Tsarskoye Selo Lyceum

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The Imperial Lyceum, as it appears on a 19th-century drawing.

14-year-old Pushkin reciting his poem before old Derzhavin in the Lyceum (1911 painting by Ilya Repin).

The Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo near Saint Petersburg was founded by the Emperor Alexander I with the object of educating youths of the best families, who should afterwards occupy important posts in the Imperial service.

Its regulations were published on 11 January 1811, although they had received the Imperial sanction on 12 August 1810, when the four-storied "new" wing of the Great Palace was appointed for its accommodation, with special premises for a hospital, a kitchen and other domestic requirements, as well as a residence for the tchinovniks. Furniture and utensils were given with the neoclassical building designed by Vasily Stasov and situated next to the Catherine Palace.

The Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum was opened on October 19, 1811. The first graduates were all brilliant and included Alexander Pushkin and Alexander Gorchakov. The opening date was celebrated each year with carousals and revels, and Pushkin composed new verses for each of those occasions. In January 1844 the Lyceum was moved to St Petersburg.

During the 33 years of the Tsarskoe Selo Lyceum's existence, there were 286 graduates. The most famous of these were Anton Delvig, Wilhelm Kuchelbecker, Nicholas de Giers, Dmitriy Tolstoy, Jacob Grot, Nikolay Danilevsky, Aleksey Lobanov-Rostovsky, Fyodor Shcherbatskoy, and Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin.