After a brief stint in Spain as a tutor to the Russian ambassador's son, Veselovsky continued his education with Heymann Steinthal in Berlin and Prague and spent three years working in the libraries of Italy.

Veselovsky's early studies of medieval Italian literature led him to believe that many plots and literary devices were imported to Europe from the Orient through Byzantium.

Looking at literature primarily from a genetic point of view, Alexander Veselovsky and his brother Aleksey (1843-1918) attempted to construct a comprehensive theory of the origin and development of poetry.

In 1899, Veselovsky famously argued that "the font and syncretic root of poetic genres" may be traced to ritualized popular games and folk incantations.

[1] In the Soviet Union, Veselovsky and his followers were criticized for their "ethnographism", which allowed "source study to grow to a hypertrophied degree, thus dissolving the specific character of the literary work into a collection of influences".