“To Search and Not to Find”: The Fate of a 19th-Century Man in V. F. Odoevsky’s “The Sylph”

Abstract

The works of V. F. Odoevsky are interpreted primarily from the philosophical and aesthetic principles of Romanticism. This view, while valid, sometimes obscures and narrows the deeper meanings of the writer’s work, who sought to understand not only human nature as such, but also to reveal the state of mind, skepticism, and despondency of his contemporaries. This article examines the story “The Sylph” within the central concerns of 19th-century Russian literature and within the context of Odoevsky’s work, which emphasized the harm of one- sidedness, including the complete rejection of everyday life (even in the name of art). This approach presents the hero of “The Sylph” not as an exceptional individual whose escape into dreamland demonstrates the apotheosis of Romantic rejection of banal reality in the name of a sublime dreamworld, but as self-delusion and the abandonment of human duty. Odoevsky saw the way out of the spiritual impasse into which the man of the 19th century, led by both materialistic and mystical ideas, had wandered in the traditional religion for Russia and in active work for the good of the fatherland and other people.