Vassili Golovanov 
For those who have yet to read Odoevsky, one can only feel envy: they have before them an encounter with a writer who knows the weight and place of every word, a man preoccupied with questions that still look remarkably relevant today.
The public’s interest in this remarkable man’s work was undermined by the revolution: Odoevsky, of course, was “socially alien” to the revolutionary era – he was a scion of the Rurikids, a direct descendant of Mikhail Vsevolodovich, Knyaz of Chernigov, who was tortured to death in the Horde in 1246 and later canonized. Through ties of friendship and kinship, he was connected to the Decembrist circle, yet he consistently pursued not a conspiratorial, but an educational path in life. Moreover, he served – not out of fear, but conscientiously. He considered it the duty of every nobleman to serve the state for the good of the fatherland and the people. He could not abide falsehood. He carried out his duties in public office with zeal. “We are all contracted people in life,” Odoevsky wrote, “the contract may be a dreadful one, a most absurd one, but we accepted it – by being born, by marrying, by entering the service, and so on – and consequently we must fulfill it, which does not prevent us from striving to change it and to ensure that such contracts no longer exist in the future.”
Wisdom‑Lovers
Odoevsky’s own “contract” was by no means a simple one: his father, Fyodor, was the grandson of Knyaz Ivan Odoevsky, who had chaired the Board of Estates during the reign of Elizabeth Petrovna. His mother, Ekaterina Filippova, was the daughter of a warrant officer’s widow who had bought her way out of serfdom. True, she had received a “noble” upbringing, spoke French, played the piano, and was remarkably beautiful – but even that did not spare Odoevsky the lamentable consequences of this unequal marriage.
His father died when Vladimir was just four years old. For a time, the boy was raised by his grandfather, Colonel Sergei Odoevsky, but he too soon passed away. In 1816, when the young knyaz was barely twelve, his mother enrolled him in the Noble Boarding School at Moscow University, while she herself remarried and settled in the estate of her first husband, Drokovo. Upon graduating from the boarding school in 1822, Vladimir Odoevsky found himself stone‑broke: after his father’s debts were paid and the estate divided with his mother, he was left with nothing but his grandfather’s half‑ruined estate in Kostroma province.
It is curious that these family troubles did not affect the young man’s character. “Always calm, quiet, moderate, gentle, kind‑hearted, ready to oblige in any way, receiving with pleasure all requests, even the most troublesome ones. He never lost his temper, and no one ever managed to provoke him,” recalled Mikhail Pogodin about Odoevsky.
Beneath this placid exterior, however, lay a probing curiosity and a sharp mind. Having “caught the bug” of German philosophy back at the Noble Boarding School, Vladimir, upon graduating, joined forces with the poet Dmitry Venevitinov to found a secret circle of Lyubomudry – “wisdom‑lovers.” Secret, because the times demanded it: secret societies and circles were springing up everywhere. Vladimir Odoevsky lived then in a small apartment on Gazetny Lane. The group met on Thursdays. The regulars were Odoevsky, Venevitinov, Ivan Kireyevsky, Alexander Koshelev, Vladimir Titov, and Nikolai Melgunov. The Lyubomudry would bring their translations and first literary attempts, but the lion’s share of their time was devoted to studying the German “wisdom‑lovers”: Fichte, Kant, and above all, Schelling.
Later, reflecting on the “seething” era of the 1820s – when all the questions of Russian life unexpectedly came to the boil in the minds of the “generation of 1812” – Odoevsky asked himself: what could the “German wisdom‑lovers” possibly add to their resolution? And he answered that question thus: “At the beginning of the nineteenth century, Schelling was what Christopher Columbus had been in the fifteenth – he revealed to man an unknown part of his world, about which only fabulous legends existed – his soul!”
The remark about the soul was no accident: it was precisely through influencing the soul that morals were to be gradually softened, and in time, with the aid of the sciences, humanity was to be led toward a true social order – such was Odoevsky’s conviction. From this, too, sprang his “mysticism.”
