As soon as Alexander Pushkin was twelve years old, his father Sergey Lvovich decided to take him to St. Petersburg and send him to study at the Jesuit College. However, the rumors that Tsar Alexander I was planning to open the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, which will train senior officials and statesmen, seriously interested him.
The children of the noble nobles were provided with the patronage of the king, free education and a brilliant career in government, diplomatic and military posts. The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum received only thirty pupils, and there were many noble children. And yet, in July, Pushkin successfully passed the exams and became a lyceum student.
Grand Opening of the Lyceum
A four-story beautiful building, connected by an arch to the Catherine’s palace, so that the tsar personally observed the education of students — Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum saw this . Here in modestly
furnished room number 14, on the 4th floor, he will spend his happy lyceum years, will find true friends, whose names will go down in the history of Russian culture.
On October 19, 1811, the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum was inaugurated. 10-14-year-old boys were dressed in new, full-dress blue uniforms with a red collar and silver rim, white trousers and black high boots, on the contrary stood their teachers, lyceum professors and invited officials. Fascinated and aspirated, they listened to the Tsar’s Decree on the opening of the Lyceum.
The school that brought up Pushkin and Delvig, Pushchin and Kuchelbecker
The course lasted six years, the first three years -
initial separation, the second three - final. Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum was considered a closed institution, and the whole life of its pupils proceeded strictly according to the regulations. Boys had no right to leave its territory throughout the school year and even during the holidays. At the same time, unlike other educational institutions, lyceum rules were very democratic. For example, the Lyceum Charter forbade the use of various
corporal punishments for pupils
, which was absolutely new in those years when all schoolchildren in other institutions were mercilessly
cut with rods. The training program included
many sciences: verbal, moral, physical and mathematical, historical and fine arts. Students were taught God's law, ethics, horseback riding, dancing, fencing, swimming, painting and calligraphy. Lyceum students were to become highly educated people prepared for serving the Fatherland. Graduates of the Lyceum received higher education and throughout the course of their studies, professors treated them as adult students, providing freedom of choice and complete independence, they could appear at lectures and miss them at their discretion. Pushkin adored Russian and French literature, history and with zeal was engaged in only those disciplines that were to his liking. Of the 29 graduates, Pushkin was the twenty-sixth on the list. The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum forever remembered how fervently and selflessly he read “Memoirs of Tsarskoye Selo” at a public exam before the already elderly Derzhavin.
There is information that the lyceum students introduced their tradition of smashing the lyceum’s bell immediately after the final exams, so that everyone could take a splinter for memory, because for 6 years it was he who gathered them together for classes. The then Director of the Lyceum - Yegor Antonovich Engelhardt - made custom-made cast-iron rings in the form of hands intertwined in handshakes from the fragments of the bell for his first graduation.