later Alexei told the children that she had died. Having borne eight children, of whom seven survived, she was dead at 33. For a long time Maklakov reproached himself for the failure of his prayers and for the lack of faith that this failure must imply. He was just short of 12 years old.11
The seven Maklakov children, with the youngest girl, Mariia, at extreme left, Vasily third from the right, and Nikolai fourth from the right. © State Historical Museum, Moscow.
By the time of his mother’s death Vasily was enrolled in the gymnasium. His parents had disagreed on whether he should be sent there—his mother favored tutors at home; his father preferred the gymnasium for the exposure to real life, including its “dark side.” The school, in fact, gave Vasily an early hint of some of the stultifying, oppressive, pedantic, and humorless qualities he was to encounter at the university. The students themselves did not represent an abrupt switch for him: they seemed to have been drawn from a similar social niche, being generally the children of such people as doctors and professors. One classmate was the son of a cook. With the revelation of this background and a suggestion from on high (probably the school administration) that the son of a cook didn’t belong, “he grew in our eyes like a rare bird.”
Maklakov did very well academically, never getting less than a “five,” the highest grade possible. He was especially good at foreign languages and studied Greek on his own, just out of curiosity. (But he acknowledges in his memoirs that at an audience with the pope in 1904, he was unable to converse in Latin.) Though admitting that there were some excellent teachers, he deplored the teaching methods generally. For ancient languages there was a great focus on grammar rules, at the expense of reading literature. When a teacher took up actual thoughts expressed in classical literature, it was “like contraband.” History similarly seemed to consist of pumping the students full of isolated facts. It seemed to Vasily as if the object must have been to kill any interest in history or literature. Reflecting on it later, he thought that perhaps the state’s true goal was to weaken freedom of thought and any concomitant ideas of opposing the regime.12
The students responded rather creatively. One, the son of a professor at an agricultural academy, taught others zoology and the basics of evolution, making the subject interesting enough for Maklakov to take it up on his own. Another was able to give instruction in chemistry. As to discipline, they reacted with a “we, they” attitude: they met the school authorities with their united strength, learning to defend their own, never betray their fellows, and never help “the enemy.”
It was on the disciplinary front that the school nearly bested Maklakov. The atmosphere is suggested by his story of a martinet, who, finding a student missing a button on his uniform, told him: “Today you’ve lost a button; tomorrow you’ll go about without trousers; and the next day you’ll be rude to supervisors. . . . Regicide! To the stocks.” Under such a regime, it’s hardly surprising that Maklakov got into endless scrapes, which ultimately put his access to a university education at risk. His bounding down a staircase elicited a reprimand from the school’s director. When he repeated (quite a few times, it appears) a sardonic reaction to Alexander III’s April 29, 1881, assertion of his commitment to “unshakeable autocracy,” his name was posted for the offense of “stupid talk.” He once used a rucksack buckle to carve a criticism of the school onto a desk; he was disciplined not for the vandalism (which, depending on the carving and the prior condition of the desk, may have been minor) but for “raising the banner of rebellion.” Maklakov’s own account of his scrapes is doubtless incomplete. A schoolmate from the class above him wrote in his diary years later, when Maklakov was quite famous and the schoolmate (M. M. Bogoslovskii) was a professor, “This demagogue, standing behind a column, cried out ‘Marseillaise, Marseillaise!’ and then sat down so as to hide himself.”13 The hijinks led to various marks of disfavor, such as being deprived of the special seating and public listing that normally celebrated high academic achievement. They also made him locally famous. One teacher at the school exclaimed, “Who is this Maklakov?”
The discipline problems came to a head on the verge of transition to university. During a language exam, Maklakov checked with a neighboring student on the translation of a word. The director happened to be passing by, heard the exchange, and ordered Maklakov to gather his papers and leave the examination room. The apparent cheating doesn’t reflect well on Maklakov, but it’s hard to assess. The director, speaking of it later, mistakenly described Maklakov’s behavior as helping the other student; the fact that the director got it exactly backwards, as well as Maklakov’s general track record, suggest that whatever was going on in Maklakov’s mind, this was not an attempt to get better marks than his competence and diligence deserved. Because entrance into the university required that a student receive “full credit” for behavior, the school was in a bit of a bind. Full credit might seem a stretch under the circumstances, but it also would be hard to block the progress of so talented a student. The outcome was a deal. He was given full credit, but denied an honor that naturally would have been his—a gold medal for outstanding scholarship and conduct.14
In 1885, during Vasily’s last years at the gymnasium, his father remarried. Lydia Filippovna Koroleva was a literary figure in her own right, author of a story published in Vestnik Evropy (Herald of Europe) that had won great praise from Turgenev; more important in the Maklakov family, she had written a children’s book that Vasily and his siblings knew and loved. Her first husband had killed himself shortly after their marriage, and she had been the common-law wife of Vasily Sleptsov, a journalist, social activist, promoter of feminism, and writer of short stories and a novella who died in 1878. A distinguished Russian author, visiting Lydia in 1930 in the old-age section of the Soviet House of Scholars to talk with her about Sleptsov (she was nearly 80 years old), spotted on her desk “Faust in German, Marcel Prévost’s Les Demi-Vierges in French, and the 1861 edition of Nekrasov.”15 She thus brought into the family the atmosphere of intellectual, literary circles. Among her friends was the great Russian historian V. O. Kliuchevskii. On one occasion six members of the Maklakov family (Lydia, Alexei, and Vasily, plus two daughters and another son) wrote to him jointly, explaining that a desire to see him had sprung up among all six at the same time and extending “a collective request” that he pay them a visit.16 Among the other distinguished friends that Lydia brought into their circle were the writer Maxim Gorky and the lawyer who became the speaker of the First Duma, Sergei Muromtsev. Another close friend, who had lived abroad since his participation in one of Garibaldi’s campaigns, was the geographer Lev Ilych Mechnikov, brother of Ilya Ilych Mechnikov, the Nobel laureate in physiology and medicine, and of Ivan Ilych Mechnikov, the model for Tolstoy’s story The Death of Ivan Ilych. Maklakov found himself captivated by one of Lev Mechnikov’s articles laying out a grand theory of history. It claimed to show a natural law tending to steady human improvement as work became specialized and people, acting on their own initiative, found their niches and ways of productive cooperation.17
Despite the gain in intellectual breadth for the Maklakov children, the remarriage took its toll. Maklakov observed that it was naturally hard for his stepmother to reconcile her literary ambitions with taking charge of a household with seven children. “Both sides,” he observed, “suffered from the unusual relationship, though both, for the sake of our father, tried to hide it; he, of course, understood and suffered more than anyone.”18
Maklakov graduated from the gymnasium in 1887 and then proceeded to Moscow University, where his career looks a little like that of a perpetual student. He studied in three different faculties—natural sciences, history, and then law, ultimately taking his law degree in 1896. The two transitions—from natural sciences to history and from history to law—are fairly easily explained. He had been rather purposeless in choosing natural sciences. In view of his success in ancient languages at school, they would have been a more plausible specialty, but he rejected them, he later explained, at least in part out of a foolish spite toward the gymnasium. To the extent that he had been drawn
