| Two hundred years ago Prince Vladimir Odoevsky was born Vladimir Odoevsky prefaced his first book with an unusually ornate title - “Motley fairy tales with eloquent words, collected by Irinei Modestovich Gomozeyka, master of philosophy and member of various learned societies, published by V. Bezglasny .” A bizarre title should hide the author's face, but like almost any hoax, it reveals quite a lot about the hoaxer himself.
Let's start deciphering with the second, “publishing” name. Many years later, the author of “Motley Tales” would write about himself: “Odoevsky (Prince Vladimir Fedorovich) was born in Moscow, July 30th, 1804.” This is the only “positive information” (however, it did not save philologists from arguing about the exact date of birth of the writer), for it is further said: “He has a special hatred for autobiographies...” Odoevsky’s life was eventful: the heir of an ancient family, he published with Wilhelm Küchelbecker the famous almanac "Mnemosyne", was a cousin and friend of the Decembrist poet Alexander Odoevsky, closely communicated with Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Glinka, Belinsky, created the updated "Notes of the Fatherland" - the best magazine of the 1840s. In a word, just start telling... But in relation to his person, Odoevsky remained “voiceless”. He liked to hide behind pseudonyms. He kept completed essays on his desk for a long time, often abandoned work mid-sentence, and could publish a passage that seemed to require continuation. Odoevsky always eluded some “main field,” alternating music with chemistry, literature with gastronomy, history with practical charity. In the same quasi-autobiography, he argued: “... a person should neither create any activity for himself arbitrarily, nor refuse the one to which the combination of life circumstances calls him.”
“Conjugation” led to everything at once - calling himself “a member of various learned societies,” the prince did not bend his heart: suffice it to say that the name of Odoevsky is inscribed in the history of the Public Library (he served there), the Rumyantsev Museum (he headed), the Moscow Conservatory (one of the founders). The mosaic of hobbies was strengthened by Odoevsky’s eternal passion—philosophy. (Formally, this is a tracing of the well-known Greek word “philosophy.” But only formally.) In 1823, several young Moscow wise men formed the secret “Society of Philosophy” in order to comprehend the abyss of nature and the human soul, studying the philosophy of Schelling and the poetry of Goethe. The history of this society ended at the turn of 1825-1826, when news of the uprising on Senate Street reached Moscow, the dreamers burned their protocols, and the new era scattered former friends: who should serve, who should engage in commerce, who should joke in salons. Odoevsky preserved the memory of the youthful union - it lives both in the sad lyrical story about the inevitable separation of former sympathizers ("New Year", 1831), and in the writer's main work - the philosophical novel "Russian Nights", completed only in 1844.
“Russian Nights” are interviews with friends seeking truth, interspersed with stories about great musicians (Beethoven’s Last Quartet, published in 1831, was highly appreciated by Pushkin), a scary future (“City Without a Name”), the paradoxes of creativity (“Improviser”), soulless modernity. The mystery of life eludes the interlocutors, but it is also dear to them because it can be endlessly unraveled. After reading “Russian Nights,” the exiled settler Kuchelbecker, who was once friends with Odoevsky, wrote in his diary: “How many questions he raises! Of course, almost none of them are resolved, but thank you for raising them - and in the Russian book!”
Odoevsky initially intended to call this book “The Madhouse” - he thought of it as a shelter for everyone who, being mistaken, or even dying, strives for the truth, and therefore breaks out of the “norm”. How the “Russian foreman of the princes” fought for them, who wanted, if not to be, then to be known as an eccentric, an alchemist, a Russian Faust, Irenaeus Modestovich Gomozeyka, a semi-impoverished wise guy, to whom Odoevsky “gave” his first book and came up with the appropriate funny and touching fate.
An eccentric sage must also write strangely: even in “Russian Nights” there is a touch of extravagance, a love of curiosity, stylistic mannerisms - what can we talk about “Motley Tales”, where the latest romantic fashions are intertwined with ancient allegories, and irony is inseparable from simple-minded moralizing . Pushkin was victoriously right when he reacted skeptically to Odoevsky’s words that “writing fantastic tales is extremely difficult”: “If it is so difficult, why does he write them? Who is forcing him? Fantastic tales are only good when they are easy to write.”
Odoevsky believed that he had learned the lesson of Pushkin, who advised him to be “more plastic” in his writings. This is both true and false. Of course, in “mysterious stories” (especially in “Salamander” with its rich historical texture), and in secular stories, and in later stories (for example, in the brilliant “Martingale”) Odoevsky strove for plasticity and concreteness. But he could not escape either the playful intonations, or the allegories, or intellectual overload. Yes, in general, I didn’t want to. That’s why he constantly exploited the motif of the “mechanical nature” of everyday life, and that’s why he saw clockwork dolls or the living dead in bad people. Apollo Grigoriev had reason to exclaim: “Princess Mimi is not a living creature, but a thought, and a monstrous one at that, derived, like a mathematical calculation, from observations that are exceptionally sad and gloomy.” But the critic did not know the outline of the fantastic prologue to this story, where a whole family of devils inhabits the body of the sinister (ill-fated) heroine!
Like all amateurs, Odoevsky was not an equal writer. Moreover, in the same works of his (“La Sylphide”, “Salamander”, the ultra-fantastic “Cosmorama”, the same “Princess Mimi”), witty and vivid episodes coexist with sluggish descriptions, routine dialogues, and supposedly effective cliches. Odoevsky was not the deep thinker for whom they tried to pass him off during the era of rush demand for “uncommon facial expressions” (this was the case first in the 1910s, then in the 1970s). The mysticism that was so passionately sought in his prose is extremely rationalistic, and his erudition (and indeed not small) does not make up for the lack of his idea. The fact that Odoevsky left literature in the mid-1840s was not at all an accident - he felt how the “literary” era was passing, and he had not been a passionate writer before. Another thing is that in modern times the prince worked with dignity for the benefit of Russian culture. And the third is the feeling of admiration that this charming eccentric evokes. The reasons for it are precisely named in Kuchelbecker’s letter to Odoevsky dated May 3, 1845: “You... are ours; Griboedov, Pushkin, and I bequeathed all our best to you; “Before posterity and the fatherland, you are a representative of our time, of our selfless striving for artistic beauty and unconditional truth.”
What's true is true. Odoevsky, with all his quirks and hobbies, retained his loyalty to the “Pushkin era” within himself. And without him, our “golden age” would clearly not be complete. Andrey NEMZER |
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