In the 1830s Vladimir Odoevsky was one of the most popular authors in Russia, rated as a prose writer not far below Aleksandr Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. His star rapidly waned as he went prematurely into a virtual literary retirement in the mid 1840s, some quarter of a century before his death, as the Romantic style of writing gave way to the new "Natural School" in prose and to the rise of Russian realism. Odoevsky was also well known as a thinker, a children's writer, a popular educator, a literary entrepreneur, an amateur scientist, and the first serious Russian musicologist, as well as a distinguished public servant and the host of a leading artistic salon through five decades. One contemporary recorded that "on Odoevsky's divan sits the whole of Russian literature." A central figure of his time, Odoevsky was close to the major historical events of the period...