The Russian Century: A Hundred Years of Russian Lives

All of this is elementary. But in our class, the following occurred. One of our pranksters thought up an amusement: he made a tube of paper and then, as from an air gun, shot chewed up blotting paper from it. If such a “bullet” hit a wall or ceiling, it stuck firmly. This activity was very absorbing and soon the ceiling in our classroom was covered with stars and constellations of red paper. I also participated in this joyous activity. Of course, this exceeded the boundaries of innocent play, but it is unlikely that this breach could be called a serious crime. Our class mentor thought otherwise. He did not attempt to explain to us why this mischief was unacceptable—he was only interested in who the offenders were. We, however, remained tight-lipped. Nobody made an admission or betrayed each other. For a long time he demanded confession and the remanding of the guilty. We remained resolute and among us there were no cowards or traitors. Then he turned to cunning and announced that, this being the first time, he forgave the guilty in advance. He simply was requesting that an admission be made so that he would know who was capable of doing this—the guilty would not be punished. We went for the bait and trustingly made the admission. Among those confessing was me. How bewildered—no, horrified—we were, when, despite the mentor’s solemn promise, we were cruelly punished. We were left after school for two hours in a locked room! I recall that most of all we took this as a moral blow. Our mentor had made a promise, which we believed, and had fooled us right there on the spot. From this moment on, we would have no faith in our teachers.

In the eight years that I spent in the gimnazium, our relationship with our teachers was pretty much one of open civil war. Almost none of them were able to interest us in their subject. We felt that Greek and Latin were invented merely to torture us. Even the instructor in Russian language and literature, though he was Vladimir Ivanovich Shenrok, a Gogol scholar, could not engage us. Geography was a dead science—the mere enumeration of geographic names. It was particularly unpleasant when the “mute” map hung before us. On it we had to name and identify the mountain ranges, oceans and

Vladimir Zenzinov, Coming of Age

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rivers of the world’s five parts. Physics seemed a useless fabrication to us, as did, cosmography. I had a visceral revulsion for mathematics and, in all honesty, to this day cannot understand why we had to learn spherical geometry, trigonometry, Newtonian binomials, and suffer over logarithms. Even history failed to interest us.

We studied all of this only because it was demanded of us and the teachers taught it because that was the educational program dictated by the Ministry of Education.

When, as an adult, I began to study classical antiquity anew, I bitterly lamented that even those little bits of Greek and Latin which I absorbed in my gimnazium years, were almost totally forgotten. How I would love now to reread and hear the commentaries of Caesar, Ovid, Virgil and Horace, Plato, and especially Homer! I had read all of this once, but it was all a dead letter, “lessons” to which I had to respond, and which I could either learn or not. Why did no one interest us in this, or even try? Forget about inculcating a love for the subject. One may ask, who was at fault here? Of course, it was not us, the school children, but our teachers and our lifeless and deadening school system.

The most fearful and unpleasant memories were of our history teacher— Viacheslav Vladimirovich Smirnov. This was a small and very quiet person with a short, dark beard. All his movements were in slow motion, his voice quiet. But he was the terror of the whole gimnazium. We all feared and hated him fiercely. He was very demanding. We had to be ready for anything that he might ask that was covered over the whole year. He never corrected the student, never interrupted him, or asked him to repeat. He waited— sometimes with malicious glee—until the student became entangled or stopped altogether.