Romanov Riches: Russian Writers and Artists Under the Tsars

And yet, October 19, 1811, when the Imperial Lycée was opened in Tsarskoe Selo, became a legendary day in Russian culture, first of all because among the thirty boys in the first class of the school, that day standing in three rows in the big, light-filled recreation hall of the four-story Catherine Palace, was the curly-haired, lively, and quick son of a Moscow nobleman, twelve-year-old Alexander Pushkin.

As one of the students recalled, they were presented to Alexander I, who came to the school: “After the speeches, each came up to the table and bowed to the emperor, who regarded us kindly and patiently returned our clumsy bows.”⁶

Alexander wanted to create an elite, closed boarding school for “educating youths especially intended for important state service.” Originally, the tsar’s younger brothers, the Grand Dukes Mikhail and Nicholas (the future emperor), were to be educated there too, but their mother objected. Nevertheless, the royal treasury spent lavishly on the Lycée: the boys had luxurious accommodations and the best professors.

Pushkin, however, was not interested in his studies. In math class, he wrote poetry, brow furrowed and lips pursed. The professor of mathematics let it pass: he enjoyed Pushkin’s epigrams mocking the school doctor (who chuckled at Pushkin’s jabs at the math professor).

Pushkin was called to the blackboard to work on an algebra problem; the teacher watched compassionately as the young poet shuffled his feet and scribbled formulas endlessly in chalk. When he got tired of waiting, he interrupted Pushkin’s suffering: “Well, what did you get? What does X equal?”

“Zero.”

“Pushkin, in my class, everything comes out zero for you. Go back to your seat and write poetry!”⁷

Everyone indulged the wunderkind, including the royal patron of the Lycée, Emperor Alexander I. As one of the poet’s classmates put it delicately, Pushkin “liked sometimes, secretly from the authorities, to make sacrifices to Bacchus and Venus”—that is, to drink and traipse after maids.

Once Pushkin found himself in the dark corridor of the tsar’s palace and grabbed the maid of Princess Varvara Volkonskaya, lady-in-waiting of the tsar’s wife. Hugging and kissing her, he discovered to his horror that it was not the maid but the elderly princess—a scene out of a French farce. Pushkin ran off, but the princess complained to the emperor, who scolded the Lycée’s director, Egor Engelhardt: “What is happening? Your pupils not only steal apples from my orchard, now they won’t even leave my wife’s ladies-in-waiting in peace!”

The director pleaded on behalf of Pushkin: “The poor lad is desperate: he came for my permission to write to the princess and beg her pardon.” Alexander was forgiving: “Let it be, I’ll have a word on his behalf; but tell him it’s the last time.”

With those words, Alexander hurried to catch up with his wife, whom he saw in the distance, but managed to whisper to the overjoyed Engelhardt: “La vieille est peut-être enchantée de la méprise du jeune homme, entre nous soit dit” (“The old maid may be delighted by the young man’s mistake, just between us”).⁸

Such encounters with the world of the tsar’s family—real and potential (after all, the future Nicholas I, just three years older than Pushkin, could have been a classmate at the Lycée)—had to have fired young Pushkin’s imagination: next to him, palpably close, personified history took place. This was a heady sensation, whose influence must be stressed also because for more than a hundred years first liberal and then Soviet scholars diligently minimized the significance of young Pushkin’s contacts with the court of Alexander I.

For Pushkin’s generation, the cult of historical personality was typical—first embodied by the romantic figure of Napoleon, an ordinary Corsican officer who rose to the peaks of fame and power and, in the words of sixteen-year-old Pushkin, destroyed “Europe’s divine shield.”

The War of 1812, when Guards regiments heading to fight Napoleon passed the Lycée, gave Pushkin and his schoolmates new, more real heroes. Now for Pushkin the “men of history” were the young Russian officers who went for glory. Almost a quarter century later, Pushkin still recalled how hard it was for him to remain in school, “envying those who walked off to die past us.”

Dreams of glory and immortality made his head spin. A military career was impossible then because of his age; its surrogate was poetic triumph. A fellow Lycée student, Anton Delvig, published a poem in 1815 in a prestigious magazine, in which he called his sixteen-year-old friend Pushkin “immortal.”