The fate of the Lyubomudry was sealed when news of the crushing of the Decembrist uprising reached Moscow: it became dangerous to hold “secret” meetings. Odoevsky, as chairman of the society, gathered all the Lyubomudry and burned the minutes of their meetings in the fireplace. With the closure of the society, the time of “rebellious youth” was over for Odoevsky. It was time to decide what to do next.
St. Petersburg Life
Fortunately, at this time Odoevsky’s aunt, Varvara Ivanovna, arrived in Moscow. She was married to Sergey Lansky, the future Minister of Internal Affairs under Alexander II. Having become better acquainted with her nephew, she introduced him to one of her husband’s sisters – 29‑year‑old Olga Lanskaya. In the only surviving portrait, she appears to have a truly angelic appearance – and this, apparently, is what struck the 22‑year‑old Odoevsky.
Life would prove that Odoevsky could not have found a better match: Olga Stepanovna, intelligent and even‑tempered, gave him the maternal care he had been deprived of since childhood. Odoevsky was perfectly happy. And although later, in the 1830s, he experienced a passionate affair with Nadezhda Lanskaya, he never could bring himself to leave his wife.
The Lanskys were wealthy and influential: they secured Odoevsky a post at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, and in 1826 the young couple moved to St. Petersburg. Olga Lanskaya had a wide circle of acquaintances at court, and Odoevsky himself, already from the time of the almanac Mnemosyne – which he had published in Moscow together with Kuchelbecker – was acquainted from afar with the St. Petersburg circle of writers. Pushkin, Griboyedov, Boratynsky, and Yazykov all appeared in Mnemosyne. As a man who considered himself “under contract” and approached his service to the sovereign with zeal, Odoevsky – even while working in the censorship committee, which at the time was subordinate to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs – did a great deal for Russian literature. It was largely thanks to Odoevsky and Sergey Aksakov that the new Censorship Statute of 1828 was adopted, replacing the old “cast‑iron” statute that had weighed so heavily on journalism and book publishing. Later, in his capacity as censor, Odoevsky secured the revival of Otechestvennye Zapiski – the finest literary journal of the 1840s. Pushkin enlisted him in the publication of Sovremennik, and Odoevsky continued the work after the poet’s death. The journal survived until Belinsky’s arrival, who again “raised” it and gave it its direction – and that was possible only thanks to Odoevsky.
Odoevsky himself made his literary debut in the 1830s with a book entitled Motley Tales with a Sprinkling of Wit, Collected by Ireney Modestovich Gomozeyko, Master of Philosophy and Member of Various Learned Societies, Published by V. Bezglasny. The pseudonym was easy to decipher: “Master of Philosophy and Member of Various Learned Societies” was, of course, Odoevsky himself.
Odoevsky’s St. Petersburg literary salon was inimitable. Who didn’t visit him here! Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Tyutchev, Fet, Grigorovich, Goncharov, Turgenev – Slavophiles and Westernizers alike. The celebrated Hungarian composer and pianist Franz Liszt performed here… Leo Tolstoy, while working on War and Peace, was a constant guest at the Odoevskys’ and drew on his wife’s reminiscences of her high‑society acquaintances. All of Russian literature, in the apt observation of critic Stepan Shevyrev, “found itself on Odoevsky’s sofa”…
Scattering Thoughts
Odoevsky, meanwhile, immersed himself in alchemy and the study of the mystics of his day, seeing in this the key to piecing together the two sundered halves of the “soulless” nineteenth‑century man that civilization had torn apart. It would be wrong to look down on such pursuits. After all, the mystics of that time contributed no less to the development of thought than the utopian socialists. All of them had learned a bitter lesson from the French Revolution; all of them saw the soullessness of capitalism triumphant in Europe; all were troubled by the problem of civilization’s further development; and all were stirred by the same question: what is man, what is his true nature? How is a just society to be built?
It was at the very beginning of the 1830s that Odoevsky began writing his novel Russian Nights – his principal work, which he would not complete until 1843. It is a philosophical meditation on the destinies of the world and of man. The Romantics, to whose ranks Odoevsky belonged, were acutely sensitive to the flaws of the world around them and subjected them to sophisticated critique. Where was hope, where was the social ideal? For Odoevsky, it lay in the future. In 1835 he began (but never finished) a science‑fiction novel, The Year 4338. It is considered the most significant work of fantasy from the first third of the nineteenth century. Structurally, Odoevsky’s novel is constructed as a series of letters written by a Chinese student, Hippolyte Tsungiev, to his friend in Beijing. By the time of the events described, two states – Russia and China – have taken over the governance of the world. In this union, Russia plays the role of the elder brother, which ensures the book a wealth of admiring observations by the naive Chinese of Russian achievements.
