At the second edition of the Art of the Future Biennale at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow, Pavel Pepperstein’s exhibition ‘4338’ takes centre stage. Drawing on the visionary writings of Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky, the project asks what a nineteenth-century prophet might reveal about artificial intelligence, technology, and our human future. Art critic, curator, and Odoevsky aficionado Sergey Khachaturov reflects on this exhibition.

The second Art of the Future Biennale is being held at the Multimedia Art Museum, Moscow and is devoted to artificial intelligence, neural networks, and other programs that imitate human activity, all technologies that may ultimately prove to be either our helpers or our adversaries. It is therefore entirely fitting that the intellectual centerpiece—the crowning dome of the biennale—is the exhibition ‘4338’ by the guru of young conceptualism, Pavel Pepperstein. The exhibition occupies the halls of the museum’s seventh floor. Its principal protagonist is Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky (1803-1869), a friend of Russian literary greats Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol. Russian readers usually encounter Odoevsky in childhood through his celebrated fairy tale ‘The Little Town in a Snuffbox’. For most, familiarity with him goes little further than this story, in which the mechanism of a musical snuffbox springs mysteriously to life. Pepperstein, however, sets out to restore to the prince the reputation he enjoyed during his lifetime as a “Russian Faust.” In doing so, he constructs a program in which Odoevsky appears as a visionary, an alchemist-sorcerer, astronomer, poet, and philosopher.

‘4338’ is a utopian novel in which a Chinese student arrives in Saint Petersburg one year before Earth’s anticipated encounter with a comet threatening to collide with the planet. The visitor marvels at the perfection of futuristic Russia—its social organisation, technological progress, and refined customs—and compiles a detailed report on the country in the year 4338. Within this melancholic hallucination, tinged with anxious foreboding, a series of astonishing prophecies unfolds. If contemporary geopolitical assumptions were reversed, China two thousand years in the future would appear as a backward agrarian land, while Russia would have become an urbanist paradise. The country is governed by philosophers, led by a monarch who is also a poet. Aerial roads, along which aerostats drift, lead to glass skyscrapers crowned with crystal roofs. People regulate the climate, and covered gardens spread everywhere. Saint Petersburg and Moscow have merged into a single metropolis. Printed books have nearly vanished, replaced by “telegraphic dispatches,” and people communicate through electric conversations. As Pavel Pepperstein aptly observes, Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky anticipated neural networks in the creation of texts, as well as the internet, mobile telephones, and much else besides. Horses—no longer needed for riding—have become as small as domestic dogs. In pursuit of health, people take magnetic baths, eat nitrogen, and drink carbonic gas. Odoevsky even emerges as a prophet of molecular gastronomy. The prince himself was famed for his alchemical recipes and for the dinners he hosted, where guests such as Alexander Pushkin and Nikolai Gogol would gather together.

Pavel Pepperstein has produced his interpretation of the novel in the form of an unbound travel sketchbook. On sheets of paper he sketches individual scenes, commentaries on episodes from the narrative, and signs them with the name of Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky. Roughly half of the sheets consist of completed engravings. The artist takes existing nineteenth-century lithographs and subjects them to interventions reminiscent of the subversive acts performed by Jake Chapman and Dinos Chapman upon historical prints and paintings.

A scene of battling predatory beasts is transformed into the portrait of a many-limbed, many-headed creature described as a “most recent variety of aggregate animals.” Threads of ornament are inserted into anatomical illustrations of the ear in order to depict the materialisation of “rumours about the future.” An engraving of a Romantic painter at his easel becomes a portrait of a cyborg surrounded by discharges of coloured lightning and an eye-like comet. In this way, Odoevsky—assisted by Pepperstein—has portrayed a “most recent painter whose name shall become celebrated in the year 4338,” working fully equipped with the technical apparatus of the future.

