About the lyrics of A. I. Odoevsky He was born for them, for those hopes, Poetry and happiness... In it the quiet flame of feeling has not died out: He also retained the sparkle of his azure eyes, And ringing children's laughter, and live speech, And a proud faith in people and other life. M. Y. Lermontov "In Memory of A. I. Odoevsky". December 8 marks the 200th anniversary of the birth of Alexander Ivanovich Odoyevsky (1802-1839), a poet of the Decembrist penal servitude, who went down in the history of Russian literature with his poem "Strings of prophetic fiery sounds..." - a response to Pushkin's famous "Message to Siberia". A. I. Odoevsky belonged to an ancient family of appanage princes of Chernigov, he could have made a brilliant career, was a close friend of A. S. Griboyedov, the poets A. A. Bestuzhev, K. F. Ryleev. But since 1825, he has become an active member of the radical wing of the Northern Society of Decembrists. The day before the uprising, at a meeting with Ryleev, according to V. I. Shteyngeyl, he exclaimed: "Let's die! Oh, how well we will die!" On Senatskaya Square, Odoevsky commanded a platoon of the Moscow Life Guards Regiment, and successfully agitated others to join the rebels (see: Decembrists in the Memoirs of Contemporaries, Moscow, 1988). After the defeat of the uprising, he was sentenced to hard labor, and in 1832 he was transferred from the Chita prison to a settlement, having lost the opportunity to communicate with friends. Only in July 1837 was he enlisted as a private in the Caucasian Separate Corps, in November - in the Nizhny Novgorod Dragoon Regiment, where he met and became friends with Lermontov, visited Pyatigorsk and Zheleznovodsk. When he received the news of his father's death in 1839, he wrote: "It's over for me.<...> I feel that I don't belong to this world (Odoevsky A. I. Poly. sobr. poems and Letters, Moscow-L., 1934, pp. 331-332). Indeed, the poet soon dies of malaria. According to the memoirs of N. A. Zagoretsk ... Read more