His father started out as an adjutant of Prince Grigory Potyomkin, then, in 1798 he entered civil service as the director of the Moscow Assignant bank.

[4] His widow, Avdotya Petrovna, had a house on the Prechistenka street in Moscow, several servants and a small fortune from her husband.

[5] Part of his childhood was spent with his grandfather, colonel Prince Sergey Ivanovich Odoyevsky,[5] but when he died, his estate in Kostroma Governorate ended up in the hands of an acquaintance of Vladimir's maternal grandmother, the widow of a general, Agrafena Glazova, who took over the properties.

[5] Vladimir ended up owing much debt to Glazova, and having settled liabilities, he moved to his grandfather's estate being almost completely broke.

In the mid-1820s, Odoyevsky presided over the Lyubomudry Society, where he and his fellow students met to discuss the ideas of Friedrich Schelling and other German philosophers.

Aspiring to imitate Ludwig Tieck and Novalis, Odoyevsky published a number of tales for children (e.g., "The Snuff-Box Town") and fantastical stories for adults (e.g., "Cosmorama" and "Salamandra") imbued with the vague mysticism in the vein of Jakob Boehme and Louis-Claude de Saint-Martin.

As a music critic, Odoyevsky set out to propagate the national style of Mikhail Glinka and his followers, denigrating their forebears such as Dmitri Bortniansky.

[7] He also wrote a romanticised biography of the Russian violinist Ivan Khandoshkin, whose career he presented as thwarted by the malign influence of such Italian musicians as Giuseppe Sarti.

[8] Among his many articles on musical subjects, a treatise about old Russian church singing deserves particular attention, though he expressed strong distaste for strochnoy (early Russian polyphonic) chant: "No human ear could possibly bear the succession of seconds that are constantly to be encountered.