bavarikon4UFriedrich Bodenstedt
Friedrich (Martin) Bodenstedt (1819-1892) came from modest circumstances and studied history and foreign languages at the University of Göttingen after an apprenticeship as a businessman. From 1840, he worked as a private or grammar school teacher in Moscow and Tbilisi, among other places. In 1845, he returned to Germany and travelled to Italy and Switzerland. He worked as editor in several European cities (including Triest, Vienna, Berlin and Bremen) until 1854, when he was invited by King Max II of Bavaria (1811-1864), who appointed him as honorary professor for Slavic philology (later also for Old English) at the University of Munich. Under his association nickname "Apis", Bodenstedt became a founding member of the Munich poets' association "Die Krokodile" (The Crocodiles). From 1867 to 1869 he worked as director at the Meiningen court theatre, where he was ennobled. From 1876, he finally lived as a writer in Wiesbaden.
With his literary debut "Lieder des Mirza Schaffy" (1851), translations of his Tbilisi teacher of the Tartar Mirza Schaffy Wazeh (1796-1852) after the model of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe's (1749-1832) "West-östlicher Divan" (1819), he achieved world fame, while Bodenstedt's other collections of poems as well as his dramatic and narrative works could hardly rise to such significance - the Songs were at a reaction to the political conditions of the post-March era. Bodenstedt also made a name for himself as a translator for example of Alexander Sergeyevich Pushkin (1799-1837), Ivan Sergeyevich Turgenev (1818-1883) and Mikhail Juryevich Lermontov (1814-1841) along with other Russian poets. He was also often the first to translate, Persian and Old English poetry (e.g. by William Shakespeare [1564-1616], John Webster [1579-1634], Christopher Marlowe [1564-1593] and Thomas Chatterton [1752-1770]).
His travelogues "Die Völker des Kaukasus und ihre Freiheitskämpfe gegen die Russen" (1848), "Tausend und ein Tag im Orient" (2 vols, 1849/50, including the first version of the "Lieder des Mirza Schaffy", "Enthüllungen aus England" (1860) and "Vom Atlantischen zum Stillen Ozean" (1882) are of cultural and historical importance. Bodenstedt's "Erinnerungen aus meinem Leben" (2 vols, 1888-90) are an impressive contemporaneous document for the years until 1850.