Both in these augmented engravings and in his own drawings, Pepperstein once again demonstrates his remarkable ability to create a self-contained world—one that is at once punk in spirit and calibrated for the “lovers of wisdom,” the erudite viewer. Within it, virtuoso draughtsmanship, comic-book imagery, Rorschach-like forms, and the Suprematist modules of Kazimir Malevich (1879-1935) and his circle merge in a wonderfully eccentric union. A flying comet blazes through the entire enfilade of Pepperstein’s graphic series. It resembles an eyeball with a coloured, striped tail and appears as though it were produced in the laboratories of the colour experimenters of the 1920s—Mikhail Matyushin (1861-1934) and the Ender family. The comet poses a challenge to humanity living two thousand years hence. Like an avant-garde glitch, it hurtles through every image of the future, seeming to stimulate creative imagination and flights of fantasy.

In the spirit of nineteenth-century English satirical graphic art, Pepperstein also draws a portrait of Alexander Pushkin, the sun of Russian poetry. In a fantastical commentary allegedly left by Odoevsky, Pushkin appears as a comet-worshipper. He gives his inspiration to the comet alone, as though enamoured of this unknown celestial body and determined to dedicate to it a poem surpassing everything he had previously written.

One might suggest that Odoevsky himself was no less devoted a comet-worshipper, captivated by unknown forms of life and by condensations of the energies of space and time. He was drawn to whatever possessed a mysterious power of attraction—often incomprehensible and frequently destructive. It is precisely for this reason that Odoevsky became a genuine revolutionary in the genre of fantasy. Unlike Pushkin, he had no desire to demystify the supernatural and the mysterious in his fantastic tales.

It is therefore entirely natural that Pepperstein should have chosen Prince Odoevsky as the hero of his imaginative universe. Some years ago I had the opportunity to organise two projects devoted to the prince as a prophet of contemporary art. The first was the 2019 exhibition ‘Cosmorama’ at the Museum of Moscow. The second was the 2021 Odoevsky Fest at the Gogol Centre (now Gogol Theatre). Its culmination was the performance ‘A Man Without a Name’, a collective work led by director Kirill Serebrennikov, actor Nikita Kukushkin, musician Pyotr Aidu, playwright Valery Pecheikhin, and artist Sasha Barmenkov. These events made it possible to consider Odoevsky in a complex and multifaceted way.

What constitutes the energy of Odoevsky’s prophecies? He belonged to the type of the armchair scholar. His eccentric homes—filled with alchemical flasks, skulls, books, and musical instruments—became laboratories in which a variety of experiments were conducted, ranging from anatomical and electrical to culinary. In him, the life of a recluse coexisted with an extraordinary breadth of interests and a vast range of knowledge. It was for this reason that he earned the nickname “the Russian Faust.”

Through his experiments he sought to overcome the isolation of the various sciences and arts and to restore the unity of knowledge about the world. As a creator, Odoevsky stands on the one hand close to the Renaissance tradition of figures such as Leonardo da Vinci (1452-1519), and on the other to contemporary ideas about porous boundaries and the hybrid interaction of the sciences and the arts. The platform for this synthesis in Odoevsky’s world was, of course, literature.

From an interpretation of his philosophical writings, fantastic novels, and novellas, one may conclude that the “instinctual” knowledge he extolled is close in spirit to the ideas of the Surrealists, including André Breton (1896-1966) and Jan Švankmajer (b.1934). The universe created in the silence of the study also anticipates the imagery of the strange collector of knowledge—the maker of poetic and scientific shadow-box installations—embodied by the 20th century artist-hermit Joseph Cornell (1903-1972).

Enclosed within the walls of his study—like “a town in a snuffbox,” the title of his most celebrated tale—Odoevsky’s philosophical and artistic world possesses the power of prophecy and a capacity for divining many future discoveries in science, art, and society. Like a contemporary artist, Prince Odoevsky offers neither ready-made formulae nor systematic explanations of life’s laws. Instead, he compels his interlocutor—the reader-viewer—to become a co-creator and to assume responsibility for the intellectual unraveling of the situations and events he presents.

The psychedelic worlds of Pepperstein are illuminated by Odoevsky’s star. The turn toward schizo-China, horses the size of domestic dogs, and merry elixirs capable of altering human nature resonates persistently in contemporary culture. One need only recall the spectacular stage production by director Kirill Serebrennikov based on Vladimir Sorokin’s novel ‘The Blizzard’.