ABSTRACT
Konstantin Aksakov’s university years in the middle thirties were a time of important contacts established through his family’s social connections, Moscow University, and the Stankevich circle. In the case of youthful Iu. F. Samarin, outside of his family, Moscow University provided him with influential contacts, and its environment assumes a somewhat greater significance in his early life than was perhaps the case with Konstantin Aksakov. Samarin was, of course, at Moscow University during one of its most inspiring decades. Although the faculty was only then being enlarged and strengthened, the small but exceptionally lively student body gave the university distinction. Samarin was one of the many students who have left us impressions of their professors. His reminiscences about his university years were written in 1855, the centennial year of the founding of Moscow University, when he was thirty-five years old. In the middle 1830s when Samarin began his university studies Moscow University was in the process of change and improvement.
