Wilhelm Ludwig von[a] Küchelbecker[b] (Russian:Вильге́льм Ка́рлович Кюхельбе́кер,romanized: Vil'gel'm Karlovich Kyukhel'beker; 21 June [O.S. 10 June] 1797 inSt. Petersburg – 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1846 inTobolsk) was a RussianRomantic poet andDecembrist revolutionary of German descent.
Born into aBaltic German noble family, he spent his childhood in what is nowEstonia and later attended theTsarskoye Selo Lyceum nearSaint Petersburg together withAlexander Pushkin andAnton Delvig,[1] with whom he became friends. In 1821, he went toParis to deliver courses inRussian literature, but his activity was deemed too liberal by the Russian administration and Küchelbecker had to return to Russia.
He served in theCaucasian War underGeneral Yermolov (with whose nephew he fought a duel) before launching the miscellanyMnemozina along withVladimir Odoevsky in 1824. Despite his German name, Küchelbecker was considered an ardent Russian patriot by his contemporaries, and though closely allied with the romanticists, he insisted on calling himself a literary conservative and a classicist.D.S. Mirsky characterizes him as "aquixotic figure, ridiculous in appearance and behaviour", but his personal friends had a warm affection for him.Pushkin, who was one of his principal teasers, dedicated to him one of the most heartfelt stanzas of theLyceum Anniversary of 1825.
As a poet, Küchelbecker had apantheistic vision of the world but did not succeed in giving it a definite expression — his poetry is an inchoate world awaiting a builder. His best-known poem is the noble elegy on the death of Pushkin, a poem closing theGolden Age of Russian Poetry. In his short prose piece "European Letters" (1820), a 26th-century American travels in Europe, which has fallen back intobarbarism. In the satiric fragment "Land of the Headless" (Земля безглавцев, 1824), the protagonist travels to the Moon and finds adystopian state there.
During the doomed Decembrist Uprising, he made an attempt on the life of the tsar's brotherMichael. Küchelbecker was sentenced to corporal punishment which was commuted toimprisonment inSveaborg,Kexholm, and other fortresses for ten years. After that he was exiled toKurgan. He died blind inTobolsk fromtuberculosis. His most famous biography,Kyukhlya, was written byYury Tynyanov; its publication in 1925 marked a resurgence of interest in Küchelbecker and his art.
This article incorporates text fromD.S. Mirsky's "A History of Russian Literature" (1926-27), a publication now in thepublic domain.
"Кюхельбекер, Вильгельм Карлович" .Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary (in Russian). 1906.
