Vladimir Odoevsky, Zhivoi mertvets [The Live Corpse]

Slobodan Sucur (University of Alberta)

Ed. by Neil Cornwell, University of Bristol
The Literary Encyclopedia. Volume 2.2.1.00: Slavic and Russian Writing and Culture: Old, Medieval and Tsarist, 700-1917.
Vol. editors: Neil Cornwell (University of Bristol), Roman Koropeckyj (University of California, Los Angeles), Andrei Rogatchevski (UiT - The Arctic University of Norway)

Dates

First circulation or publication 1844

Places

Russia (Country of Origin)

Genres and Modes

Story

Resources

Zhivoi mertvets [The Live Corpse], written in 1838 and dedicated to Countess Rostopchina, was first published in 1844. It has been described as “a striking tale of out-of-body experience, based ultimately this time on dream” (Neil Cornwell: Introduction to Salamander, 4), influencing Dostoevsky's later fantastic stories such as Bobok (1873) and, in particular, The Dream of a Ridiculous Man (1877). The last lines of The Live Corpse had in fact formed the epigraph to Dostoevsky's first work, Poor Folk (1846), and the theme, also present in Odoevsky's Kosmorama [The Cosmorama] and Salamandra [The Salamander], was taken up by Tolstoy in The Death of Ivan Ilyich (1886), his similarly entitled play Zhivoi trup [The Live Corpse, 1900] and The False Coupon (1904). It may also be seen as implicit in the philosophy emerging in War and...

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2430 words

Citation: Sucur, Slobodan. "Zhivoi mertvets". The Literary Encyclopedia. First published 24 May 2005 [https://www.litencyc.com/php/sworks.php?rec=true&UID=16245, accessed 12 February 2026.]

Vladimir Odoevsky, Zhivoi mertvets [The Live Corpse]

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