Odoevsky is astonishing in his technical predictions: he foresees electric ships, tunnels bored under seas and mountains, steerable dirigibles, the flourishing of the spectacular arts, extraordinarily bright electric lighting, winter gardens, plant hybridization, man’s conquest of the Moon, elastic glass (fibreglass), power stations, the use of geothermal heat, “magnetic communication between houses,” the phototelegraph, and “home newspapers” sent out to friends… He completely “electrifies” Russia; he cannot, of course, foresee the computer age, but he does write: “…The time will come when books will be written in the syllable of telegraphic dispatches; only tables, maps, and a few theses on separate sheets will be excepted from this custom. Printing presses will be used only for newspapers and visiting cards; correspondence will be replaced by electric conversation…” So perhaps the blogger Ivan Dezhurny is not so wrong after all when he writes that Odoevsky foresaw the advent of the Internet and blogs.
But for us, something else is more important. Why Odoevsky set his utopia so far into the future as the year 4338 is, on the whole, understandable. In the age when the novel was being written, historical time moved slowly; it seemed inconceivable that anything could change significantly over one or two centuries. It was only toward the end of the nineteenth century that time began to “speed up,” and in the twentieth it broke into a gallop.
The second reason why Odoevsky ties his novel to the year 4338 is the inevitable, according to nineteenth‑century calculations, meeting of the Earth with Biela’s Comet in that year. Indeed, it was the earthlings’ opposition to the comet that was to form the novel’s plot. In that case, Odoevsky would have produced a novel in the Jules Verne way. But the plot is precisely what Odoevsky never wrote! Instead, he speculates… About what, do you suppose? Why, of course – about an ideal society without conflict. How is social harmony to be achieved? Through the softening of morals.
His primary means for softening morals are laughing gas and magnetic baths. The essence of the “bath” is that people, joining hands in a chain, pass an electric current through themselves – some fall into a healing magnetic sleep, while others enter a state of somnambulism. In this state, a person is incapable of lying and can perceive across space and time – thus society is freed from all hypocrisy.
Odoevsky understands that magnetic baths alone are not enough for universal harmony. The state of society is determined by its elite. And Odoevsky presents us with it: a Minister of Philosophy, a Minister of Fine Arts, a Minister of Aerial Forces, poets, philosophers, historians… In such company, the tsar himself becomes a poet… Yet the foremost dignitary of the empire is, after all, the Minister of Reconciliations – who also serves as chairman of the State Council.
Odoevsky knew what reconciliation meant not from hearsay. The Society for Visiting the Poor, which he founded with the support of Grand Duchess Elena Pavlovna, lifted 15,000 people out of poverty over the nine years of its existence. A shop was opened to sell the wares of poor artisans, rooms for mothers with children, workshops for poor women, shelters… It is hardly surprising that after the European revolutions of 1848, these enterprises were branded as somewhat communist. The society was merged into the Imperial Philanthropic Society, and in 1855 it was simply abolished.
Contradictions Remain
Of course, Odoevsky’s novel contains many contradictions. For what purpose maintain an army, if human morals have become so softened? And a man who takes “magnetic baths” would hardly make a good soldier… It is claimed that the army is used for expeditions to the Moon. There is also mention of “savage” Americans who, in search of profit, sell off their cities. But in Odoevsky’s view, they no longer pose any threat – any more than the English, who are selling off their islands…
America had long attracted Odoevsky’s attention. Believing that the United States embodied a possible future for humanity, Odoevsky wrote that on this “advanced” frontier there occurred “a complete immersion in material gain and a complete oblivion of other, so‑called useless impulses of the soul.” In his novella The City Without a Name, Odoevsky tells the sorrowful fate of a colony of Benthamites – followers of Jeremy Bentham’s theory. At first, they prospered. Then they extended their principle of utility to neighboring peoples, who did not possess such a narrow “philosophy of life.”
