Wilhelm Küchelbecker

Born into a Baltic German noble family, he spent his childhood in what is now Estonia and later attended the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum near Saint Petersburg together with Alexander Pushkin and Anton Delvig,[3] with whom he became friends.

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 considered an ardent Russian patriot by his contemporaries, and though closely allied with the romanticists, he insisted on calling himself a literary conservative and a classicist.

In the satiric fragment "Land of the Headless" (Земля безглавцев, 1824), the protagonist travels to the Moon and finds a dystopian state there.

His most famous biography, Kyukhlya, was written by Yury Tynyanov; its publication in 1925 marked a resurgence of interest in Küchelbecker and his art.