Alexander Veltman

Alexander Fomich Veltman
Born	30 July [O.S. 18 July] 1800 Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire
Died	23 January [O.S. 11 January] 1870 Moscow, Russian Empire
Occupation	novelist

Alexander Fomich Veltman (Russian: Алекса́ндр Фоми́ч Ве́льтман) (30 July [O.S. 18 July] 1800 — 23 January [O.S. 11 January] 1870) was one of the most successful Russian 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.

Veltman was born in Saint Petersburg, 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 Veltman said in an unpublished autobiography that he had learned to tell stories from his father's orderly, a shoemaker he called "Uncle Boris," but his formal education began at the age of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 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, 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 and several of the officers who were later arrested were his friends, but there is no evidence that Veltman sympathized with the revolt.

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