Pyotr Veinberg

Pyotr Isaevich Veinberg (, July 16 (28) 1831, Mykolaiv, then Russian Empire, now Ukraine, – July 3 (16) 1908, Saint Petersburg, Russian Empire) was a Russian poet, translator, journalist and literary historian.

Biography

Pyotr Veinberg was born in Mykolaiv to the family of a notary. After studying in the Odessa gymnasium and Richelieu's lyceum he joined Kharkov University's history and philology faculty, from which he graduated in 1854. For the next three years he was working in Tambov as a local governor's aide, editing the ''Tambov Governorate News'' newspaper’s unofficial section. One of his first poems, "He was a titular councillor" (1859), was an autobiographical one and dealt with his own unrequited love for the governor's daughter. Veinberg, Jewish by birth, adopted Christianity in his youth.

Pyotr Veinberg's literary career started in 1851 when the ''Panteon'' magazine published his translation of George Sand’s ''Claudie'' drama. In 1854 in Odessa a small compilation of his translations from Horace, André Chénier, Victor Hugo and Lord Byron came out. In 1856 ''The Russian Messenger'' published several of Veinberg’s own poems, subtitling it, mistakenly, "From Heine". This prompted the author to use a pseudonym, "Heine from Tambov".

In 1858 Veinberg moved to Saint Petersburg to embark upon a professional literary career. His poems and translations started to appear regularly in ''Sovremennik'', ''Biblioteka Dlya Chteniya'', ''Syn Otechestva'', later in Nekrasov's ''Otechestvennye Zapiski''. He became known as a satirist when the ''Veseltchak'' magazine published in 1858 his poetry cycle ''Grey-Colored Melodies'' and a series of humorous sketches called ''Life and Its Oddities''. From 1859 to 1866 Veinberg contributed to ''Iskra'' magazine. Many of his work published there featured in the ''Humorous Poems of Heine from Tambov'' compilation (Saint Petersburg, 1863).

From 1868 to 1874 Veinberg worked as the head of the Russian literature cathedra at the Warsaw University. His treatise "Russian Folk Songs About Ivan the Terrible" was praised by the academic A. N. Veselovsky. On return to the capital he joined the Saint Petersburg University's Literature cathedra and lectured in several colleges and courses. In 1884 Weinberg adapted Ivan Turgenev’s '' Home of the Gentry'' for theater production. In 1885 he wrote a libretto for Eduard Nápravník's opera ''Harold''. He compiled several textbooks on literature and theater and wrote a book ''Extracts from the History of Western Literature'' (1907). Several of his verses were put to music by composers like Cui, Grechaninov, Ippolitov-Ivanov.

In his later years Veinberg was an active member of the Russian Literary Fund. In 1905 he was elected an honorary member of the Russian Academy. Using his authority he did a lot to help authors persecuted by the government for political reasons; Maxim Gorky, German Lopatin and others.

English translations

*''The Dostoevsky Archive: Firsthand Accounts of the Novelist from Contemporaries' Memoirs and Rare Periodicals'', (includes two accounts of Dostoyevsky by Pyotr Veinberg), McFarland & Company, 1997.

References

External links

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{{DEFAULTSORT:Veinberg, Pyotr Isaevich
1831 births
1908 deaths
Writers from Mykolaiv
People from Kherson Governorate
Ukrainian Jews
Male poets from the Russian Empire
Russian male poets
Members of the Russian Academy
Journalists from the Russian Empire
Russian male journalists
19th-century educators from the Russian Empire
Literary historians from the Russian Empire
Jews from the Russian Empire
National University of Kharkiv alumni
19th-century poets from the Russian Empire
19th-century translators from the Russian Empire
19th-century male writers from the Russian Empire
Jewish Russian writers
Magazine editors from the Russian Empire