Theophile of Bodisco

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Theophile Magda Eugenie von Bodisco , born von Wistinghausen , pseudonyms J. von Playe and Magda Kaarsen (born March 15, 1873 in Reval , Russian Empire , † June 17, 1944 in Bad Schachen near Lindau ), was a Baltic German writer and journalist .

Life

Bodisco was born as the daughter of the Evangelical-Lutheran, German-Baltic-Russian doctor and administrative officer Karl Alexander von Wistinghausen (1826-1883) and his wife Nikolette Adelheid (Adele) Anna Theophile (1849-1922), born Countess Stenbock and granddaughter of Henriette Kant (1783) –1850), a niece of Immanuel Kant , born in Reval. She spent her childhood in Reval, on the mansion of her grandfather Karl Magnus Graf Stenbock in Kolk and in Dorpat . Her cousin, the writer Count Eric Stenbock (1860–1895), also lived in the classicist mansion on the Estonian coast. After the first maternal instruction and home tuition from a tutor, which marked the beginning of her school education, she attended a private secondary school for girls, which qualified her students for the tutor's examination. She made her first friendships there, including with the painter Susa Walter , and kept her up into old age. At the urging of her mother, she refrained from her personal plan not to be confirmed . She traveled to Switzerland and Italy with her mother. She made further trips to Finland , Saint Petersburg and Moscow . She soon discovered her interest in writing, which she wanted to devote herself to professionally. Her first story appeared in the Reval newspaper in 1890 under the pseudonym J. von Playe . On July 5, 1896, she married the lawyer and state official Eduard Michael von Bodisco (1863-1940), great-grandson of the Russian admiral Nikolaus (Nikolai) von Bodisco (1756-1815). She gave birth to sons Boris (1897–1973) and Modest (1899–1961) as well as their daughter Beatrice Theophile Anna (married von Cossel, 1903–1999). Reserved to the institution of marriage as “another level of life”, it was able to maintain an inner freedom. Before the First World War she managed to become a well-known author whose novels were published by S. Fischer Verlag and Gebrüder Paetel Verlag and, between 1912 and 1924, described the Baltic German milieu in literary terms. In December 1918, she fled the Red Army from Reval to Berlin , where she had stayed at longer intervals from 1891 to 1914. After the World War, she returned to Reval in 1920, at that time the capital of independent Estonia renamed Tallinn , but in 1927 she and her husband finally returned to the German capital, where she had also lived in 1922/1923. There she worked as a journalist for the Deutsche Rundschau , the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung and the Vossische Zeitung . She wrote newspaper novels and articles in the 1920s. From 1931 to 1939 she lived in Blankenburg , and from 1939 back in Berlin. After she lost her apartment on a night of bombing in Berlin in 1943 during the Second World War and went to see her daughter on Lake Constance, she passed away on June 17, 1944 by suicide . Her memoirs appeared in 1997 under the title Sunken Worlds .

Works (selection)

Bodiscos novels portray from conservative Baltic German perspective, the completed, patriarchal and literary embossed spiritual world of the Baltic nobility and the educated classes in which the existence remains an Estonian population in the narrative background of an idyllic home image. The Estonian landscape was described by her as part of a synaesthetically represented natural world, often by letting the characters in her stories and novels, who dispose of a lot of leisure, cast long gazes out of windows or take long walks. Her literary style is shaped by the Baltic impressionist Eduard von Keyserling .

literature

Web links

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Beatrice Theophile Anna von Bodisco , website in the portal gw.geneanet.org , accessed on December 19, 2015
  2. ↑ Anja Wilhelmi: The worlds of women of the German upper class in the Baltic States (1800-1939). An investigation based on autobiographies . Harrassowitz Verlag, Wiesbaden 2008, ISBN 978-3-447-05830-8 , pp. 123, 156, 176, 236 ( Google Books )
  3. ↑ Maike Schult: Under the spell of the poet. The theological Dostoevsky reception and its understanding of literature . Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, Göttingen 2012, ISBN 978-3-525-56349-6 , p. 254 ( Google Books )
  4. ↑ Mari Tarvas: Theophile von Bodisco as a representative of Baltic German literature . In: Jean-Marie Valentin (Ed.): Files of the XI. International Germanist Congress Paris 2005 . Volume 8: Universal, Global and National Cultures - National and World Literature. (= Yearbook for International German Studies , Series A, Volume 84), Peter Lang, Bern 2007, ISBN 978-3-03910-797-1 , p. 77 ff. ( Book preview at Google Books )
  5. ^ Antonie Alm-Lequeux: Eduard von Keyserling. His work and the war . Dissertation 1995, Igel Verlag, Paderborn 1996, ISBN 3-89621-020-3 , p. 48 ( book preview on Google Books)
  6. ^ Gero von Wilpert : German Baltic Literature History . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 2005, ISBN 3-406-53525-9 , p. 259 ( book preview on Google Books)
personal data
SURNAME Bodisco, Theophile of
ALTERNATIVE NAMES Bodisco, Theophile Magda Eugenie von; Wistinghausen, Theophile Magda Eugenie von (maiden name); Playe, J. von (pseudonym); Kaarsen, Magda (pseudonym)
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Baltic German writer and journalist
DATE OF BIRTH March 15, 1873
PLACE OF BIRTH Reval , Russian Empire
DATE OF DEATH June 17, 1944
Place of death Bad Schachen near Lindau