6 - Gymnasium

Summary

HINSEY: Let's return to your personal experiences. Could you describe the beginning of your high school education in Vilnius?

VENCLOVA: I previously mentioned that I attended only the second grade of primary school in Freda, and then enjoyed two blessed years of idleness. As often happens under such circumstances, I learned quite a bit, including Russian as well as the rudiments of English and French. My mother tried to teach me piano, but I had no aptitude for it. Neither could I paint or draw. In time, I learned to understand and appreciate painting, but I only started to enjoy serious music later in life. The area that really interested me was literature, especially poetry.

When we moved to Vilnius, it was time for me to undertake a regular high school education. The Soviets prided themselves on mandatory secondary schooling, in contrast to bourgeois Lithuania. Actually, only a seven-year school, the so-called semiletka, was mandatory; after this, some continued their education for three more years (this was the ten-year school, or desiatiletka), while others went to vocational schools or simply joined the workforce. Since Vilnius was half-empty, secondary schools were not numerous. In the beginning, only two of them were Lithuanian and the rest Russian (later, a small number of Polish schools were also allowed). Moreover, they were not coed. Stalin eliminated coeducational schooling throughout the Soviet Union after the war, having gotten it into his head to restore the old tsarist custom of his youth. Later, this was reversed, but I graduated from a boys’ school. I believe this may have resulted in some psychological damage: for a rather long time, I had very little information about girls and was shy with them (which, in turn, led to stupid escapades when I became more self-confident).

I was easily accepted into fifth grade (the first level of gymnasium, in prewar terms); the only requirement was an informal dictation test. However, this was not all that easy. Lithuanian orthography is rather complicated: most of the vowels have three variants that differ only slightly in pronunciation.