ABSTRACT
Russia and China are close neighbors, and Russia was the first Western country with which China concluded a treaty. Nevertheless, in the field of sinology Russians began to be heard only in the first quarter of the nineteenth century with the publication of Yegor F. Timkovskii's Travels to China Over Mongolia. Utopian visions are rare in Russian literature. In the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, when the genre became rather popular in the West, there had only been six in Russia before the first part of Prince Vladimir Fedorovich Odoevskii's The Year 4338 was published in 1835. Odoevskii was a significant figure in Russian cultural life from the 1820s through the 1860s. One of the most remarkable features of this talented man was his capacity for development. Throughout his life he was never satisfied, but constantly looked for new ways to discover the truth.
