Translation number 4 (week four):

A segment of university life in late tsarist Russia

    The Spring of 1914 was for me especially bright and happy: I finished the eighth class of the Samarskaia Women’s Gymnaziia and received my diploma.   It looked especially impressive and celebratory because it was, owing to the high marks I had received, decorated with the portraits of Tsars Mikhail Fedorovich and Nikolai the Second, since my graduation year coincided with the three-hundred-year anniversary of the reign of the House of Romanov.

     Like a dream the summer flashed by, made especially fortunate by the proud realization that I now had full right to consider myself an adult woman who had to determine for herself her future path of life.