Author: Kotzebue, August von
Biography:
KOTZEBUE, August Friedrich Ferdinand von (1761-1819: EB)
He was born in Weimar, Prussia (now Germany), on 3 May 1761, to Anna Christine Kruger (1736-1828) and her husband Levin Karl Christian Kotzebue (1727-61). He was well educated at the Weimar gymnasium and at Jena University, where he graduated in law. He had written poetry from childhood and became a phenomenally prolific writer of poems, novels, and especially plays, but his primary career was in government service. In 1781 he accepted a position as secretary to Baron Bawr, governor-general of St. Petersburg, Russia, where there was a German theatre. After the death of Bawr in 1783, Catherine the Great ennobled him (hence the “von”) and put him in charge of the magistracy of Estonia (1785-c. 1798), where he married his first wife, Frederike von Essen (1763-90), with whom he had four children. His second marriage, in 1794, was to Christine von Krusenstern (1769-1803), with whom he had six children, the last two born in Berlin after his return to Germany in 1801. In 1804 he married her sister Wilhelmina von Krusenstern; they had seven children together. Although most of his travels were shuttles between Russia and Germany, Kotzebue also spent time in Paris and Vienna. His greatest theatrical successes date from the 1790s and were almost immediately translated into all the major European languages. Between 1798 and 1800 twenty separate titles were translated into English, but the ones that are now most famous—the comedy Lovers’ Vows (well known for its role in the plot of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park) and the tragedy Pizarro—were in prose and do not appear in this bibliography. In the Napoleonic period, from St. Petersburg he was the editor of anti-Napoleonic periodicals. It was on a mission to Mannheim that he was stabbed to death on 23 Mar. 1819 by a student radical, Karl Ludwig Sand, who was later executed. (EB 28 Dec. 2023; NBG 28, cols. 135-43; ancestry.com 28 Dec. 2023; WorldCat) HJ
Other Names:
- Kotzebue
- Augustus von Kotzebue
- August von Kotzebue