Great Russian writers who didn’t do so well at school Russia Beyond (Photo: Public Domain) Let’s face it, even great Russian writers were often not great students. Some were expelled from schools for bad behavior, others refused to hit the books and were so poor at foreign languages and mathematics that they couldn’t even conjugate a verb or solve a fairly simple linear equation.
1. Alexander Pushkin (1799-1837)
The future author of ‘Eugene Onegin’ was a mediocre student. He went to the Imperial Lyceum in Tsarskoe Selo, near St. Petersburg. Tsar Alexander I founded the lyceum in 1811 for children from the nation’s most prominent families.