Poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker: biography, creativity

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

As a poet, Wilhelm Küchelbecker is little known. He grew up surrounded by brilliant poets, above all of whom, no doubt, was Pushkin. Zhukovsky, Vyazemsky, Delvig were his entourage. Baratynsky wrote during these years. In the circle of these poets, it is easy to get lost with an outdated, overly civic muse, such as Küchelbecker had, although his talent was considerable.

Family

Küchelbecker Wilhelm Karlovich was born in 1797 in St. Petersburg. The family was not rich, but had both useful connections and influential relatives. My father, a very educated man, studied in Leipzig at the same time as Goethe and Radishchev. He had extensive knowledge in agronomy, economics and legal sciences. Influential relatives helped him to take a position at court (Secretary of the Grand Duke Pavel Petrovich). Later he was appointed director of Pavlovsk. Wilhelm's mother was also at court. She was the nanny of the youngest son of Emperor Mikhail Pavlovich. Pavel I gave his father Kuchelbeker the estate for life. Exactlyin it, in Avinorm, Wilhelm Küchelbecker spent his childhood.

Father, Karl Küchelbecker, turned out to be a very economic man. He successfully managed the estate, and even during the crop failure in 1808, the peasants did not starve on his estate. But there were four children in the family, and everyone had to be educated, so there was always not enough money.

At the age of nine, Wilhelm fell seriously ill and became deaf in one ear. From the fact that he did not hear everything, the previously calm, cheerful and mischievous child became nervous and irritable. When William was eleven years old, his father died, and the estate was taken away from the family. The adult married sister of Wilhelm, Justina, began to take care of the family. Her husband later became tutor to Grand Dukes Nikolai Pavlovich and Konstantin.

In the Lyceum

By this time, Wilhelm Küchelbecker was already studying at a boarding school, where there was an excellent general education program. But the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, which opened free of charge, was a great financial help to the family. In 1811 he was brought there by a distant relative, Michael Barclay de Tolly. The teenager brilliantly passed the entrance exams.

The abilities and perseverance of the young Kuchelbecker were noticed by the authorities. But everyone also saw the lack of knowledge of the Russian language and the passion for German authors. Lyceum students ridiculed this in the same way as the deafness of a teenager. They made fun of Kühley and wrote epigrams, which irritated him very much and led to quarrels. But the harmless good-natured Kyukhlya quickly cooled down. However, his extensive knowledge and perseverance commanded respect.lyceum students. At the age of 15, he began to compose poems with enthusiasm both in Russian and in German. Poems were tongue-tied. And the importance with which he communicated, like poems, still aroused ridicule. Alexander Pushkin, like everyone else, treated the works of the clumsy Kuhli with irony. But he quickly saw in him both straightforwardness and sincerity, and that he knows literature, history, philosophy better than many. And if necessary, he is always ready to share with all his knowledge. Wilhelm Küchelbecker admired Pushkin's poetic gift, his poems, sonorous and precise, with deep thoughts.

Service and poetry as high art

At the age of twenty, with a silver medal, Kuchelbecker graduated from the Lyceum and entered the Collegium of Foreign Affairs. He immediately found himself an additional job. Kuchelbecker began to teach Russian literature at the Noble Boarding School. In 1820, having become A. Naryshkin's secretary, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker traveled abroad and visited Germany and France. During these years he actively composes and prints poems. This is the most fruitful period in his work.

In total, he wrote about a hundred poems. There were many imitations of Zhukovsky, but on the whole his poems are pathetic. This is their characteristic feature. Their content is high, and therefore his art is pathetic. Female images in poems are not typical for him. After that, Yermolov served in the Caucasus, but due to a duel, he retires and cannot find a job.

A life-changing event

K 1825Mr. Kuchelbecker is back in St. Petersburg. Two months before the uprising, he joined the Northern Society and spoke with the Decembrists on Senate Square. Pushkin believed that he participated in the uprising by chance. First, he was assigned 15 years in prison, and then an eternal settlement in Siberia.

The last time Pushkin saw Kuchelbecker was when he was transported from one fortress to another in the autumn of 1827. Pushkin and Kuchelbecker, despite the presence of gendarmes, rushed to hug and kiss each other. They were torn apart. Küchelbecker, although he was ill, was quickly put into a cart and taken away. Pushkin always recalled this meeting with excitement. There are suggestions that Küchelbecker was the prototype of Lensky.

In the fortress of Sveaborg in 1832 he writes "Elegy". In it, he talks about the sad thoughts of a prisoner who bowed his head on his hand. Who will understand the anguish of his lyrical hero? Who is not indifferent to his bitter fate? He is his own support. With his firmness of spirit, he will not let himself be carried away by impossible dreams. Let him be in chains, but his spirit is free. And yet he cannot but be sad about nature, the earth, about the vast sky, about the stars, in which other worlds are enclosed. So, bowing his head, he yearns for fate. The divine fire went out in him, with which no prison, no betrayal of love, poverty is terrible. Thus ends Kuchelbecker's elegy.

In Siberia

Küchelbecker keeps diaries all the time, and Pushkin's name is very common in them. But then he was transferred to Barguzin, where he married the illiterate daughter of the postmaster and had four children.

Three survived. Then, at his own request, Kuchelbeker was transferred near Tobolsk, and then to Kurgan, where he would go blind. And again Tobolsk. This is a seriously ill person. He would die of tuberculosis in August 1846, before he even reached the age of 50.

Until the end of his life, Kuchelbecker will treat poetry as something high, prophetic, serving civil ideals. Wilhelm Küchelbecker was a philosopher and at the same time a romantic. His biography evokes sad thoughts.