Education as a test: Gavriil Potanin’s work and Russian literature about school in the mid-19th century

Abstract

The article deals with analyzing the work of the writer- Sixtier, teacher G. Potanin, an author, who is today completely unknown, but mean-while, for example, highly appreciated by N. Nekrasov. Special attention in the article is paid to the themes of teaching and educational institutions, which worried the writer-educator Potanin throughout his life. The novel “The old grows old, the young grows young”, as well as the novels “Year of Life” and “The Staff Caretaker” by Potanin are considered in the context of Russian raznochinskaya (commoner’s) prose about educational institutions: N. Pomyalovsky’s “Sketches of the Bursa”, A. Scheller-Mikhailov’s “Rotten Swamps” and A. Sokolov’s “Theatrical Swamps”. Although Potanin’s works reproduce many topoi inherent in the tradition of depicting schools of the mid-nineteenth century (teachers’ ignorance, students’ pranks, punishments, etc.), as well as direct indications of the author’s inheritance to Pomialovsky, the focus of the image in the texts under study shifts from students to teachers, which manifests the writer’s own teaching experience. Another feature of Potanin’s work is the social status of the protagonist: apparently, in the novel “The Old Grows Old, the Young Grows Young” (and partly in the story “The Year of Life”, which logically continues it) we first encounter the depiction of the growing up of a serf.