Alexander Fomich Veltman (Russian: Алекса́ндр Фоми́ч Ве́льтман; 20 July [O.S. 8 July] 1800 — 23 January [O.S. 11 January] 1870) was a Russian poet and novelist. He was one of the most successful Russian prose writers of the 1830s and 1840s, "popular for various modes of Romantic fiction — historical, Gothic, fantastic, and folkloristic". He was one of the pioneers of Russian science fiction.

Veltman was born in Saint Petersburg, the first of four children of Foma Fomich Veltman and Maria Petrovna Kolpanicheva. His father had served in the military before becoming a minor civil servant, rising to the rank of titular counselor; Russian sources say he was from the Swedish nobility, but there is evidence to suggest he may have been of German origin. Veltman said in an unpublished autobiography that he had learned to tell stories from his father's orderly, a shoemaker he called "Uncle Boris," but his formal education began at the age of eight at a Lutheran private school. In 1811 he entered the school for the nobility attached to Moscow University, but his studies were interrupted the next year by the invasion of Napoleon, who is featured in several of his books. Like much of the population, the Veltmans fled Moscow, staying in Kostroma until the French retreat.

In 1814, he resumed his education. He graduated in 1817 from the Korpus kolonnovozhatykh, a school established by General Nikolay N. Muravyov in his home to train staff officers, and was commissioned as an ensign (praporshchik) in the army. (While still a student at the Korpus, he wrote an arithmetic textbook that was published in 1817.) He was posted to the Second Army at Tulchin in the southern Ukraine and assigned to work on a topographical survey of Bessarabia, a region in which he would spend the next twelve years and one which figures prominently in his work. Tulchin was the chief center of the Southern Society of the Decembrists and several of the officers who were later arrested were his friends, but there is no evidence that Veltman sympathized with the revolt.

In Bessarabia, Veltman became popular among his fellow officers for his humorous verse, but he was eclipsed when Alexander Pushkin arrived in Kishinev, the capital of the province, in 1820. Although Pushkin was only twenty-one, he was already famous, and Veltman tried to avoid meeting him ("I was afraid that someone in the group might say to him in my presence, 'Pushkin, this fellow of ours also writes poetry'"), but the two soon became friendly and Pushkin praised Veltman's poetry in a letter to a friend. After taking part in the Russo-Turkish War (1828–1829), in which he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir (second class) for bravery, Veltman left the army to pursue a career in literature, retiring in January 1831 with the rank of lieutenant-colonel.

Veltman married his second cousin Anna Pavlovna Veidel in 1832 (after some difficulty with her family) and his daughter Nadezhda was born in 1837, so he needed more financial support than his military pension and his literary career could provide; though his work was extremely popular in the mid-1830s, it didn't bring in much income, and an attempt to create a journal, Kartiny sveta [Pictures of the world, 1836-37], was a financial failure. In 1842 he became assistant director of the Kremlin Museum of Armaments, a post that provided him with a good salary, a government apartment, and the rank of court councilor, so that he was free to write and pursue his antiquarian interests. In 1848 his friend Mikhail Pogodin invited him to help edit the journal Moskvityanin (The Muscovite), and from January 1849 through March 1850 its pages "bear his considerable imprint in the form of the numerous articles and reviews written by him as well as through his rather arbitrary editorial treatment of the contributions to the magazine written by others."

Anna Pavlovna died in 1847, and in 1850 he married Elena Ivanovna Kube, who had been a successful writer under her maiden name and now took Veltman's. (In 1919 Maxim Gorky asked Kornei Chukovsky if he had read her work, and said "She had a fine novel in Otechestvennye zapiski in the fifties.") In 1852 Veltman became Director of the Museum of Armaments, and he and his wife became prosperous, entertaining guests on Thursdays in their large and luxurious new apartment near the Arbat. In 1854 he was elected a corresponding member of the Academy of Sciences. Elena died in 1868 and Veltman himself two years later.

Veltman's first novel, Strannik (The wanderer, 1831–32), had extraordinary success. Laura Jo McCullough wrote: "The Wanderer is, in a sense, Veltman's artistic manifesto and reflects his debt to both Sterne and Jean Paul." Set mainly in Bessarabia, it is "a parodic revival of the travel notes genre, a combination of an imaginary journey taking place on a map in the narrator's study with details derived from a real journey over the same territory some years before." In it, Veltman "gives whole conversations in Yiddish, Modern Greek and Rumanian, as well as in the more readily intelligible German and French."

He followed Strannik with Koshchei bessmertny: Bylina starogo vremeni (Koshchei the immortal: a bylina of old times, 1833), a parody of the historical adventure novels popular at the time. Its hero, Iva Olelkovich Puta-Zarev, is a sort of Russian Don Quixote, his brains addled by overexposure to Russian folklore. After his marriage, he imagines that his bride has been captured by Koschei, and after various adventures the couple are reunited. "Vel'tman indulges in cheerful leaps through space and time, happy to be sidetracked down the byways of history and folk-tale." Critics are in general agreement that Strannik and Koshchei bessmertny are the works that best reflect Veltman's talent.