Wilhelm Küchelbecker

Wilhelm Küchelbecker in the 1820s

Wilhelm Ludwig (from) Kuchelbecker ( Russian Вильгельм Карлович Кюхельбекер / Wilgelm Karlovich Kjuchelbeker ; born June 10, ^jul. / 21st June  1797 ^greg. In St. Petersburg ; † August 11 ^jul. / 23. August  1846 ^greg. In Tobolsk ) was a Russian poet from the circle of the Decembrists and the circle of poets around Pushkin .

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Wilhelm Küchelbecker was born into a German family in Saint Petersburg. His father Karl Heinrich was born in Bautzen in 1748 ; his mother Justina Elisabeth Lohmann was a German-Baltic woman from Segewold . Küchelbecker spoke and wrote with her in German throughout his life. He spent his childhood on the estate that Paul I had given his father in Awinorm . In 1808 he attended a private school in Werro . In 1811, like Pushkin, he belonged to the first year of the Lyceum of Tsarskoye Selo (today Pushkin ). In 1820, at a meeting of the Free Society of Friends of Russian Literature , he read verses that were dedicated to Pushkin, who was exiled to southern Russia - The Poets ( Поэты ), for which he negotiated an advertisement. To avoid the danger, Küchelbecker went on a trip abroad on the advice of his friends. In Dresden he met Ludwig Tieck and soon afterwards in Weimar with Goethe . Küchelbecker expressed his enthusiasm for God in the poem An Prometheus ( К Прометею ), which he sent to Goethe with an interlinear translation.

In 1821 Küchelbecker, who had traveled to Paris as secretary of the Naryschkin Embassy Council, gave a lecture there in which he praised the wealth and - which made it politically impossible - the democratic and liberal power of the Russian language in exuberant words. Küchelbecker was released and traveled home via southern France (poem Nice ).

Friends gave Küchelbecker a job with General Jermolow , since 1816 commander- in -chief in Georgia, who was popular in progressive circles. In Tbilisi , Küchelbecker made friends with Alexander Gribojedow , the author of the comedy Verstand macht Leiden . In 1822 Küchelbecker gave in his dismissal and retired to his sister's estate in the Smolensk governorate . There he wrote the tragedy The Argives (an ancient Greek material about the fight of the republican Timoleon against his brother, the tyrant Timophan), wrote the poem Kassandra and began a poem about Griboyedov. 1823-1824 Küchelbecker together with Wladimir Fjodorowitsch Odojewski (1803-1869) published the magazine Mnemosyne ( Мнемозина ), in which he fought for the rebirth of the ode as a genre. He explained his aesthetic program in the article On the direction of our poetry, especially the lyrical one, in the last decade . The poems that he dedicated to the Greek struggle for freedom , The Greek Song and An Achates , a poem on the death of Lord Byron and letters to Yermolov and Griboyedov , fall during this period .

14 ^jul. / December 26, 1825 ^greg. Küchelbecker actively participated in the uprising of the Decembrists (Dekabr = December) on the St. Petersburg Senate Square . He tried to shoot the Tsar's brother, Grand Duke Michael. After the failure of the uprising, he tried to flee abroad; he was arrested in Warsaw and sentenced to death in a first sentence . In 1835 he was exiled to Tobolsk / Western Siberia after ten years of imprisonment . In exile he married the daughter of a postmaster whom he taught to read and write and with whom he moved from one Siberian village to the next. Küchelbecker continued to write while he was imprisoned and exiled: the poem Ryleev 's shadow on the executed Decembrist poet Kondrati Ryleev ; the three-part "mystery" Ishorski , the story of a nihilist; the fairy tale drama Ivan, the merchant's son ; the Prokofi Lyapunov tragedy over the Ryazan people's contingent against the Polish-Lithuanian invasion; a cycle of seven poems with mostly historical themes, of which The Orphan is considered the most important. Towards the end of his life, Küchelbecker fell ill with tuberculosis and died on July 11th ^. / 23 August 1846 ^greg. went blind in Tobolsk.

Küchelbecker's life theme was his friendship with Pushkin, at least subjectively perceived. But the latter had distanced himself from him early on. Küchelbecker measured himself artistically against Pushkin and knew at the same time that he could not reach him.

