Many noteworthy Russians testify to having been happy at von May's school. An irrepressible popinjay, von May wore gold- rimmed eyeglasses, took snuff, and sported red and yellow handkerchiefs in the breast pocket of his frock coat. Madame von May, who liked to be called "Aunt Agnes," distributed chocolate and other treats to the boys. The headmaster's motto was "First love, then teach," and he acted on it, the first thing every morning, by greeting each of his students with a handshake.
Nicholas was a "May Bug," as the students named themselves, for almost a full decade. Each morning, he walked to school. The day began with a dual prayer service, led by a Lutheran pastor and an Orthodox deacon. Then, off to the classroom. Roerich did well in all subjects, but was most enthusiastic about literature, history, and geography. He enjoyed foreign languages, learning Latin and rudimentary Greek. His German became fluent; much of the school's instruction was in that tongue. He also picked up French and some English, though real aptitude in those came later, during his European travels.
Kolya's artistic and literary tastes showed early.12 Until age eight or nine, his favorite toy was a miniature theater; as a teenager, he accompanied his parents to the opera. He dog-eared the family copy of Scott's Ivan- hoe with repeated readings and moved on at school to Ruskin, Blake, and Carlyle. The German Romantics "occupied honored places on my desk," and he wrote term papers on Schiller's "Undine" and Goethe's "Elf-King." Shakespeare interested him, as did Poe and Twain. He spent his teenage years infatuated with Gogol's tales and, at seventeen, made his first foray into student theatricals by appearing as the sailor Zhevankin in Gogol's The Wedding. As for music, Roerich gravitated to Russian composers: for him,
Glinka, Mussorgsky, and Rimsky-Korsakov trumped most Westerners, although he appreciated the "oriental" splendor of Verdi's Aida and Meyerbeer's LAfricaine. The one exception was Richard Wagner, for whose works Roerich conceived a lifelong passion. In 1889, Nicholas had the good luck to attend Saint Petersburg's first staging of the Ring cycle, by Angelo Neumann, director of the German opera in Prague, an event that profoundly affected many Russian artists and composers, including Rimsky-Korsakov and Alexander Glazunov.13
That Nicholas blossomed at the May Gymnasium is not surprising. University life in Russia was stultified by the reactionary politics of the 1880s and 1890s—the reign of the bullheaded Alexander III—but secondary schools proved safer havens for young minds wishing to push beyond the confines set by state censors. In 1889, for exactly this reason, a number of von May's students, led by the artist Alexandre Benois and including Konstantin Somov, Dmitri Filosofov, and Walter Nouvel, formed the Society for Self-Education, known in lighter moments as the "Nevsky Pickwickians." The Pick- wickians read journals from Western Europe, debated the merits of foreign composers, and smuggled banned literary works to each other, reveling in the poetic decadence offered by Verlaine and Baudelaire. Benois graduated in 1890, and his friends soon after, but before the decade was out, this same group, joined by Leon Bakst and the enterprising Sergei Diaghilev, reconstituted itself as the famed World of Art Society.
This circle left an indelible mark on Russian culture, and because Roerich involved himself with its activities during the 1900s, the question of whether he did so earlier naturally arises. He did not.14 He knew the Pickwickians and shared many of their views. But while Benois later remembered him as a "handsome" and "affectionate" classmate, he also described him as "bashful before his elders."15 The Pickwickians were on average four to five years older than Nicholas, and he had few boyhood ties with them. To the extent the May Gymnasium shaped his teenage views on art, it was the
school's general ethos that mattered. •
Nicholas was drawn like iron to a magnet by geography, history, and archaeology. Von May taught the first two subjects with skill, as did one of the school's youngest instructors, Alexander Lipovsky, who remained friends with Roerich after his graduation. With spellbinding stories of far-off realms echoing in his ears, Kolya drafted maps and molded mountain ranges out of clay, daydreaming about future travels. Nor was he immune to the sense of excitement stirred up by the explorers of the day, who spent the century's waning decades racing to the North and South Poles, plunging into the jungles of the Amazon, or braving the depths of Africa. Among the spaces remaining blank on the world map were the steppes and deserts of Central Asia, and the Himalayan peaks that lay beyond.
The Russians, living in proximity to these regions, were instrumental in exploring them. The Russian Geographical Society was founded in 1845. Three decades later, by the time of Roerich's infancy, it had sponsored or assisted expeditions to Turkestan; the Ussuri and Amur basins; the Pamir, Tien Shan, and Karakoram ranges; and Mongolia and the Gobi Desert. Most alluring of all to Roerich's mind were the hidden mysteries of Tibet and the Himalayas. Like others of his generation, Kolya read about his compatriots' exploits in magazines such as the Illustrated World, the Global Traveler, and Nature and People, across whose pages the names of Nikolai Muraviev-Amursky, Pyotr Semy- onov-Tien-Shansky, and Grigori Potanin marched as intrepidly as their real-life owners did across the mountains and expanses of Asia. The visual appeal of Vasily Vereshcha- gin's celebrated paintings of Turkestan, Sik- kim, and Kashmir added to the public's (and Nicholas's) enthusiasm. Most heroic was the officer-geographer Nikolai Przhevalsky, who logged tens of thousands of miles in Mongolia, Turkestan, and Tibet during the 1870s and 1880s, and brought into Western scientific classification the wild steppe horse that bears his name. Przhevalsky's celebrity status was at its height when Kolya was at his most impressionable. Forty years later, an older Roerich, walking paths that Przhevalsky had walked, had a sense of following in an idol's footsteps.
For now, Nicholas contented himself with adventures closer to home. When not at the gymnasium, he spent as much time as possible at Isvara. Puberty did nothing to cure his bronchial ailments, and Petersburg's autumn dampness caused him distress every year. As with Teddy Roosevelt half a world away, Nicholas's doctors suggested that he toughen his lungs by spending time outdoors and away from the city, especially during the winter. He took up horseback riding and hunting, as well as natural history. He compiled collections of plants and minerals, classified butterflies and beetles, and completed ornithological studies competent enough that, in 1892, the Forestry Department granted him a license to collect eggs from nests in state-owned woods for scholarly purposes. As he neared graduation, he wrote magazine articles on outdoorsmanship.
Roerich's fascination with archaeology began around the time he entered the May Gymnasium and grew into a cherished avocation.16 When he was nine, one of his father's acquaintances, the archaeologist Lev Ivanovsky, excavating nearby burial mounds, or kurgans, paid a visit to Isvara. Noting Kolya's inquisitive nature, he invited the boy to see what had been unearthed. The sight of the age-old weapons, broken pottery, and jewelry transported him to the Stone Age, where, it can safely be said, his soul remained for decades to come. He filled his library with every book about archaeology and prehistory he could lay his hands on. He read about the Altamira cave paintings, the carvings of winged bulls in the palaces of Nineveh, and Heinrich Schliemann's triumphant uncovering of the ruins of Troy.17
To gain his own field experience, Nicholas, at about age fourteen, explored tumulus tombs in the Isvara area, helped by the village deacon's sons, who kept their role secret because their father considered it impious to show such curiosity about pagan sites. His first finds included gold and silver coins from the tenth and eleventh centuries. The thrill of success spurred him to read Count Alexei Uvarov's standard text, The Archaeology of Russia, and essays by Alexander Spitsyn and Prince Pavel Putiatin, whose niece he would later marry. In 1892, Nicholas took his pastime to a more scholarly level by establishing contact with the Imperial Archaeological Commission (IAK).