The life of Professor Fedor Matveevi&chachek; Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d, sometime director of the Carskosel&soft;skij Licej in Pu&shachek;kin's days there, and also the founder of the Blagorodnyj carskosel&soft;skij liceijskij pansion, illustrates many of the interesting characteristics of elite culture on the eve of its golden age of literature. Born in 1780 in Transylvania, the future professor eventually became acquainted with Count S. S. Uvarov, chief administrator of the St. Petersburg educational district, and Lieutenant-General Baron von Laudon, the son of the great Austrian Field Marshal, and a subject of the Russian Emperor. Despite his rather sketchy credentials, but on the strength of these connections, Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d was recruited into the pioneer faculty of the Licej at Carskoe Selo when it opened in the summer of 1811. His subsequent meteoric rise and fall within the world of elite education is an interesting tale in itself, but also testifies to the possibilities inherent in an emerging culture with a restricted talent pool. It also provides a revealing glimpse of the unstable and dangerous world which would provide the setting for the lives of Pu&shachek;kin and his friends.
In 1813, with the car&soft; away liberating Europe,
Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d astounded everyone by opening up, right in
Carskoe Selo itself, a private pansion that made Uvarov's coveted
St. Petersburg Gymnasium redundant. In the following year Minister of
Education Count Razumovskij co-opted the institution, which became the
Blagorodnyj carskosel&soft;skij litseijskij pansion with
Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d as its director. Soon after this, a series of
fortuitous events resulted in Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d also receiving
the top position in the Licej itself. It was during these eventful
years that Pu&shachek;kin knew the professor, and deftly lampooned him
in verse as the pedant,
whose horrible
voice
announced doom to mischievous boys.
Eventually replaced at the Licej, but not at the Pansion,
Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d's next coup was to secure, despite his
notoriously weak grasp of the Russian language, the coveted
appointment as German translator of N. M. Karamzin's
Beginning in that year, however, Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d involved
himself in intrigues at Court involving the mystical new Minister of
Spiritual Affairs and Public Instruction, Prince Aleksandr
Golicyn. Affairs then began to fluctuate in harmony with the mood
swings of a car&soft; grown paranoid about potential revolution. On 8
July 1820 an Imperial ukaz ordered the treasury to pay the director a
yearly pension of a princely two thousand rubles for life. Further
honors included the Order of St. Anne second class, the rank of
Collegiate Councilor, and a Corresponding Membership in Imperial
Academy of Sciences. But then, following rumors that the boys at the
Pansion were out of control, on 27 February 1822 an Imperial command
arrived, removing the highly-decorated Director from the
administration of the Pansion, and from all classes at the
Licej.
On 4 May of the same year, Gauen&shachek;il&soft;d
crossed the Russian border, bringing to an end one of the most
eventful careers in Russian elite education.