Alexander Veltman
Encyclopedia
Alexander Fomich Veltman ( — ) was one of the most successful Russia
Russia
Russia or , officially known as both Russia and the Russian Federation , is a country in northern Eurasia. It is a federal semi-presidential republic, comprising 83 federal subjects...

n prose writers of the 1830s and 1840s, "popular for various modes of Romantic fiction—historical, Gothic, fantastic, and folkloristic." He was one of the pioneers of Russian science fiction
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

.

Life

Veltman was born in Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg
Saint Petersburg is a city and a federal subject of Russia located on the Neva River at the head of the Gulf of Finland on the Baltic Sea...

, the first of four children of Foma Fomich Veltman and Maria Petrovna Kolpanicheva. His father had served in the military before becoming a minor civil servant, rising to the rank of titular counselor; Russian sources say he was from the Swedish nobility, but there is evidence to suggest he may have been of German origin. Veltman said in an unpublished autobiography that he had learned to tell stories from his father's orderly, a shoemaker he called "Uncle Boris," but his formal education began at the age of eight at a Lutheran private school. In 1811 he entered the school for the nobility attached to Moscow University, but his studies were interrupted the next year by the invasion of Napoleon, who is featured in several of his books. Like much of the population, the Veltmans fled Moscow, staying in Kostroma
Kostroma
Kostroma is a historic city and the administrative center of Kostroma Oblast, Russia. A part of the Golden Ring of Russian towns, it is located at the confluence of the Volga and Kostroma Rivers...

 until the French retreat.

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 Tulchin in the southern Ukraine and assigned to work on a topographical survey of Bessarabia
Bessarabia
Bessarabia is a historical term for the geographic region in Eastern Europe bounded by the Dniester River on the east and the Prut River on the west....

, a region in which he would spend the next twelve years and one which figures prominently in his work. Tulchin was the chief center of the Southern Society of the Decembrists
Decembrist revolt
The Decembrist revolt or the Decembrist uprising took place in Imperial Russia on 14 December , 1825. Russian army officers led about 3,000 soldiers in a protest against Nicholas I's assumption of the throne after his elder brother Constantine removed himself from the line of succession...

 and several of the officers who were later arrested were his friends, but there is no evidence that Veltman sympathized with the revolt.

In Bessarabia, Veltman became popular among his fellow officers for his humorous verse, but he was eclipsed when Alexander Pushkin arrived in Kishinev, the capital of the province, in 1820. Although Pushkin was only twenty-one, he was already famous, and Veltman tried to avoid meeting him ("I was afraid that someone in the group might say to him in my presence, 'Pushkin, this fellow of ours also writes poetry'"), but the two soon became friendly and Pushkin praised Veltman's poetry in a letter to a friend. After taking part in the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829), in which he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir
Order of St. Vladimir
The Cross of Saint Vladimir was an Imperial Russian Order established in 1782 by Empress Catherine II in memory of the deeds of Saint Vladimir, the Grand Prince and the Baptizer of the Kievan Rus....

 (second class) for bravery, Veltman left the army to pursue a career in literature, retiring in January 1831 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

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, and in 1842 he became assistant director of the Kremlin Museum of Armaments
Kremlin Armoury
The Kremlin Armory is one of the oldest museums of Moscow, established in 1808 and located in the Moscow Kremlin .The Kremlin Armoury originated as the royal arsenal in 1508. Until the transfer of the court to St Petersburg, the Armoury was in charge of producing, purchasing and storing weapons,...

, 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
Mikhail Pogodin
Mikhail Petrovich Pogodin was a Russian historian and journalist who, jointly with Nikolay Ustryalov, dominated the national historiography between the death of Nikolay Karamzin in 1826 and the rise of Sergey Solovyov in the 1850s. He is best remembered as a staunch proponent of the Normanist...

 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."

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 Maxim Gorky
Maxim Gorky
Alexei Maximovich Peshkov , primarily known as Maxim Gorky , was a Russian and Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.-Early years:...

 asked Kornei Chukovsky if he had read her work, and said "She had a fine novel in Otechestvennye zapiski in the fifties.") In 1852 Veltman became Director of the Museum of Armaments, and he and his wife became prosperous, entertaining guests on Thursdays in their large and luxurious new apartment near the Arbat. In 1854 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences
Russian Academy of Sciences
The Russian Academy of Sciences consists of the national academy of Russia and a network of scientific research institutes from across the Russian Federation as well as auxiliary scientific and social units like libraries, publishers and hospitals....

. Elena died in 1868 and Veltman himself two years later.

