The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

businessmen? Additionally, my eldest brother also graduated from the Moscow Imperial Technical College and earned a diploma in mechanical engineering. But he became a merchant and entered my father’s business. My other brother—the “good for nothing”—did not feel the need to further his studies upon graduating from the Alexander Commercial Institute. Both of them led fairly dissipated lives and caused periodic trouble for our parents. Their friends were of little interest, especially those of Mikhail (whom the Bolsheviks later executed). This was how the youth of that circle lived, without any special spiritual interests.

I am not sure of the circumstances which made me different. From my youngest years, my biggest joy was to find an interesting book and hide somewhere. I could read a book for many hours. I can still recall the sensation: you sit for hours in an easy chair in a quiet living room—everything else is forgotten. Nothing outside of the book exists. Suddenly I am called to dinner or for something else. I would immediately come to myself as if recovering from some hallucination and look around without recognizing the familiar surroundings. My brothers laughed at me. Once I found a note pinned above my bed which read: “Philosopher—king of donkeys.” (My brothers teased me by calling me “donkey” since I had protruding ears in childhood.)

Father would get angry because I would always arrive for family tea with a book. I would put it next to my place setting and try to read so as not to waste time over tea. Indignantly he would say, “And your books are all unusual, big and thick.” (At that time, as I recall, I was reading Buckle’s A History of Civilization in England in Pavlenkov’s large edition.) I gobbled up many books in childhood—and probably did not understand many of them properly. But of those which I understood, I clearly remember Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, Stevenson’s Treasure Island, Verne’s The Mysterious Island, and 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea, Tolstoy’s Childhood, Adolescence and Youth and The Cossacks, Emar, Mayne Reid, Cooper, Walter Scott, [Pushkin’s] The Captain’s Daughter, Gogol and Turgenev.

Here in America, every time that I see a group of school children in a museum under the supervision of a teacher, and see how they address their instructors with friendliness and trust, I become envious. We in Russia, at least my generation, did not experience this. During our school years there was always an abyss between us and our teachers. Even worse than an abyss— enmity which often turned into hatred. We did not like or respect out teachers and they, in turn, were deeply indifferent to us. Why this occurred I do not know, but I think the fault lay less with us than with the teachers. We, schoolchildren, were like the children of other countries during all times, i.e., children with good and bad inclinations. Like soft wax, we could have been

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Chapter Seven

molded into anything desired. But the majority of our teachers were poor pedagogues and educators.

Here is one of my first impressions of gimnazium. This, likely, was one or two weeks after I entered the gimnazium. I was then nine years old. What will children at that age do when forty of them are gathered in one room and left to themselves? Obviously, the first thing is to be naughty! This is as natural as for a school of fish to splash and gambol in the water. And should play exceed the limits of the permissible, a smart teacher should stop the overly zealous kids and explain to them why their fooling around was excessive and intolerable. Punishment should be meted out only after they disobeyed the rules.