Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum - the school that brought up the color of time

2024 Author: Leah Sherlock | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-17 05:25

As soon as Alexander Pushkin was twelve years old, his father Sergei Lvovich decides to take him to St. Petersburg and send him to study at the Jesuit Collegium. However, rumors that Tsar Alexander I plans to open the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum, which will train high-ranking officials and statesmen, seriously interested him.

Children of well-born nobles were granted the patronage of the king, free education and a brilliant career in government, diplomatic and military positions. The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum accepted only thirty pupils, and there were many children of the nobility. And yet, in July, Pushkin successfully passed the exams and became a lyceum student.

Grand opening of the Lyceum

A four-storey beautiful building, connected by an arch to the Catherine Palace, so that the tsar personally supervised the upbringing of students - this is how Pushkin saw the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum. Here in modestly

furnished room No. 14, on the 4th floor, he will spend his happy high school years, gaintrue friends whose names will go down in the history of Russian culture.

On October 19, 1811, the Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum was solemnly opened. 10-14-year-old boys were dressed in new, ceremonial blue uniforms with a red collar and silver trim, white trousers and black high boots, their teachers, lyceum professors and invited officials stood opposite. They listened to the Decree of the Tsar on the opening of the Lyceum with fascination and breathlessness.

The school that brought up Pushkin and Delvig, Pushchin and Kuchelbecker

The course lasted six years, the first three years -

initial branch, the second three - final. The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum was considered a closed institution, and the whole life of its pupils proceeded strictly according to the rules. The boys were not allowed to leave his territory throughout the school year and even during the holidays. At the same time, unlike other educational institutions, the lyceum rules were very democratic. For example, the Lyceum Charter forbade the use of various corporal punishments on pupils, which was absolutely new in those years when all schoolchildren in other institutions were mercilessly flogged with rods. The training program included

many sciences: verbal, moral, physical and mathematical, historical and fine arts. Students were taught the law of God, ethics, horseback riding, dancing, fencing, swimming, drawing and calligraphy. Lyceum students were supposed to become highly educated people, prepared to serve the Fatherland. Lyceum graduatesreceived higher education and throughout their studies the professors treated them like adult students, giving them freedom of choice and complete independence, they could attend lectures and skip them at their discretion. Pushkin adored Russian and French literature, history, and zealously studied only those disciplines that were to his liking. Of the 29 graduates, Pushkin was twenty-sixth on the academic record. The Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum forever remembered how passionately and selflessly he read "Memoirs of Tsarskoye Selo" at a public exam in front of the already elderly Derzhavin.

There is evidence that lyceum students have introduced their tradition of breaking the lyceum bell to smithereens immediately after the final exams, so that everyone can take a fragment as a keepsake, because for 6 years it was he who collected them together for classes. The then director of the lyceum, Yegor Antonovich Engelhardt, custom-made cast-iron rings in the form of hands intertwined in a handshake from bell fragments for his first graduation.