Nikolai Ketcher

Born 1809 in Moscow; died there Oct. 12 (24), 1886. Russian writer and translator.

Ketcher graduated as a physician from the Medical and Surgical Academy in 1828. He began his literary activity at the end of the 1820’s, doing a particularly great amount of work as a translator of Schiller, Hoffmann, and Shakespeare. A friend of A. I. Herzen and N. P. Ogarev, he joined their circle in 1831. During the 1840’s, Ketcher contributed to the journal Otechest-vennye zapiski. In the 1850’s and 1860’s, after Herzen’s departure abroad, Ketcher took on a bourgeois-liberal stance.

Together with A. D. Galakhov, he prepared the first collected works of V. G. Belinskii (1859–62).