[26] On the Sunday school movement in St. Petersburg see Reginald E. Zelnik, Labor and Society in Tsarist Russia: The Factory Workers of St. Petersburg , 1855–1870 (Stanford, 1971), pp. 160–99.
[27] See Ia. V. Abramov, Nashi voskresnye shkoly: Ikh proshloe i nastoiashchee (St. Petersburg, 1900); and E. N. Medynskii, Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie: Ego znachenie, organizatsiia i tekhnika (Moscow, 1918).
[28] V. M. Riabkov, "Iz istorii razvitiia narodnykh universitetov v gody sotsialisticheskogo stroitel'stva v SSSR," in Klub i problemy razvitiia sotsialisticheskoi kul'tury (Cheliabinsk, 1974), pp. 35–36; and Medynskii, Vneshkol'noe obrazovanie , pp. 266–70.
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Along with the popular universities there were also new art and music schools open to the general population. The People's Conservatory in Moscow, founded in 1906, was richly endowed with an excellent musical staff. Among the teachers were Aleksandr Kastalskii and Arsenii Avraamov, who would become important organizers of Proletkult musical training.[29] People's theaters, first begun in the late nineteenth century, also mushroomed in the years after 1905. These drama circles aimed to acquaint the lower classes with the best of Russian playwrights, including Gogol, Tolstoy, and especially Ostrovsky.[30] Although these programs made some concessions to popular tastes, such as incorporating folk music into conservatory curricula, inevitably the intellectual organizers conveyed their own standards of excellence.
Another educational forum were "people's houses" (narodnye doma ). Before the Revolution of 1905 the houses were largely used as organizational centers for cultural activities in city districts and towns. After 1905 they began to take on a more independent educational function. Like people's universities, they were sustained by many different local groups. Zemstva and cooperative organizations were by far the most common sponsors, and the government contributed money from its Trusteeship of the People's Temperance, founded with funds from the liquor monopoly.[31] Organizers hoped that the friendly and comfortable clublike atmosphere of the houses would make education more appealing to the local population. The most famous of these institutions was the
[29] N. Briusova, "Massovaia muzykal' no-prosvetitel' naia rabota v pervye gody posle Oktiabria," Sovetskaia muzyka , no. 6 (1947), pp. 46–47; and Boris Schwarz, Music and Musical Life in Soviet Russia , rev. ed. (Bloomington, 1983), p. 5.
[30] Gary Thurston, "The Impact of Russian Popular Theatre, 1886–1915," Journal of Modern History , vol. 55, no. 2 (1983), pp. 237–67.