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." 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." In it, Veltman "gives whole conversations in Yiddish, Modern Greek and Rumanian, as well as in the more readily intelligible German and French."

He followed Strannik with Koshchei bessmertny: Bylina starogo vremeni (Koshchei the immortal: a bylina
Bylina
Bylina or Bylyna is a traditional Russian oral epic narrative poem. Byliny singers loosely utilize historical fact greatly embellished with fantasy or hyperbole to create their songs...

 of old times, 1833), a parody of the historical adventure novels popular at the time. Its hero, Iva Olelkovich Puta-Zarev, is a sort of Russian Don Quixote, his brains addled by overexposure to Russian folklore. After his marriage, he imagines that his bride has been captured by Koschei
Koschei
In Slavic folklore, Koschei is an archetypal male antagonist, described mainly as abducting the hero's wife. None of the existing tales actually describes his appearance, though in book illustrations, cartoons and cinema he has been most frequently represented as a very old and ugly-looking man...

, and after various adventures the couple are reunited. "Vel'tman indulges in cheerful leaps through space and time, happy to be sidetracked down the byways of history and folk-tale." Critics are in general agreement that Strannik and Koshchei bessmertny are the works that best reflect Veltman's talent.

Also in 1833, Veltman published MMMCDXLVIII god: Rukopisʹ Martyna-Zadeka (3448 A.D.: a manuscript by Martin Zadek), a utopia
Utopia
Utopia is an ideal community or society possessing a perfect socio-politico-legal system. The word was imported from Greek by Sir Thomas More for his 1516 book Utopia, describing a fictional island in the Atlantic Ocean. The term has been used to describe both intentional communities that attempt...

 in which a traveler visits the imaginary Balkan country of Bosphorania, ruled by the righteous Ioann, who devotes all his time and effort to the good of his people; there are descriptions of the social and technological advances of the 35th century, including popular festivals and expeditions to the South Pole. Ioann has an evil twin brother Eol, who seizes power and drives the country into ruin; after his death, peace and order are restored. The novel is a successor to the utopias of the 18th century and represents the more advanced philosophical ideas of the 1820s. Martin Zadek is not an invention of Veltman's but a popular Nostradamus
Nostradamus
Michel de Nostredame , usually Latinised to Nostradamus, was a French apothecary and reputed seer who published collections of prophecies that have since become famous worldwide. He is best known for his book Les Propheties , the first edition of which appeared in 1555...

-type figure of the day; a book of his predictions was published in Basel
Basel
Basel or Basle In the national languages of Switzerland the city is also known as Bâle , Basilea and Basilea is Switzerland's third most populous city with about 166,000 inhabitants. Located where the Swiss, French and German borders meet, Basel also has suburbs in France and Germany...

 in 1770 and translated into Russian the same year (editions continued to be printed right up to the October Revolution
October Revolution
The October Revolution , also known as the Great October Socialist Revolution , Red October, the October Uprising or the Bolshevik Revolution, was a political revolution and a part of the Russian Revolution of 1917...

), and he was referred to by Pushkin and Zamyatin, among others.

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." The novel includes digressions into philosophy, ideas on education, and descriptions of provincial life; the student protagonist has been seen as a precursor of Dostoevsky's doubles.

Svetoslavich: Vrazhii pitomets (Svetoslavich: the devil's foster child, 1835) is another historical fantasy; its hero, Prince Vladimir
Vladimir I of Kiev
Vladimir Sviatoslavich the Great Old East Slavic: Володимѣръ Свѧтославичь Old Norse as Valdamarr Sveinaldsson, , Vladimir, , Volodymyr, was a grand prince of Kiev, ruler of Kievan Rus' in .Vladimir's father was the prince Sviatoslav of the Rurik dynasty...

, has an evil double, the "devil's foster child" of the title, who is the son of Prince Sviatoslav
Sviatoslav I of Kiev
Sviatoslav I Igorevich ; , also spelled Svyatoslav, was a prince of Rus...

 and Inegilda, miraculously stolen from his mother's womb by Satan "and brought up to be the Devil's weapon against the danger that Vladimir may bring Christianity to Rus." The situation is parallel to that of loann and Eol from MMMCDXLVIII god.

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
Science fiction
Science fiction is a genre of fiction dealing with imaginary but more or less plausible content such as future settings, futuristic science and technology, space travel, aliens, and paranormal abilities...

 novel and the first novel to use time travel
Time travel
Time travel is the concept of moving between different points in time in a manner analogous to moving between different points in space. Time travel could hypothetically involve moving backward in time to a moment earlier than the starting point, or forward to the future of that point without the...

