VI
The school years of a Russian youth are so different from the corresponding period in west European schools, that I must dwell further on my school life. Russian boys, as a rule, while they are yet at a lyceum or in a military school, 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 place for such a development; but in those years of general revival, broader ideas penetrated even there, 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 became interested in history, and with the aid of notes made during the lessons, and helping myself with reading, I wrote quite a course of early medieval 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 be admitted to the Imperial Library as a reader, to study that great struggle. That 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 at last to enter the sanctuary, and to take a seat at one of the readers’ small tables, on one of the red velvet sofas which then formed a part of the furniture of the reading-room.
From the various textbooks 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 aesthetic enjoyment in the quaint structure and expressiveness of the Old French 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 highly the original sources of history than the works of modernized generalizations in which the prejudices of modern politics, or even mere current formulae, are often 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 afterwards helped me very much.
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 a vast 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 engraved themselves forever in my memory.
Our textbook of physics was not bad (most textbooks 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. 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 on heat, electricity, and magnetism, they had to be written entirely anew, with more developments, and this I did, thus preparing a nearly complete textbook of physics, which was printed for the use of the school.
In the second form we also began to study chemistry, and in this, too, we 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 universal revival of taste for the exact sciences. Grove, Clausius, Joule, and Séguin showed that heat and all physical forces are but divers modes of motion; Hemholtz began about that time his epoch-making researches in sound; 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 Mendeleev, 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 time of scientific revival, and the current which carried minds toward 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 textbook, we started our laboratory in a small bedroom of two of our comrades, the brothers Zasetsky. Their father, an old admiral in retirement, 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
