Pavel Pepperstein
The Year 4338
2025
Installation
Paper, engraving, ink, watercolour, marker, coloured pencil; oil on canvas
Courtesy of the artist and Sonya Stereostyrski
In 1835 Prince Vladimir Fyodorovich Odoevsky (philosopher, novelist, friend of Pushkin, Lermontov and Gogol, musicologist, and one of the most prominent figures of his time) wrote and shortly thereafter partially published the short story ‘The Year 4338’. In this story the prince described the events and realities of a future that might seem distant not only to him but to us as well. In this extremely significant work, which marks the beginning of the history of Russian science fiction, this member of one of Russia’s most ancient aristocratic families made several strikingly accurate predictions. In particular, in the prince’s text, we read:
“The invention of a book in which the letters are machine-transformed into several books. Machines for novels and for Russian drama. The time will come when books will be written in the style of telegraphic dispatches; only tables, maps and a few leaflet theses will be excluded from this custom. Printing presses will be used only for newspapers and visiting cards; correspondence will be replaced by electric conversation; novels will survive, but not for long – they will be replaced by the theatre. Textbooks will be replaced by public lectures. The new worker in science will face no small task: in the morning, fly (by then balloons will replace cabbies) to a dozen lectures, read up to twenty newspapers and the same number of books, write a dozen pages on the fly, and actually make it to the theatre on time; but the main task will be: weaning the mind from fatigue, accustoming it to move instantly from one subject to another; to refine it so that the most complex operation becomes easy for him from the very first minute; a mathematical formula will be found for finding precisely the page needed in a huge book and quickly calculating how many pages can then be skipped without error.”
This relatively short passage makes a whole range of very specific predictions. A neural network that creates books is predicted, the internet and email correspondence are predicted, search engines like Google and Yandex are very sensibly described, and the lifestyle of a modern ‘accelerated’ intellectual, spending time on an airplane, where he prepares for his next lecture in one of the world’s cities, is quite realistically depicted.
What enabled Prince Odoevsky to peer into such a distant future with such insight and clarity? His fascination with magnetism? His experiments in somnambulism? Or did the prince’s extraordinary scientific knowledge and astonishing erudition play a decisive role in his foresight?
Pavel Pepperstein
The project is supplemented by comics about the life of Prince Odoevsky, created by artist Ivan Razumov in 2026.
MAMM would like to thank the Russian National Museum of Music for providing the enharmonic petit grand piano that belonged to Prince V. F. Odoevsky.
