The school years of a Russian youth are so very different from what they are in West European schools that I must dwell upon my school life. Russian youths, as a rule, while they are yet at a lyceum or in a military school, already take an interest in a wide circle of social, political, and philosophical matters. It is true that the corps of pages was, of all schools, the least congenial medium for such a development; but in those years of general revival, broader ideas penetrated even into our midst and carried some of us away, without, however, preventing us from taking a very lively part in ‘benefit nights’ and all sorts of frolics.
While I was in the fourth form I took an interest in history, and with the aid of notes made during the lessons—I knew that university students do it that way—and helping myself with reading, I wrote quite a course of early mediæval history for my own use. Next year the struggle between Pope Boniface VIII. and the Imperial power attracted my special attention, and now it became my ambition to gain admission to the Imperial library as a reader, in order thoroughly to study that great struggle. This was contrary to the rules of the library, pupils of secondary schools not being admitted; our good Herr Becker, however, smoothed the way out of the difficulty, and I was allowed one day to enter the sanctuary and to take a seat at one of the readers’ small tables, on one of the red velvet sofas with which the reading-room was then furnished.
From various text-books and some books from our own library, I soon got to the sources. Knowing no Latin, I discovered nevertheless a rich supply of original sources in Old Teutonic and Old French, and found an immense æsthetic enjoyment in the quaint structure and expressiveness of the latter in the Chronicles. Quite a new structure of society and quite a world of complicated relations opened before me; and from that time I learned to value far more the original sources of history than works in which it is generalized in accordance with modern views—the prejudices of modern politics, or even mere current formulæ being substituted for the real life of the period. Nothing gives more impetus to one’s intellectual development than some sort of independent research, and these studies of mine immensely helped me afterwards.
Unhappily, I had to abandon them when we reached the second form (the last but one). The pages had to study during the last two years nearly all that was taught in other military schools in three ‘special’ forms, and we had an immense amount of work to do for the school. Natural sciences, mathematics, and military sciences necessarily relegated history to the background.
In the second form we began seriously to study physics. We had an excellent teacher—a very intelligent man with a sarcastic turn of mind, who hated learning from memory, and managed to make us think instead of merely learning facts. He was a good mathematician, and taught us physics on a mathematical basis, admirably explaining at the same time the leading ideas of physical research and physical apparatus. Some of his questions were so original and his explanations so good that they have engraved themselves for ever on my memory.
Our text-book of physics was pretty good (most text-books for the military schools had been written by the best men at the time), but it was rather old, and our teacher, who followed his own system in teaching, began to prepare a short summary of his lessons—a sort of aide-mémoire—for the use of our form. However, after a few weeks it so happened that the task of writing this summary fell upon me, and our teacher, acting as a true pedagogist, trusted it entirely to me, only reading the proofs. When we came to the chapters of heat, electricity, and magnetism, they had to be written entirely anew, and this I did, thus preparing a nearly complete text-book of physics, which was printed for the use of the school.
In the second form we also began to study chemistry, and we also had a first-rate teacher—a passionate lover of the subject who had himself made valuable original researches. The years 1859-61 were years of a universal revival of taste in the exact sciences: Grove, Clausius, Joule, and Séguin showed that heat and all physical forces are but divers modes of motion; Helmholtz began about that time his epoch-making researches in sound; and Tyndall, in his popular lectures, made one touch, so to say, the very atoms and molecules. Gerhardt and Avogadro introduced the theory of substitutions, and Mendeléoff, Lothar Meyer, and Newlands discovered the periodical law of elements; Darwin, with his ‘Origin of Species,’ revolutionized all biological sciences; while Karl Vogt and Moleschott, following Claude Bernard, laid the foundations of true psychology in physiology. It was a great time of scientific revival, and the current which directed men’s minds towards natural science was irresistible. Numbers of excellent books were published at that time in Russian translations, and I soon understood that whatever one’s subsequent studies might be, a thorough knowledge of the natural sciences and familiarity with their methods must lie at the foundation.
Five or six of us joined together to get some sort of laboratory for ourselves. With the elementary apparatus recommended for beginners in Stöckhardt’s excellent text-book we started our laboratory in a small bedroom of two of our comrades, the brothers Zasétsky. Their father, an old retired admiral, was delighted to see his sons engaged in so useful a pursuit, and did not object to our coming together on Sundays and during the holidays in that room by the side of his own study. With Stöckhardt’s book as a guide, we systematically made all experiments. I must say that once we nearly set the house on fire, and that more than once we poisoned all the rooms with chlorine and similar stuffs. But the old admiral, when we related the adventure at dinner time, took it very nicely, and told us how he and his comrades also nearly set a house on fire in the far less useful pursuit of punch making; while the mother only said, amidst her paroxysms of coughing: ‘Of course, if it is necessary for your learning to handle such nasty smelling things, then there’s nothing to be done!’
After dinner she usually took her seat at the piano, and till late at night we would go on singing duos, trios, and choruses from the operas. Or else we would take the score of some Italian or Russian opera and go through it from the beginning to the end, recitatives and all—the mother and her daughter taking the parts of the prime donne, while we managed more or rather less successfully to maintain all other parts. Chemistry and music thus went hand in hand.
Higher mathematics also absorbed a great deal of my time. Four or five of us had already decided that we should not enter a regiment of the Guards, where all our time would be given to military drill and parades, and we intended to enter, after promotion, one of the military academies—artillery or engineering. In order to do so we had to prepare in higher geometry, the differential and the beginnings of the integral calculus, and we took private lessons for that purpose. At the same time, elementary astronomy being taught to us under the name of mathematical geography, I plunged into astronomical reading, especially during the last year of my stay at school. The never-ceasing life of the universe, which I conceived as life and evolution, became for me an inexhaustible source of higher poetical thought, and gradually the sense of man’s oneness with Nature, both animate and inanimate—the poetry of Nature—became the philosophy of my life.