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Chapter 4
School in the Twenties
In the 1920s, nine-year schools provided comprehensive education.The first four
years were called the first level or primary school.The next three years completed
the compulsory seven-year education.After completing seven years of school you
could enter a technical school, go to work, or continue to study for another two
years. For the last two years, the eighth and ninth grades, each school had its own
emphasis—a specialization enabling graduates to obtain a certificate conferring on
them one profession or another. Factory educational institutions (FZU) also
provided comprehensive education. 1 I dreamed of getting into a radio and electrical
engineering FZU, or if worst came to worst, an aeronautical engineering FZU.
But there was nothing of the sort in our immediate vicinity.
In autumn 1924, I went straight into the fifth grade of the nine-year school,
having passed the exams for the first level, which I got through thanks to my
parents’ efforts.
Father exhibited a great deal of patience and spent long hours trying to secure
in my memory the fundamentals of Russian grammar and syntax. I persistently
failed to understand the difference between the genitive and accusative cases, and
I hated penmanship, but gladly solved arithmetic problems. I was more enthusiastic
about the fundamentals of physics and chemistry than the prescribed reading of
Turgenev’s Sportsman’s Sketches and Tolstoy’s Childhood. My mother kept track of
my literary training. I remember how exasperated she was when she found me in
the garden reading a volume of Pushkin’s selected works edited by Valeriy Bryusov
and published in 1919. It turned out that the rest of the famous poem “The blush
of dawn covered the east . ..”was quite involved and not at all what one would
find in a primer; and many of Pushkin’s epigrams were absolutely inappropriate for
my age.The book was returned to the airplane mechanic who lived at our factory
with the aforementioned Vera. He was surprised. “Why hide this from children?
Everyone knows that Pushkin was a hooligan.”
Another of Mama’s passions was her desire to teach me French. To this day I
regret that during my childhood, under the influence of my neighborhood friends,
1. FZU—Fabrichno-zavodskoye uchebnoye zavedeniye.
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