“…we saw no reason to spare our neighbors: by various tricks we delayed the transport of essential goods to them and then sold them our own at exorbitant prices; many of us, shielding ourselves with all legal formalities, undertook highly successful bankruptcies against our neighbors, as a result of which their factories collapsed, which worked to our advantage; we set our neighbors at odds with other colonies, helping them in these cases with money, which, of course, returned to us a hundredfold; we drew them into stock exchange speculation and, through clever maneuvering, were constantly in profit; […] When our neighbors were completely ruined thanks to our wise and thorough policy, our rulers, having gathered the elected representatives, put to them for resolution the question: would it not be beneficial for our colony to acquire outright the land of our weakened neighbors?” But in the end, the Benthamites’ civilization perishes precisely because of their insatiable greed…
A people cannot survive without contact and mutual understanding with other peoples – unless it degrades. This is one of Odoevsky’s most important ideas. In the Russian character, he saw a kind of grateful receptivity, from which it was but a step to Dostoevsky’s “universal responsiveness.” Seeing all the shortcomings of the people, above all “a general laziness of mind,” Odoevsky nevertheless wrote: “…and yet the Russian is the foremost man in Europe – not only in the abilities which nature has given him for free, but also in that feeling of love which has been wondrously preserved in him, despite a lack of enlightenment, despite the perverse teaching of religious principles.”
Having begun traveling abroad in the 1840s, Odoevsky grew disillusioned with Europe. It was too rational, devoid of lofty impulses. The exception was his journey to his idol, Schelling, undertaken shortly before he completed Russian Nights. Schelling found Odoevsky an extraordinarily intelligent man. Moreover, their conversation turned to Russia. Schelling said: “Yours is a wondrous country, Russia – one cannot determine what it is destined for or where it is heading, but it is destined for something great…”
Odoevsky himself was also “a man from the future.” He was a brilliant writer, but he never spoke of himself as one. The finest people of Russia and Europe were friends with him. His idols were Giordano Bruno, Lomonosov… Everything he undertook succeeded. His brilliant service on the censorship committee turned out to benefit literature. His musical pursuits are inspirational. He left behind several interesting compositions for organ and harpsichord; he was the first to notice, while listening to the singing of some Old Believer, that folk song does not fit into the “harmonic” structure of the classical octave – and he found a brilliant solution: he invented the “enharmonic clavicymbal.” Odoevsky wrote several experimental pieces for his instrument, but they have still not found their audience: the clavicymbal, on which alone these pieces can be played, is preserved in the Glinka Museum of Musical Culture in Moscow. But how to tune it – that, it seems, no one now knows…
Odoevsky led a remarkable life: it encompassed the vocations of Lyubomudr, State Servant, Writer, Russian Faust, Philanthropist, and finally, Keeper – from 1846 he served as director of the Rumyantsev Museum and deputy director of the Public Library in St. Petersburg. When it was decided to transfer the Rumyantsev Museum to Moscow, he and his wife followed the museum. He spent his final years in Moscow, where he reopened his salon for the public – and everything there was steeped in music, predominantly old Russian and church music…
Such a life can only be lived by a free and pure man. Such a life can only be envied. After all, he was, in the end, a Prophet too. And not always filled with rosy hopes, as in The Year 4338 – he also had access to a darker register: “The time has come, foretold by the philosophers of the nineteenth century: the human race has multiplied; the proportion between the products of nature and the needs of humanity has been lost. […] The boundaries of cities have merged, and the entire globe, from pole to pole, has become one vast, inhabited city, into which has been transplanted all the luxury, all the diseases, all the debauchery, all the activity of former cities; but over this splendid city of the universe there loomed terrible poverty […] Long ago, everything that once constituted man’s happiness and pride vanished. Long ago the divine fire of art went out; long ago both philosophy and religion were relegated to the ranks of alchemical knowledge; with that, all the ties that bound people to one another were torn asunder, and the more need pressed them together, the more their feelings grew apart…”
What future is he speaking of, then?
Or is it of our present?
Translated by Grigory Litvinov
