LITMIR.BIZ

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with a small stone palace, laid out a park and a vegetable garden, and constructed greenhouses, an orangery and a menagerie. On her death in 1727 the estate passed to her daughter Elizabeth, whose favourite residence it soon became. To begin with she lacked the means to improve it, but after her accession in 1741 she called on her architects to turn it into a Russian Versailles. In 1752–6 the palace was completely rebuilt by the Italian architect Rastrelli, who later designed the Winter Palace in St Petersburg. Rastrelli’s Catherine or Great Palace is a magnificent three-storey Baroque edifice with a façade of colossal length – 306 metres – and an immense cour d’honneur formed by a low, single-storeyed semi-circle of service buildings pierced by three fine wrought-iron gates. The park was laid out in the formal Dutch style, with ‘fish canals, avenues, neat bowers, alleys, espaliers, and “close boskets with mossy seats”’, and ornamented with pavilions and follies.¹

      Elizabeth was succeeded by Peter III, Peter the Great’s grandson, who ruled for only six months before being deposed and assassinated. His wife, the German princess Sophia of Anhalt-Zerbst, who had changed her name on her conversion to Orthodoxy, then came to the throne as Catherine II. Her passion for Tsarskoe Selo was even greater than that of Elizabeth, and, like her predecessor, she completely changed the nature of the palace and its grounds. The Dutch style was swept away and the park recast in the English fashion. ‘I love to distraction these gardens in the English style – their curving lines, the gentle slopes, the ponds like lakes. My Anglomania predominates over my plutomania,’ she wrote to Voltaire in 1772.² She employed as landscape gardener an Englishman, John Bush, head of a noted nursery garden at Hackney, who came out to Russia in the late 1770s. New dams and ponds were created, and the park wall replaced by a canal. ‘At the moment I have taken possession of mister Cameron, a Scot by nationality, a Jacobite by profession, a great designer nurtured by antiquities; together we are fashioning a terraced garden with baths beneath, a gallery above; that will be so beautiful, beautiful.’³ Cameron remodelled much of the interior of the Catherine Palace, built the famous Cameron Gallery: a large, covered Ionic terrace which juts out at right angles from the south-east corner of the palace, on the garden side, and added to the constructions in the park several examples of chinoiserie: a theatre, a bridge on whose balustrade sit four stone Chinamen with parasols, and a village – nineteen little houses surrounding a pagoda. His summer-house in the form of a granite pyramid was a memorial to Catherine’s favourite dogs, three English whippets: Sir Tom Anderson, Zemira and Duchesse, who are buried behind it, on the bank of a small stream. Catherine’s anglomania was catered for by the Marble Bridge, a copy of the Palladian bridge in the grounds at Wilton, and the red-brick Admiralty on the bank of the lake, built in the English Gothic style. The most prominent addition to Tsarskoe Selo in these years, however, was the severely classical Alexander Palace, built in 1792–6 to the designs of the Italian architect Quarenghi for Catherine’s grandson, the future Alexander I. Earlier, in 1789, she had employed a Russian architect, Neelov, to add a wing to the Great Palace for the accommodation of her grandchildren: this stands across the street from the north end of the main building, to which it is connected by a triple-bay arch. In 1811, after a complete renovation, it became the building of the Lycée. The ground floor was occupied by the domestic offices and staff apartments; the dining-room, sickbay, school office and teachers’ common-room were on the first floor; classrooms, reading-room, science laboratory and the school hall on the second; the third was divided into fifty small study-bedrooms with a central corridor, and the gallery over the arch became the library. Games were to be played on the Champ des Roses, so called because it had in Elizabeth’s time been bounded by wild rose bushes, in the south-western corner of the Catherine park. The palace swimming-pool, constructed for the empress’s grandsons in a grove near the Great Pond, with its two bright yellow wooden pavilions in the style of Louis XVI, was taken over by the school a little later. One of the houses built for court functionaries in the time of Elizabeth, on the corner of Sadovaya Street and Pevchesky Lane, just opposite the Lycée, was allotted to the school’s director, Malinovsky. A single-storey wing of this house became the school’s kitchen and bath-house.

Education reform in Russia had begun in 1803, and had had considerable success, both at secondary and university level. Alexander, influenced by Speransky, his principal adviser on internal administration and reform, now wished to establish a school to provide a cadre for the highest ranks of the civil service. His proposal, drawn up originally in 1808 by Speransky, was issued as an imperial decree on 12 August 1810, later ratified by the Senate. The school’s purpose was to be ‘the education of youth especially predestined for important parts of government service’. Among the subjects taught special stress was laid on ‘the moral sciences, under which is to be understood all that knowledge relating to the moral position of man in society and, consequently, the concepts of the system of Civic societies, and of the rights and duties arising therefrom’. ‘Beginning with the most simple concepts of law’, the pupils should be brought to ‘a deep and firm understanding of differing rights and be instructed in the systems of public, private and Russian law’. Teachers were ‘never to allow [pupils] to use words without clear ideas’, and in all subjects were to encourage the ‘exercise of reason’.⁴ Corporal punishment was forbidden, which made the Lycée probably unique in its time. There were to be two courses, junior and senior, each lasting for three years.^* The first intake would consist of not less than twenty, and not more than fifty children of the nobility between the ages of ten and twelve; on graduation the students would be appointed, depending on achievement, to a civil service rank between the fourteenth class – the lowest – that of collegial registrar, and the ninth, that of titular councillor.

      The St Petersburg Gazette of 11 July 1811 announced that children wishing to enter the Imperial Tsarskoe Selo Lycée should present themselves to the Minister of Education, A.K. Razumovsky, on 1 August together with a birth certificate, attestation of nobility, and testimonial of excellent behaviour. They would be medically examined, and there would be an examination conducted by the minister himself and the director of the Lycée. They would be expected to have: ‘a) some grammatical knowledge of the Russian and either the French or the German language, b) a knowledge of arithmetic, at least up to the rule of three, c) an understanding of the general properties of solids, d) some knowledge of the basic fundamentals of geography and e) be able to divide ancient history into its chief epochs and periods and have some knowledge of the most important peoples of antiquity’.⁵

      Sergey Lvovich applied to the commissariat for a month’s leave to take his son to the examination. Permission was slow in coming and, realizing he might be detained in St Petersburg for more than a month, he entrusted Pushkin to his brother, Vasily, who was himself travelling to the capital at that time. Together with Vasily’s mistress, Anna Vorozheikina, they set off in the third week of July. Pushkin’s sister, Olga, gave him as a parting present a copy of La Fontaine’s Fables, which he left behind on the table. His great-aunt, Varvara Chicherina, and his aunt, Anna Pushkina, together gave him a hundred roubles ‘to buy nuts’.⁶ Vasily immediately borrowed the money and never returned it: behaviour that long rankled with Pushkin; he mentions it, albeit jokingly, in a letter of 1825.

Vasily had published his first verses in 1793, but since then he had produced little: only twenty poems over one five-year period, causing Batyushkov to remark that he had ‘a sluggish Muse’.⁷ She was, however, eventually stirred into action by the heated contemporary debate on literary language and style, and inspired a number of poems in which Vasily enthusiastically ridiculed the conservative faction. Indeed, he was now journeying to St Petersburg to publish two epistles in reply to a veiled personal attack on him by the leader of the conservatives, Admiral A.S. Shishkov,

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