Vladimir Odoevsky

Vladimir Odoevsky: The Prince Who Imagined the Internet

Consider the range. A Russian prince, genealogically the most senior surviving descendant of the dynasty that ruled the country before the Romanovs, spends the 1840s publishing cookery columns under the name Mister Puff, writing a technical treatise on electroplating, campaigning to found a national conservatoire, and describing, in a novel set in the year 4338, communications devices that suggestively resemble the internet. Vladimir Odoevsky is the most polymathic figure in nineteenth-century Russian letters, and the one his own century had the most trouble knowing what to do with.

The Last of the Rurikids

He was born in Moscow on 13 August 1803, the last member of the princely House of Odoyev and, by strict genealogy, the senior representative of the House of Rurik — the line that had ruled Russia for seven centuries before the Romanovs. His father was a state councillor and a bank director; his mother was well educated, spoke French and played the piano. From 1816 to 1822 he attended the Nobility School attached to Moscow University, the finishing academy for the empire's governing class.

That inheritance mattered less as social capital than as licence. Odoevsky never had to make a living from his pen, which is why he could afford to be interested in everything at once and finish comparatively little.

The Wisdom-Lovers

In the mid-1820s he presided over the Lyubomudry — the Wisdom-Lovers — a Moscow society devoted to Friedrich Schelling and the German idealists. This was the moment Russian thought acquired a philosophical vocabulary of its own, and Odoevsky was at the centre of it. In 1824 he began working as a critic and journalist and, with the poet Wilhelm Küchelbecker, founded the magazine *Mnemozina*.

What is striking is what he refused. The Lyubomudry circle produced both the Slavophiles, who held that Russia had a distinct spiritual destiny, and the Westernizers, who wanted it to become Europe. Odoevsky knew both factions and joined neither. That refusal is legible everywhere in the fiction, which keeps setting Russian and European intellectual positions against one another without awarding the argument.

Petersburg

He moved to St Petersburg in 1826, joined the staff of the Imperial Public Library, and became a fixture of literary officialdom — later co-editing *Sovremennik*, the most important journal of the age, with Alexander Pushkin. He was, in the most literal sense, an insider: a civil servant, a librarian, a senator in his final years, and simultaneously the author of some of the strangest prose in the language.

Russian Nights

*Russian Nights* (1844) is his masterwork and one of the odder books of European Romanticism. It is a Gothic frame-novel: a group of young men argue philosophy across a series of nights, and the tales they tell are embedded inside the argument. The form is borrowed from Aulus Gellius's *Noctes Atticae*, the manner from E. T. A. Hoffmann, and the underlying principles from Schelling and Novalis. Essays and novellas run into one another; genres and registers are deliberately mixed.

The embedded stories are the reason to read it. Several — "The Last Suicide," "The City Without a Name" — are dystopias, genuine ones, written decades before the word existed and before the industrial catastrophes that usually explain the genre's arrival. Others turn on the artist and what being one costs: "Sebastian Bach," "Beethoven's Last Quartet," "The Improvisatore." The whole book is an argument about whether reason and system can account for human beings, staged by a man who was himself a scientist, a bureaucrat and a mystic, and pointedly not resolved.

Elsewhere he wrote fantastic tales — "Cosmorama," "Salamandra" — and children's stories including "The Snuff-Box Town." One of his sharpest inventions is "Opere del Cavaliere Giambattista Piranesi," in which an architect is pursued by his own drawings, which demand to be built. On the strength of these he is counted among the pioneers of the impressionistic short story in Europe, and named alongside Hoffmann and Osip Senkovsky as central to the early shaping of European fantastika.

The Year 4338

In 1828 he published "Two Days in the Life of the Terrestrial Globe," in which a social gathering is interrupted by the news that Biela's Comet will strike the earth in 4339. Between 1837 and 1839 he expanded the premise into *The Year 4338: Petersburg Letters*, a novel of the year before the impact. Its future contains advanced transport including travel in space, deliberate control of the weather, and devices for communicating at a distance that anticipate networked media with uncomfortable accuracy. It is one of the first serious works of Russian science fiction and it went essentially unread for a century.

The Musician's Advocate

Odoevsky's other great cause was music. He was among the earliest and loudest champions of Mikhail Glinka and of a distinctively Russian national style, at a point when educated Russian opinion still assumed serious music was Italian or German. More consequentially, he helped establish the Russian Musical Society and both the Moscow and St Petersburg conservatories — the institutions through which Russian musical training was professionalised. He also found time in 1844 to publish a treatise on electroplating. He returned to Moscow in 1861, served as a senator, and died on 11 March 1869, buried at the Donskoy monastery.

Why Vladimir Is Called a Genius

The quality here is genuine intellectual range, and range of an unusual kind: not a dilettante's shallow sampling but an ability to work at a serious level in domains that had no vocabulary in common. He wrote philosophical fiction under the influence of Schelling; he founded conservatories; he published on electrochemistry; he wrote for children; he anticipated networked communication. The unifying instinct is a conviction that no single system — rationalist, mystical, national — can hold the whole of experience, which is exactly the argument *Russian Nights* is built to stage rather than settle.

He also possessed real anticipatory imagination. Writing dystopian fiction in the 1830s and 40s, before the industrial and political catastrophes that made the form obvious, required extrapolating from a premise rather than reacting to an experience. That is a harder cognitive act, and it is the same faculty that produced *The Year 4338*.

The honest counter-case is that influence, not insight, is where he falls short. The Science Fiction Encyclopedia is blunt: his science fiction had negligible influence for a hundred years, and only "in hindsight the strength of his work seems clear." *Russian Nights* got a minor revival when it was reprinted in the early twentieth century; there is a suggestion Dostoevsky knew it, but no more than a suggestion. And the scope came at the cost of concentration: he scattered himself across fiction, philosophy, musicology, chemistry and public administration. He is a genius of scope who never produced the single unarguable masterpiece that scope promised.

Legacy

Odoevsky's institutions outlasted his books. The conservatories he helped found reshaped Russian music permanently, which is a more concrete legacy than most novelists leave. In literature he was rediscovered slowly, as the twentieth century developed a taste for exactly the things he did first: the philosophical frame-tale, the dystopia, the fantastic story that refuses to explain itself. The prince who could not settle on one field turned out to have been early in several.

Achievements

• Order of St. Vladimir, 2nd class
• Order of Saint Stanislaus, 2nd class
• Order of Saint Stanislaus, 1st class
• Order of Saint Anna