Wilhelm Kuchelbecker

Wilhelm Küchelbecker (or Küchelbecher; Russian: Вильге́льм Ка́рлович Кюхельбе́кер; 21 June [O.S. 10 June] 1797 in St. Petersburg – 23 August [O.S. 11 August] 1846 in Tobolsk) was a Russian Romantic poet and Decembrist.

Born into a noble family of Baltic Germans, he was brought up in Estonia and attended the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum together with Alexander Pushkin and Anton Delvig, with whom he became friends. In 1821 he went to Paris to deliver courses in Russian literature, but his activity was deemed too liberal by the Russian administration and Küchelbecker had to return to Russia.

He served in the Caucasian War under General Yermolov (with whose nephew he fought a duel) before launching the miscellany Mnemozina along with Vladimir Odoevsky in 1824. Despite his German name, Küchelbecker was an ardent Russian patriot, and though closely allied with the romanticists, he insisted on calling himself a literary conservative and a classicist. D.S. Mirsky characterizes him as "a quixotic 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 the Lyceum Anniversary of 1825.

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