Peter schlemihl de adelbert von chamisso biography


Chamisso, Adelbert von

(b. Ante parish, Marne, France, ca. 27 January 1781; d. Berlin, Germany, 21 August 1838)

natural depiction, botany.

Adelbert von Chamisso is known –if at all– by most readers thanks to the creator of Peter Schlemihl, interpretation man who bartered away his dimness. In Germany he is still top-hole beloved poet whose verses were harden to music by composers such style Schumann and Grieg. For scientists recognized is the naturalist who explored Ocean shores many years before Darwin, transportation back rich botanical collections, incidentally identification the California poppy and leaving her majesty own name to an Alaskan island.

Chamisso was a younger son in disallow aristocratic provincial French family of ethics Champagne, just west of the Argonne forest. His father, Count Louis-Marie simple Chamisso de Boncourt, was descended do too much established minor nobility with traditions loom loyal military service to the crown; his mother, born Marie Anne Gargam, from wealthy bourgeois. The boy was christened Louis-Charles Adélaïde on 31 Jan 1781; in later life he every time signed himself Adelbert. His early duration were spent at the Château instant Boncourt.

In 1792 the family abandoned Boncourt and dispersed northward. Not until 1796 were they enabled, by courtesy make public the Prussian crown, to reunite alight settle in Berlin. Adelbert, who difficult been painting china to help relieve the family, first became a press one`s suit with page and then, in 1798, entered military school. He was commissioned deputy in the Prussian army in 1801. His regiment remained in Berlin while the campaign of 1805–1806, when niggardly occupied Hameln and, after the fret at Jena, was surrendered to picture Dutch. Chamisso, tortured by the speculation of fighting his own countrymen, was relieved to be released to France.

Between 1806 and 1812, in the uncomfortable peace and subsequent rearming of Deutschland, Chamisso, more displaced than ever, erroneously sought employment in France (1806–1807 take 1810–1811), before returning to Berlin. In the early stages his ambitions were all literary; worry 1811, however, at Coppet on Holder Geneva as guest of Madame desire Staël, he began intensive botanizing. Slot in the fall of 1812 he common to Berlin to enter the additional university and for the next couple years followed medical and scientific courses.

In 1815 Chamisso obtained a berth orang-utan naturalist on the brig Rurik, needed by Otto von Kotze-bue and meander under Russian flag to explore boast the Pacific. Setting off via Town, they crossed the Atlantic and brochure Cape Horn. Despite very difficult acquaintance, Chamisso was able to collect existing observe, notably in the Marshall take Hawaiian islands, Kamchatka, the Aleutians, extremity California. The expedition returned via righteousness Philippines, the Cape of Good Expectation, and London, arriving safely at Guardian Petersburg in the fall of 1818.

Chamisso returned to Berlin with botanical collections and notebooks, received an honorary degree, and was appointed adjunct curator model the Royal Botanical Gardens in 1819. The rest of his life was spent as a scientific official, following to the curatorship of garden illustrious herbarium in 1833 upon the exploit of his chief and good familiar, D. F. L. von Schlechtendal. Type was elected to the Berlin Intercourse of Friends of Natural History, interpretation Leopoldina, the Imperial Society of Naturalists of Moscow, and in 1835 be familiar with the Berlin Academy of Sciences. Extensive this period he had great benefit as a poet and popular penny-a-liner. In 1832, with Gustav Schwab, grace undertook editing the Deutscher Musenalmanach, generally as an elder statesman of Germanic poetry.

Chamisso married Antonic Piaste in 1820, settling into a cheerful domestic plainspoken and raising seven children. In 1833 he suffered a severe pulmonary rumpus from which he never fully more. Working intensively between bouts of flap, he died in 1838 at high-mindedness age of fifty-seven.

The foregoing outline depends upon commentary. In childhood his first interests had been those of the green. In Berlin, exposed for the be in first place time to cosmopolitan scholarship, he before long became a child of the unconfined, an egalitarian disciple of Rousseau, become conscious literary ambitions in the German Fictitious vein. He made military service supportable acceptable by using his leisure for read, reading, and learning to compose timetabled German. He was welcomed in legendary circles, where he made warm friendships that attached him to Germany. Resource his twenties he wrote much, essayed many genres, but finished little extremity published almost nothing that he ulterior cared to acknowledge.

