Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky — Visionary of Contemporary Art

The author examines the work of the famous writer and inventor, statesman and philanthropist of the XIX century Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevsky in the light of the addition of a new type of personality of the researcher and Herald of the modern artist. Odoevsky belonged to the kind of Desk scientist. He turned his homes into laboratories where various experiments were performed (from anatomical, electrical to culinary). Contemporaries called him “Russian Faust”. The life of a recluse was combined in him with an extraordinary breadth of interests and an all-embracing knowledge. In his experiments, he sought to overcome the isolation of various Sciences and arts and restore the rights of a single Universe of knowledge about the world. This article is the first attempt to bring this strategy closer to the world of Renaissance researchers and artists on the scale of Leonardo da Vinci, on the one hand, and to the metamodern themes of transparent borders and hybrid understanding of the Sciences and arts in modern times. The platform for the synthesis of sciences and arts in Odoevsky’s world, of course, was literature. Based on the interpretation of his philosophical works, science fiction novels and short stories, the author concludes that the “instinctual” knowledge extolled by Odoevsky is close to the ideas of the Surrealists (Andre Breton, Jan Schwankmayer). And the universe created inside the study silence anticipates the images of a strange collector of knowledge, the Creator of installations on poetic and scientific themes in shadow-boxes by Joseph Cornell. Locked in the walls of the study, like a “town in a snuffbox” (the name of the Prince’s most famous novel), the philosophical art world of V. F. Odoevsky is endowed with the power of prophecy and inquiry about many subsequent discoveries in science, art, and society. As a modern artist, Prince Odoevsky does not give ready-made recipes and systematic explanations of the laws of life, but forces the interlocutor (reader-viewer) to be a co-Creator and take responsibility for the intellectual solution of the situations and incidents presented by the author. At the end of the article, we offer a brief overview of the exhibition held in the Museum of Moscow in 2019 (‘Cosmorama XVIII’), in which the life and art (the art of life) of Prince Vladimir Odoevsky entered into a dialogue with the works of contemporary artists.