Alexander Pushkin

1811-1817 The Lycee

His parents originally planned to send Pushkin to a French Jesuit school in St. Petersburg.  However, in 1811, Tsar Alexander I decided to found, in the pleasant suburb of Tsarskoye Selo, an elite academy (to which he donated his personal library) to be housed in the Summer Palace of the Tsars.  Six years’ continuous education (with visits home or leaving school grounds strictly forbidden) were to be provided free of charge for “young men destined for highest office in the service of the state”.   Corporal punishment was forbidden—an unheard of innovation at that time. Vasily Pushkin, the poet’s uncle, brought his nephew up to St. Petersburg for the entrance exam (pocketing en route 100 rubles entrusted him by an aunt for the boy’s spending money).  Pushkin was accepted and officially inducted with 29 other boys by Tsar Alexander I into the Lycée, on October 19, 1811, a date later commemorated in verse by Pushkin seven separate times. No sooner was the imperial pomp and ceremony of the inaugural ceremony over than all the boys ran out and got into a rousing snowball fight.  From the beginning the Lycée and its close-knit students invoked in each other a spirit of boisterous boyish freedon, joy, deep friendship, of competitive playfulness, joyous excess, and good humor yet with abiding reverence for a higher purpose in life, a devotion to love, art, and honor that came to be called “the spirit of the Lycée”.

The Lycée’s ambitious curriculum included: “1. grammar: instruction in the Russian, Latin, French, and German languages; 2. moral sciences: introduction to religion, philosophy, ethics, and logic; 3. mathematics and physical sciences, algebra, physics, and trigonometry; 4. historical sciences: history of Russia and foreign countries, geography, and chronology; 5. basic knowledge of literature: excerpts from the best authors, analysis, rules of rhetoric; 6. fine arts and gymnastics, calligraphy, drawing, dancing, fencing, horsemanship, and swimming…”  Some of the teachers were remarkable for their liberality; in particular, Kunitsyn, the professor of moral sciences, lectured against serfdom, and on behalf of  “natural law” and the teachings of Adam Smith.  The French master was the brother of the French revolutionary leader Marat.  The schoolboys vividly experienced Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812, the battle of Borodino, and the burning of Moscow, (at one point hurling away their French grammar books in protest, according to Pushkin’s school friend Malinovsky).  

In his Notes on Pushkin, Ivan  Pushchin, (“Jeannot”) recalled what the poet (his best friend) was like in those days:

We could all see that Pushkin was way ahead of us, had read many things of which the rest of us had never even heard. And he’d remembered all he’d read.  Yet the best thing about him was that he never thought to show off or act important as gifted people often do at that age….On the contrary, he thought all learning was nonsense, and was only ever busy trying to prove that he was a master sprinter, or could jump over piled up chairs, or hurl a ball…

Pushkin became a master fencer and rider, an avid swimmer and walker, a gymnast, and Russia’s first lightweight champion in what was then known as “French boxing”.   His poetic talents, though, were also quickly recognized.  His first publication, in 1814, came when his friends, as a prank, sent his manuscript of  “To a Friend who Writes Poems” to the journal The Herald of Europe.  The author was “N.K.CH.P.”  (Pushkin backwards).  In 1815, Pushkin, with his voice “ringing out youthfully” declaimed his “Recollections of Tsarskoye Selo” at a Russian literature examination attended by Russia’s most famous poet at the time, Gavriil Derzhavin. Pushkin got so emotional that: “I don’t remember how I finished reading; I don’t remember where I ran away. Derzhavin was full of admiration, demanded to see me, wanted to embrace me…They looked for me, but couldn’t find me.”

As for schoolwork, Professor Kunitsyn complained:  “Pushkin expresses himself very clearly, intelligently, and wittily, but is extremely lazy.”  Together with Pushchin and Malinovsky, Pushkin was always getting up to some prank or other, such as brewing illicit hot egg creams laced with rum (for which they were denied meals, and made to kneel in prayer for two days), or leaving school grounds, or chasing girls (Mon Portrait).  The earliest manuscript of any Pushkin poem is already about love:  To Natalia, written 1813, was about a young actress in Count Tolstoy’s serf theatre.  Pushkin wrote over 120 poems during his days in the Lycée, more than twenty to Yekaterina Bakunina, a pretty young lady in waiting at the palace (The Bard, To Dorida). He also began work on his ironic epic Ruslan and Lyudmila.. In his last year, Pushkin often skipped lessons to carouse with hussars stationed near the Palace.  One of those hussars was Pyotr Chaadayev, a penetrating critic of serfdom and autocracy, who introduced the poet to the English language, the philosophy of Hume and Locke--and to the freedom-loving, cynical, lyrical verse of Byron.   Pushkin also liked playing hooky with the famed Russian historian and sentimental novelist Nikolai Karamzin.  On June 9, 1817, Pushkin graduated 26th out of 29 in his class, with good marks only in Russian, French, and fencing.  Years later, when Pushkin became famous, one teacher grumbled:  “What’s all this fuss about Pushkin?  He was a scamp—nothing more!”  Engelgardt, the Lycée headmaster, took an even stronger dislike to his most famous pupil. His school report in 1816:

Pushkin’s higher and only goal is to shine—in poetry, to be precise, though it is doubtful indeed he will ever succeed, because he shuns any serious scholarship, and his mind, utterly lacking in perspicacity or depth, is a completely superficial, frivolous French mind. And that is in fact the best thing that can be said about Pushkin.  His heart is cold and empty: there is neither love nor religion in it.  It is perhaps as empty as ever any youth’s heart has ever been.

Anyone who’s ever dabbled in Zen Buddhism knows that “emptiness” can sometimes be an achievement of the highest order.   Perhaps the very  “emptiness”  --or openness-- of Pushkin’s heart made it a perfect vessel for sublime expressions of love. His “emptiness” was a treasure not to be cluttered with skills for  “the service of the state”.  Already in the Lycée he had decided: