To begin my life with such a disaster of the Caudine Forks of learning was far from suiting my ideas. I told my father resolutely that if he could not find some other means I should resign from the service.
My father was angry, said that with my caprices I was preventing him from organising a career for me, and abused the teachers who had stuffed me \vith this nonsense; but, seeing that all this had very little effect upon me, he made up his mind to go to Yusupov.
Yusupov settled the matter in a trice, partly l ike a lord and partly like a Tatar. He called his secretary and told him to write me a leave of absence for three years. The secretary hesitated and hesitated, and at last, with some apprehension, submitted that leave of absence for longer than four months could not be given without the sanction of His Majesty.
'VVhat nonsense, my man,' the prince said to him. 'Where is the difficulty? \\'ell, if leave of absence is impossible, write that I commission him to attend the university course, to perfect himself in the sciences.'
His secretary wrote this and next day I was sitting in the amphitheatre of the Physico-Mathematical auditorium.
The University of Moscow and the Lycee of Tsarkoye Selo play a significant part in the history of Russian education and in the life of the last two generations.
Moscow University grew in importance together with the city itself after 1 8 1 2. Degraded by the Emperor Peter from being the
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capital of the Tsars, Moscow was promoted by the Emperor Napoleon (partly intentionally, but twice as much unintentionally) to being the capital of the Russian people. The people realised their ties of blood 'vith Moscow from the pain they felt at the news of its occupation by the enemy. From that time a new epoch began for the city. Its university became more and more the centre of Russian culture. All the conditions necessary for its development were combined-historical importance, geographical position, and the absence of the Tsar.
The intensified mental activity of Petersburg after the death of Paul came to a gloomy close on the Fourteenth of December ( 1 825) . Nicholas appeared with his five gibbets, with penal servitude, with the white strap and the light blue uniform of Benckendorf.1
Everything ran backwards: the blood rushed to the heart, the activity that was out\vardly concealed boiled inwardly in secret.
Moscow University remained firm and was the foremost to stand out in sharp relief from the general fog. The Tsar began to hate it from the time of the Polezhayev a ffair.2 He sent A. Pisarev, the major-general of the En·rzings at Kalut;a.3 as Director. commanded the students to be dressed in uniform, ordered them to wear a svvord, then forbade them to wear a sword, condemned Polezhayev to be a common soldier for his verses and Kostenetsky and his comrades for their prose, destroyed the Kritskys4 for a bust, sentenced us to exile for Saint-Simonism, then made Prince Sergey Mikhaylovich Golitsyn Director, and took no further notice of that 'hot-bed of depravity,' piously advising young men who had finished their studies at the lyceum or at the School of Jurisprudence not to enter it.
Golitsyn was an astonishing person: it was long before he could accustom himself to the irregularity of there being no lecture when a professor was ill ; he thought the next on the list ought to take his place, so that Father Ternovsky sometimes had to lecture in the clinic on women's diseases and Richter, the gyn<ecologist, to discourse on the Immaculate Conception.
1 The uniform of the gendarmes of the Third Division, the political police, of which Benckendorf was head, was light blue with a white strap. ( Tr.) 2 See pp. 1 1 7- 1 9 for a full account of this. (D.M. ) 3 A collection of the works of various authors published in two parts by A. A. Pisarev in 1 825.
4 It was a young man called Zubov who was put in a madhouse for hacking a bust of the Tsar. The Kritsky brothers were punished for addressing insulting words to his portraits. (A.S. )
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But in spite of that the university that had fallen into disgrace grew in influence ; the youthful strength of Russia streamed to it from all sides, from all classes of society, as into a common reservoir ; in its halls they were purified from the prejudices they had picked up at the domestic hearth, reached a common level, became like brothers and dispersed again to all parts of Russia and among all classes of its people.
Until 1 8·1-8 tl!f' organisation of our universities was purely democratic. Their doors were op£>n to everyone \vho could pass the examination, who was neither a serf, a peasant, nor a man excluded from his commune. Nicholas spoilt all this; he restricted the admission of students, increased the fees of those who paid their own expenses, and permitted none to be relieved of payment but poor noblemen. All these belonged to the series of senseless measures which will disappear with the last breath of that drag on the Russian wheel, together with the law about passports, about religious intolerance and so on.
Young men of all sorts and conditions coming from above and from below, from the south and from the north, were quickly fused into a compact mass of comrades. Social distinctions had not among us the offensive influence which \Ve find in English schools and barracks; I am not speaking of the English universities: they exist exclusively for the aristocracy and for the rich.
A student who thought fit to boast among us of his blue blood or his wealth would have been excluded from 'fire and water' and made the butt of his comrades.
The external distinctions-and they did not go very deep-that divided the students arose from other causes. Thus, for instance, the medical section which was on the other side of the garden was not so clos£>ly united with us as the other faculties ; moreover, the majority of the medical students consisted of seminarists and Germans. The Germans kept a little apart and were deeply imbued with the Western bourgeois spirit. All the education of the luckless seminarists, all their ideas, were utterly different from ours; we spoke different languages. Brought up under the oppression of monastic despotism, stuffed with rhetoric and theology, they envied us our ease of manner; we were vexed by their Christian meekness.5
I entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics in spite of 5 Immense progress has been made in this respect. All that I have heard of late of the theological academies, and even of the seminaries. confirms it. I need hardly say that it is not the ecclesiastical authorities but the spirit of the pupils tha t is responsible for this improvement.
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the fact that I had never had a marked ability nor much liking for mathematics. Nick and I had been taught mathematics together by a teacher whom we lo\'ed for his anecdotes and stories; interesting as he was, he can hardly have developed any particular passion for his subject. His knowledge of mathematics extended only to conic sections, that is, exactly as far as was necessary for preparing high-school boys for the university; a real philosopher, he ne\'er had the curiosity to glance at the