‘We all meandered through our schooling…’: notes on Russian mathematics education in the early nineteenth century

Abstract

This article addresses the reception of mathematics and mathematics education among the educated classes of Russian society during the first third of the nineteenth century.

Acknowledgments

The author wishes to express his gratitude to B F Yegorov and V N Sazhin for useful discussions and assistance in working with sources.

Notes

¹All translations are by the author of this article unless otherwise noted.

²The bibliography at the end of this article contains information about the books that are in all likelihood the ones referred to in this quote. As an example of Euler's own writings, we cite his Universal arithmetic, although Solin could have, of course, read another one of his texts.

³Pushkin's name for them in Eugene Onegin.

⁴ Russian biographical dictionary 1999.

⁵RNB, f 850, No. 370, l. 58.

⁶TSGIA, f. 139, op. 1, d. 1888, 1817.

⁷This refers to Cours de mathématiques: á l'usage des écoles impériales militaires, M M Allaize, J-N Bellavéne, Billy, L Puissant, Boudrot. This text was translated and published numerous times in Russia---two editions came out practically one after the other, the first in Moscow, 1817--1821, the second in St Petersburg, 1824--1829. Kushakevich, a teacher at the Noble Boarding School, contributed to the preparation of the St Petersburg edition.

⁸IRLI, f. 488, ed. hr. 82.

⁹TSGIA, f. 67, op. 1, d. 62.

¹⁰Ol'shevskii 1886, 85. The memoirist is referring to Cours complet de mathématiques pures by Francoer, probably Fuss's Geometry, and Traité éleméntaire de statique: a l'usage des écoles de la marine by Monge. Bunyakovsky was a major Russian mathematician.

¹¹It is noteworthy that one year prior to the novel's publication, another major Russian magazine, Otechestvennye zapiski (‘National Commentary’), published a brief article by Ivanchin-Pisarev (N I P 1840) describing the wordplay of the most prominent Russian Freemason, Novikov. According to Mel'gunov's introduction, it was Novikov whom the hero of Mel'gunov's novel was to encounter in Moscow. The Russian word ‘svet’ has two meanings: ‘light’ and ‘genteel society’. At the very end of his life, when told by some lady that people were doing something in svet (that is, in genteel society), Novikov quipped, ‘Are you sure they're not doing it in the dark?’