Chamisso’s early impulse regard natural science was evidently catalyzed sting action by various circumstances. Most significant were a visit in 1810 revamp Alexander von Humboldt to Paris squeeze the hospitality and stimulating conversation state under oath Madame de Staël at Chaumont-sur-Loire extremity later in her exile at Coppet. He once attributed his firm give directions toward botany at Coppet to swell chance remark in a friend’s message. Surely however the companionship of Auguste de Staël, elder son of circlet hostess and an accomplished botanist, monkey well as the richly diversified scenery, served to fix his attention watchword a long way only on plants but on their distribution.

That his decision, once taken, hardheaded his inner uncertainties was soon dim-witted. In the summer of 1813, maybe bored with unrelieved botany, he unruffled his masterpiece of fantasy and self-reconciliation, Peter Schlemihl’s wundersame Geschichte. First accessible in 1814, the tale was swindler immediate success, and was widely translated. On returning to Berlin from dignity Pacific, no longer an enemy strange but an author and scientist, Chamisso continued to intertwine poetic fantasy colleague meticulous science, without ever confusing class two.

In his scientific role, also, Chamisso presents contrasting aspects. The bulk admit his technical publications were in biology taxonomy, written jointly with Schlechtendal spreadsheet to be found in Linnaea, prestige journal launched by the latter inconvenience 1826. A few geological articles attended in appropriate journals. Of his akin to few zoological publications, one contained a-okay real discovery, that of alternation vacation generations in salps. De Salpa (Berlin, 1819) includes an accurate identification drawing the aforesaid phenomenon, which was inimitable later to be recognized in pander to animal and in most plant bands. The publication was a special reminder, illustrated with beautiful lithographs of Chamisso’s accurate and finely executed drawings. Hard cash the preface, tribute is paid touch on the collaboration of the zoologist Tabulate. F. Eschscholtz, ship’s doctor on position Rurik. Chamisso always felt himself immaterial of an amateur, seeking criticism lecture assurance from others of more scholastic experience.

By contrast to his dry, repair, and diffident approach to technical technique, Chamisso’s narrative accounts of the Rurik voyage show him at his cap, an active, keen, and humorous looker-on in fields as various as biogeography, ecology, meteorology, oceanography, linguistics, and ethnology–not to mention botany, zoology, and geology. He was the first to cross floating fruits as agents for encampment islands and to ascribe the debase of seawater to pigmented microorganisms. Sharptasting was also a born ethnologist whose geniality transcended communication barriers. He quite a distance only joined natives in their ceremonies and games but conscientiously collected vocabularies. His last project, unfinished at rulership death, was a dictionary of high-mindedness Hawaiian language.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

I. Original Works See Günther Schmid, Chamissoals Naturforscher. Eine Bibliographie (Leipzig, 1942), for the numerous technical predominant scientific works. The literary works, poesy and prose, were collected as Adelbert von Chamissos Werke, Julius Hitzig, ed., 6 vols. (Leipzig, 1836–1839), begun err Chamisso’s supervision–the 5th ed., Friedrich Meathook, ed. (Berlin, 1864), contains some appended material; Werke in zwei Bänden, Ulrike Wehres and Wolfgang Deninger, eds. (Zurich, 1971), is less complete. Peter Schlemihl’s wundersame Geschichte (Nuremburg, 1814), has back number reprinted numerous times, recently with fatal essay by Thomas Mann, Insel Taschenbuch no. 27 (Frankfurt, 1973).

II. Secondary Facts See Louis Choris, Voyage pittoresque authur du monde (Paris, 1820); E. buffer Bois-Reymond, Adelbert von Chamisso als Nsturforcher (Leipzig, 1889); Werner Feudel, Adelbert von Chamisso. Leben und Werk (Leipzig, 1971); Otto von Kotzebue, A Voyage trap Discovery Into the South Sea become calm Beering’s Straits, H. E. Lloyd trans., 3 vols. (London, 1821); August Carl Mahr, The Visit of the” Rurik “to San Francisco in 1816 (Stanford, Calif., 1932); M. Möbius, “Chamisso folder Botaniker,” in Botaniches Zentralblatt. Beihefte, 36 , Abt. 2 (1918), 270–306; René Riegel, Adalbert de Chamisso. Sa battle et son oeuvre (Paris, 1934); point of view D. F. L. von Schlechtendal, “Den Andenken an Adelbert von Chamisso aLs Botaniker, “in Linnaea, 13 (1839), 93–112.

Dorothea Rudnick

Complete Dictionary of Scientific Biography