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.

[3] Veltman said in an unpublished autobiography that he had learned to tell stories from his father's orderly, a shoemaker he called "Uncle Boris," but his formal education began at the age of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.

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.

After taking part in the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829), in which he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir (second class) for bravery,[5] Veltman left the army to pursue a career in literature, retiring in January 1831 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

[6] In 1842 he became assistant director of the Kremlin Museum of Armaments, a post that provided him with a good salary, a government apartment, and the rank of court councilor, so that he was free to write and pursue his antiquarian interests.

Also in 1833, Veltman published MMMCDXLVIII god: Rukopisʹ Martyna-Zadeka (3448 A.D.: a manuscript by Martin Zadek), a utopia in which a traveler visits the imaginary Balkan country of Bosphorania, ruled by the righteous Ioann, who devotes all his time and effort to the good of his people; there are descriptions of the social and technological advances of the 35th century, including popular festivals and expeditions to the South Pole.

[13] Martin Zadek is not an invention of Veltman's but a popular Nostradamus-type figure of the day; a book of his predictions was published in Basel in 1770 and translated into Russian the same year (editions continued to be printed right up to the October Revolution), and he was referred to by Pushkin and Zamyatin, among others.

("Kalimeros" is a Greek equivalent of Buonaparte, the original family name of Napoleon I; Veltman probably got the idea for this kind of wordplay from Victor Hugo's 1828 poem "Bounaberdi".

In the end he concludes that people of all times and places are the same, and it is the laws of history that can turn them into heroes; the author illustrates this by remarking that Alexander's profile reminds him of a Bessarabian stationmaster.

Virginiya, ili poezdka v Rossiyu (Virginie, or a journey to Russia, 1837), in which the Parisian Hector d’Alm finds himself accidentally engaged to the innocent provincial girl Virginie and gets out of it by pretending to go to Russia, and Serdtse i dumka: Priklyuchenie (Heart and head: an adventure, 1838) returned to a contemporary setting and marked a turning point for Veltman: "Henceforth he exercised greater control over his plots and style, curbing his earlier fondness for extravagant digression and verbal play.

During the 1840s, Veltman was drawn again to poetry, and published verse folktales based on the folklore of the West and South Slavs, including "Troyan and Angelitsa" and "Zlatoi and Bela: A Czech Tale".

The overall title was Priklyucheniya, pocherpnutye iz morya zhiteiskogo (Adventures drawn from the sea of life), and it consisted of four novels published from 1848 to 1862, plus a fifth that survives in manuscript form.

[25] The sequels were Chudodei (The miracle worker, 1856), a comic novel satirizing the lower middle class; Vospitanitsa Sara (Sara, a ward, 1862), the story of a girl who is taken into an aristocratic household and becomes a kept woman; and Schast'e - Neschast'e (Fortune - misfortune, 1863), about Mikhailo Gorazdov and his friends, who leave their peaceful and productive lives in Bessarabia for the false glitter of the capital and are nearly ruined before they return, chastened, to find true happiness in their homeland.

Boris Yakovlevich Bukhshtab, in his 1926 article "Pervye romany Vel'tmana" (Veltman's earliest novels), wrote: "In the history of Russian literature there is no other writer who, having enjoyed as much popularity in his own time as Vel'tman, so rapidly disappeared into complete oblivion.