. The narrator rides to ancient Greece on a hippogriff
Hippogriff
A Hippogriff is a legendary creature, supposedly the offspring of a griffin and a mare.- Early references :...

, hoping to discover what aspects of life and character made it possible for the ancients to be great military leaders and rulers of peoples. ("Kalimeros" is a Greek equivalent of Buonaparte, the original family name of Napoleon I
Napoleon I
Napoleon Bonaparte was a French military and political leader during the latter stages of the French Revolution.As Napoleon I, he was Emperor of the French from 1804 to 1815...

; Veltman probably got the idea for this kind of wordplay from Victor Hugo
Victor Hugo
Victor-Marie Hugo was a Frenchpoet, playwright, novelist, essayist, visual artist, statesman, human rights activist and exponent of the Romantic movement in France....

's 1828 poem "Bounaberdi.") He abducts the Pythia
Pythia
The Pythia , commonly known as the Oracle of Delphi, was the priestess at the Temple of Apollo at Delphi, located on the slopes of Mount Parnassus. The Pythia was widely credited for her prophecies inspired by Apollo. The Delphic oracle was established in the 8th century BC...

; finds himself in the camp of Philip of Macedon
Philip II of Macedon
Philip II of Macedon "friend" + ἵππος "horse" — transliterated ; 382 – 336 BC), was a king of Macedon from 359 BC until his assassination in 336 BC. He was the father of Alexander the Great and Philip III.-Biography:...

, father of Alexander the Great; and meets Aristotle
Aristotle
Aristotle was a Greek philosopher and polymath, a student of Plato and teacher of Alexander the Great. His writings cover many subjects, including physics, metaphysics, poetry, theater, music, logic, rhetoric, linguistics, politics, government, ethics, biology, and zoology...

 in Athens. He then takes a trip with Alexander in which he mocks pagan rites and tries to pay for sacred writings with a 19th-century assignat
Assignat
Assignat was the type of a monetary instrument used during the time of the French Revolution, and the French Revolutionary Wars.- France :...

. In the end he concludes that people of all times and places are the same, and it is the laws of history that can turn them into heroes; the author illustrates this by remarking that Alexander's profile reminds him of a Bessarabian stationmaster. Having bid farewell to Alexander, the protagonist returns to his own century on his "time machine."

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 control over his plots and style, curbing his earlier fondness for extravagant digression and verbal play." 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." The adventures of the heroine, Zoya Romanovna, "illustrate the perennial split in human consciousness between what one feels and what one thinks." Serdtse i dumka was one of Dostoevsky's favorite novels.

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 Nala
Nala
Nala , a character in Hindu mythology, is the king of Nishadha Kingdom, son of Virasena. Nala is known for his skill with horses and culinary expertise. He marries princess Damayanti, of Vidarbha Kingdom, and their story is told in the Mahabharata. His main weakness is gambling...

 and Damayanti
Damayanti
Damayanti , a character in Hindu mythology, was the princess of Vidarbha Kingdom, who married king Nala, of Nishadha Kingdom, and their story is told in the Mahabharata.-The story:...

 from the Mahabharata
Mahabharata
The Mahabharata is one of the two major Sanskrit epics of ancient India and Nepal, the other being the Ramayana. The epic is part of itihasa....

, and had plans to write a continuation of Pushkin's Rusalka. He was also engaged in study of the history and culture of the Slavs, and was a strong supporter of the Bulgarian Renaissance. His story "Travel Impressions, and, among Other Things, a Pot of Geraniums" (1840) "contains some fascinating details about travel by coach as well as what may be the first description in Russian literature of travel by railroad."

In the late 1840s Veltman began a new series of novels to which he was to dedicate 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.
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 1963 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." However, he has always had influential defenders. Tolstoy
Leo Tolstoy
Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy was a Russian writer who primarily wrote novels and short stories. Later in life, he also wrote plays and essays. His two most famous works, the novels War and Peace and Anna Karenina, are acknowledged as two of the greatest novels of all time and a pinnacle of realist...

 called him lively and exact, with "no exaggeration," and said that at times he was better than Gogol; Dostoevsky was a champion of his work, and Joseph Frank, Dostoevsky's biographer, called him "one of the most original novelists of the 1830s."

English Translations

  • Travel Impressions and, Among Other Things, a Pot of Geraniums, (Story), from Russian Romantic Prose: An Anthology, Translation Press, 1979.

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 0810115263

External links

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