Küchelbecker described himself as a romanticist of classicism . He wanted a Russian romanticism that was independent of foreign models and based solely on national Russian elements. In return, Old Slavic language elements and classicistic stylistic devices were right for him. For a long time only Küchelbecker's tragicomic traits were remembered in Russia; It was only Juri Tynjanow's historical novel: Wilhelm Küchelbecker, Poet and Rebel (1925) that corrected Küchelbecker's image.

Works

First year: origin, second year: first publication

Poems

• The Separation ( Разлука ) 1817
• The Poets ( Поэты ), 1820
• To Prometheus ( К Прометею ), 1820; 1926
• Prophecy ( Пророчество ), 1822; 1891
• Greek song ( Греческая песнь ), 1821; 1939
• To Achates ( К Ахатесу ), 1821; 1939
• Ryleev's Shadow ( Тень Рылеева ), 1827; 1862
• The Fate of Russian Poets ( Участь русских поэтов ) 1845
• The Argives ( Аргивяне ), tragedy, 1822–1824
• About the direction of our poetry, especially lyrical, in the last decade ( О направлении нашей поэзии, особенно лирической, в последнее десятилетие ), 1824
• The Orphan ( Сирота ), Poem, 1833; 1939
• Ishorski (Mystery) ( Ижорский ), Part I-II 1829–1833; 1836 part III 1840/41; 1939
• Ivan, the merchant's son ( Иван - купецкий сын ), fairy tale drama 1832–1842; 1939
• Prokofi Lyapunov ( Прокофий Ляпунов ), tragedy 1834; 1938

literature

• Andreas Hermann Heinrich von Rosen : From the memoirs of a Russian Decembrist . Contributions to the history of the St. Petersburg military uprising of December 14 (26), 1825, and its participants. Read Leipzig 1874 online
• History of classical Russian literature , Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar 1973. Chapter Lyricists of the Decembrist Movement pp. 172–175
• Adolf Stender-Petersen: History of Russian literature , C. H. Beck, Munich 3rd edition 1978. Part two, The romantic period, Chapter 13 The lyrical Pleiade
• Juri Tynjanow: Wilhelm Küchelbecker, poet and rebel . Historical novel 1925. Diogenes, Zurich 1990, ISBN 3-257-21812-5 .
• Gerhard Dudek (editor): The Decembrists. Seals and documents Insel Verlag Leipzig 1975. By Wilhelm K. Küchelbecker are included: Poems ( Greetings to the Friends of the Rhine (see German translation by Menno Aden), Greek song, An Achates, Fluch, Rylejew's shadow, The fate of Russian poets ) ; About the direction of our poetry, especially lyrical, over the past decade ; Lecture on Russian language and literature given in Paris in June 1821
• Erhard Hexelschneider: Europe and Russia in contemporary travelogues from Fonwisin to A. Turgenjew in: Russia & Europe. Historical and cultural aspects of a problem of the century Rosa Luxemburg-Verein, Leipzig 1995, ISBN 3-929994-44-5 , pp. 49-64.
• Menno Aden: Pushkin: Russia and his first poet , Tübingen 2000, ISBN 3-89308-324-3 . Contains an abstract of Küchelbecker's life and some poems translated into German for the first time.
• Carola L. Gottzmann / Petra Hörner: Lexicon of the German-language literature of the Baltic States and St. Petersburg . 3 volumes; Verlag Walter de Gruyter, Berlin 2007. ISBN 978-3-11-019338-1 . Volume 2, pp. 779-780

Web links

Commons : Wilhelm Küchelbecher  - Collection of images, videos and audio files

• Biography (russian)
• Some poems and Brockhaus articles from 1890–1907 (Russian)
• Literature by and about Wilhelm Küchelbecker in the catalog of the German National Library

Individual evidence

1. ^ Erik Amburger Database: Foreigners in Pre-Revolutionary Russia at the Leibniz Institute for East and Southeast European Studies
2. ↑ Вильгельм Кюхельбекер - поэт пушкинского круга ( СТРАНИЦЫ ИСТОРИИ , Russian, sighted December 28, 2011)
3. ↑ quoted in Menno Aden: German and English , Paderborn 2007, p. 27
4. ↑ von Rosen, p. 57, 15. Zvo and p. 60, 8. Zvu