One of Odoevsky's lines, "Iz iskry vozgoritsa plamya" (Из искры возгорится пламя, One spark will start a flame), has come down in history as a long-lasting slogan of the Russian revolutionary movement.

It was chosen as a motto (signed as: the "Decembrists' reply to Pushkin") for the Lenin-founded newspaper Iskra, also giving the magazine its title, which means "spark".

On December 14 (25) Odoevsky was one of the commanders of the mutineers in the Senate Square where three thousand military men gathered to refuse to swear allegiance to the new Tsar, Nicholas I of Russia, proclaiming instead their loyalty to Grand Duke Constantine Pavlovich and the Russian Constitution.

Odoevsky's best-known poems, including Fiery sounds of prophetic strings (Strun véshchikh plámennye zvúki) where his famous line "One spark will start a flame" comes from, were written in the late 1820s - early 1830s, first in prison in Petersburg, then at a Siberian factory he was sent to work in.

As a sentry in a Nizhegorodsky dragoon regiment, he forged close friendship with Mikhail Lermontov, an officer there, who responded to the news of Odoevsky's death in 1839 with a tribute ("I knew him.