Vladimir Odoevsky was a man who knew everything: philosophy, music, chemistry, pedagogy, cookery. They called him "the Russian Faust." And yet the chief things he wrote were fairy tales.
He was born in 1804, into an aristocratic family, and studied at the Moscow University boarding school, where he joined the philosophical circles of the day — in the 1820s, the Society of Wisdom-Lovers, alongside Kuchelbecker and Venevitinov.
Russian Nights is a philosophical novel in dialogue. The Little Town in the Snuffbox is a children's tale about how a musical box works. Moroz Ivanovich is a folk tale in his retelling.
He served in the library of the Rumyantsev Museum, and later in Moscow. He died in 1869. His archive — an enormous one — has never been fully sorted to this day.