Adelbert von Chamisso
1781–1838
Biography
Adelbert von Chamisso was a German poet, writer and botanist, born in 1781 at the family estate of Boncourt in Champagne. He was first named Louis Charles Adélaïde de Chamissot. His family fled France during the Revolution in 1790 and settled in Berlin, where he began a career as an officer in the Prussian army. He left the army in 1808 and spent the following years moving between Berlin, France and Switzerland, studying natural science and writing verse. He died in Berlin in 1838, aged 57.
He is remembered most as a botanist. In 1815 he sailed as the botanist of the Russian ship Rurik on a scientific voyage round the world under Otto von Kotzebue, and he collected specimens along the Pacific coast, including around what is now the San Francisco Bay Area. He named several new species after his friend Johann Friedrich von Eschscholtz, the expedition's entomologist, among them the California poppy, and Eschscholtz in return named the plant genus Camissonia after him. Chamisso published an account of the voyage in 1827, partly to answer charges made against him by Kotzebue. Back in Berlin he became custodian of the botanical gardens and a member of the Academy of Sciences, and he was a leading member of the Serapion Brethren, the literary circle around E. T. A. Hoffmann. He did not return fully to poetry until his forty-eighth year, and his later verse appeared mainly in an almanac he co-edited.
The site holds Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte, the prose tale he wrote in the summer of 1813, partly to amuse the children of his friend Julius Eduard Hitzig. It tells of a man who sells his shadow to a mysterious stranger for a purse of gold that never runs out, and of the trouble that follows when he is left without one among other people. It is the most famous of Chamisso's works, it has been translated into most European languages, and it is still widely read.
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Books
Peter Schlemihls wundersame Geschichte
by Adelbert von Chamisso
A young man down on his luck sells his shadow to a mysterious grey gentleman in return for a purse that never runs out of gold. He soon finds that, rich or not, a man without a shadow is shunned everywhere. Chamisso's short, strange and very influential Romantic tale.
Summary written by Claude Opus 5.5.