lives in Bessarabia for the false glitter of the capital and are nearly ruined before they return, chastened, to find true happiness in their homeland.
Reputation
Boris Yakovlevich Bukhshtab, in his 1926 article "Pervye romany Vel'tmana" (Veltman's earliest novels), wrote: "In the history of Russian literature there is no other writer who, having enjoyed as much popularity in his own time as Vel'tman, so rapidly disappeared into complete oblivion."[26] However, he has always had influential defenders. Tolstoy called him lively and exact, with "no exaggeration", and said that at times he was better than Gogol;[27] Dostoevsky was a champion of his work, and Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky's biographer, called him "one of the most original novelists of the 1830s".[28]
English translations
- Travel Impressions and, Among Other Things, a Pot of Geraniums, (story), from Russian Romantic Prose: An Anthology, Translation Press, 1979.
References
- ^ Date given by Akutin and the Great Russian Encyclopedia; the Great Soviet Encyclopedia gives 30 July [O.S. 18 July] 1800.
- ISBN 0-300-10611-4), p. 605.
- ^ James J. Gebhard in Veltman, Selected Stories, p. 2.
- ^ Veltman, Selected Stories, p. 3.
- ^ Goodliffe, "Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman," p. 866.
- ^ Akutin, "Александр Вельтман и его роман 'Странник'".
- ^ Veltman, Selected Stories, p. 7.
- ^ Chukovsky, Diary, 1901-1969, p. 61.
- ^ Laura Jo McCullough, review of Veltman, Selected Stories, in Slavic and East European Journal 44 (Spring, 2000), pp. 114-116.
- ISBN 0-88233-739-4), p. 159.
- ISBN 0-88233-938-9), p. 242.
- ^ Goodliffe, "Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman," p. 867.
- ^ Akutin, "Александр Вельтман и его роман 'Странник'".
- ISBN 0-271-01967-0), p. 154.
- ^ Goodliffe, Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman, p. 867.
- ^ Brown, A History of Russian Literature of the Romantic Period, p. 254.
- ^ Akutin, "Александр Вельтман и его роман 'Странник'".
- ^ Lada Panova, "Египетский текст русской литературы" (The Egyptian text of Russian literature), Zvezda 2006/4: 192-206.
- ^ Goodliffe, Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman, p. 867.
- ISBN 90-420-0615-3), p. 30.
- ^ Goodliffe, Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman, p. 867.
- ISBN 0-691-12819-7), p. 33.
- ^ Akutin, "Александр Вельтман и его роман 'Странник'".
- ^ James J. Gebhard in Veltman, Selected Stories, p. 8.
- ^ James J. Gebhard in Veltman, Selected Stories, p. 7.
- ^ Quoted in Goodliffe, Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman, p. 866, from Ray Parrott's 1985 translation.
- ISBN 0-300-11166-5), p. 67.
- ^ Frank, Dostoevsky: A Writer in His Time, p. 33.
Sources
- Yury Akutin, Александр Вельтман и его роман "Странник" (A.V. and his novel Strannik), 1978: detailed biography and description of works (in Russian).
- James Gebhard, Aleksander Fomich Veltman: A Moscow Russophile between East and West, Oriental Research Partners, 1981.
- John Goodliffe, "Aleksander Fomich Vel'tman," in Neil Cornwell and Nicole Christian (eds.), Reference Guide to Russian Literature, Taylor & Francis, 1998 (ISBN 1884964109), pp. 866ff.
- A. F. Veltman, Selected Stories, ed. and trans. James J. Gebhard, Northwestern University Press, 1998: ISBN 0-8101-1526-3
External links
- Works by or about Alexander Veltman at Internet Archive
- Works in Russian (at Moshkow site)