Alexander Petrovich's death and the school's transformation are the decisive rupture in young Tientietnikov's education: the admired master had cultivated intelligence, self-command, and readiness for difficult public responsibilities, but his successor replaces that living discipline with external rules and hollow instruction. The change leaves Tientietnikov morally intact yet bereft of the guidance and purpose that might have shaped his ambition.

The school under Alexander Petrovich

At twelve, Tientietnikov entered an educational establishment whose headmaster, Alexander Petrovich, seemed to understand both Russian society and the natures of boys. Keen-witted but dreamy and delicate, the pupil found himself in a school where a prank did not automatically end in concealment. A boy who had misbehaved might confess of his own accord; the master could respond sternly, but his manner encouraged the culprit to rise from the fault rather than sink into shame. His guiding emphasis was not a catalogue of behavioural prohibitions but the development of intelligence: in his view, folly would diminish when a boy seriously tried to become clever.

Alexander Petrovich did not mistake that principle for a ban on play. He considered boyish mischief useful because it revealed what lay beneath the surface. Nor did he treat all pupils alike. Boys of limited ability remained for a single term, while the capable received a longer course; those selected for the senior class underwent an additional period of schooling. The distinction was not merely academic. Only in that advanced class did the master demand the mature qualities that other teachers expected too early: the ability to bear ridicule without retaliating, to keep one's temper, to disregard a fool, and to preserve dignity and composure.

His teaching joined instruction to preparation for public life. He chose studies for their value in forming good citizens, spoke plainly about the sorrows, temptations, and difficulties awaiting young people, and tried to make the spirit of a lesson intelligible even to the youngest listeners. Pupils were thus asked to imagine their future responsibilities before leaving the schoolroom. Alexander Petrovich's characteristic summons was to advance after a fall and to face difficulty directly; his former students remembered the encouragement so strongly that, even after his death, they marked his birthday by raising a glass to him and hiding the tears that followed.

The senior course aimed to produce not merely clever pupils but steady adults able to act under pressure. Its graduates, as the narration describes them, could keep their heads in awkward official situations and resist the bribery and wrongdoing to which older men sometimes yielded. They were expected to know life and human character, stay on the right road, and exert influence against wrongdoers. For Tientietnikov, reaching this coveted class promised a continuation of the education he had come to value; instead, the moment of advancement coincided with the loss of its central figure.

Death and change of leadership

Alexander Petrovich died just as Tientietnikov had been transferred into the senior class. The timing made the death a personal blow and an abrupt change in the pupil's prospects: he had attained the position for which he had hoped, only to find that the teacher who gave it meaning was gone. In the school's place came Thedor Ivanovitch, who treated the boys' open manner as evidence of insufficient discipline. He announced that progress and intellect mattered little beside good behaviour and imposed rules suited, in the narrator's judgment, to adults rather than boys.

The successor's policy produced the opposite of its declared aim. Daytime restraint became a cover for conspiracy, and secret pranks spread; at night, the pupils fell into sexual misconduct. The school had once used play to understand its pupils, but now prohibition helped drive their behaviour underground. The change is presented not as a simple relaxation of discipline but as the failure of discipline severed from trust, intelligence, and a teacher's understanding of youthful character.

A curriculum without life

The leadership change was accompanied by a transformation of the curriculum. New teachers introduced new opinions and abundant terminology, presenting their subjects with logical sequences, enthusiasm for modern discoveries, and strong personal biases. Yet the narration contrasts the display of method and novelty with the absence of life in the teaching: the language of learning, in their hands, seemed dead rather than formative. As respect for authority declined, pupils gave their tutors mocking nicknames such as “Old Thedor” and “Crusty.” Punishments and expulsions followed, and within a couple of years the school had become so altered that someone familiar with its former character would scarcely have recognized it.

Tientietnikov did not join his companions' nocturnal excesses or their mockery of what they regarded as sacred. The narrator insists that, despite his dreaminess, he retained a sense of virtue and could not be diverted from its path. But moral resistance did not give his ambition an outlet. While listening to professors gesticulate through lectures, he remembered Alexander Petrovich's calm ability to make himself understood and grieved for what had been lost.

The range of subjects did not compensate for the loss of meaningful instruction. Tientietnikov heard lectures on medicine, philosophy, and law, along with a general history course so extensive that after three years its professor had reached only the introduction and an account of the development of certain self-governing German towns. The material remained in the pupil's mind as shapeless clots. He could not explain how teaching ought to be done, but he knew that this was not it; recollection of his former master could bring him to such grief that he scarcely knew what he was doing.

Consequences for Tientietnikov

The school’s transformation thus leaves Tientietnikov with a divided inheritance. He avoids his classmates' misconduct and keeps his moral bearings, but he is also left without the demanding, comprehensible education that had stirred him to strive. The loss is especially consequential because Alexander Petrovich had trained pupils to seek difficult tasks, withstand setbacks, and prepare inwardly for a place in public life. After his death, the school still offers a path toward departure and employment, but no longer the same formation of judgment and character.

As school draws to a close, Tientietnikov tells himself that it is only preparation and that real life will begin in the Public Service, where he expects to find room for action. He leaves for St. Petersburg, joining ambitious young men drawn there by the prospect of advancement. That expectation does not undo the earlier rupture: the transition from Alexander Petrovich's education to the successor's regime has shown how a school may retain its formal structure while losing its animating purpose. The episode supplies the formative background to Tientietnikov's later disappointment, without suggesting that his commitment to virtue itself has disappeared.