Reval, Paris, and the Cadet Corps

Alexander Dmitrievich Schmemann was born on 13 September 1921 in Reval (Tallinn), Estonia, into a Russian émigré family of the imperial service, and grew up in the Russian Paris of the emigration — passing through the last Russian cadet corps of the emigration and then a French lycée before turning to theology. This file traces the origins and the boyhood, and corrects several details that circulate widely but do not survive checking against Schmemann’s own diary.

Tradition: Russian Orthodox (emigration)

Birth in Reval

Alexander Dmitrievich Schmemann was born on 13 September 1921 in Reval — the city now called Tallinn, capital of the newly independent Republic of Estonia (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич,” giving the date and place; St. Vladimir’s Seminary, “Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann,” svots.edu; hub essay, Fr. Alexander Schmemann).

[Corrected: two English-language reference pages give his birth date as 13 May 1921 — the Archdiocese centenary site (centenaire-archeveche.org) and Biola University's CE20 database. Every Russian source, together with svots.edu and the standard English references, gives 13 September 1921. September is correct; the May date is a transmission error.]

His father, Dmitry Nikolaevich Schmemann (1893–1958), had been an officer of the Semyonovsky Life-Guards Regiment and served in the White Army before fleeing to Estonia; his mother was Anna Tikhonovna Shishkova (1895–1981), daughter of a Samara landowner. The family belonged to the Russian nobility of the imperial service: Schmemann’s grandfather, Nikolai Eduardovich Schmemann (1850–1928), was a Senator and member of the State Council, and the family was of Baltic German, originally Lutheran, descent — one of the many German houses long since Russified in the service of the empire (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич” and “Шмеман, Андрей Дмитриевич”). The Baltic German ancestry is confirmed by his closest colleague: Schmemann was “born in 1921 into a Russian family, with Baltic German ancestors on his father’s side” (John Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 [1984], text at schmemann.org/memoriam).

He was a twin. His brother Andrei Dmitrievich Schmemann (13 September 1921 – 7 November 2008) shared his boyhood and then, in a divergence that says much about the emigration, never left it. Andrei was tonsured subdeacon in 1940 by Metropolitan Evlogy (Georgievsky) and served from 1952 to 2005 as starosta (church warden) of the Church of the Sign of the Mother of God in Paris, as a member of the Diocesan Council and treasurer of the Western European Archdiocese, and as chairman of the Union of Russian Cadets in France. Stateless on a Nansen passport from 1929, he was handed a Russian passport personally by Vladimir Putin at Caen on 6 June 2004; he died in Paris in 2008 and was buried from the rue Daru cathedral (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Андрей Дмитриевич”; RIA Novosti obituary, 7 November 2008). [Corrected: Andrei is occasionally described as a hieromonk or hierodeacon. He was neither: he was a subdeacon and a lay church warden.] The two lives are a diptych of what the emigration could become — one brother the theologian of a new local Church in a new land, the other the keeper of the old one in exile.

There had also been an elder sister, Elena (1919–1926), who died at the age of seven, before the family reached France (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Андрей Дмитриевич”).

To Paris by way of Belgrade

The family remained in Estonia until 1928, spent about a year in Belgrade, and settled in Paris from 1929 (ru.wikipedia, “Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич”; drevo-info.ru, “Александр Шмеман”). [Disputed: the year of arrival in France is given as 1929 by the Russian sources and as 1930 by the Archdiocese centenary site (centenaire-archeveche.org). 1929 is better supported and is consistent with the boys' entry into the cadet corps founded on 1 January 1930.]

The Paris into which he grew was the Paris of the Russian emigration: a whole society in exile, with its own newspapers, schools, publishing houses, learned societies, and — at its center — its churches.

Rue Daru

The Cathedral of St. Alexander Nevsky on the rue Daru was the mother church of that world, and Schmemann’s boyhood was bound up with it. Meyendorff records that he served there “as an altar boy and later as a subdeacon,” and Juliana Schmemann’s memoir is more specific still: “throughout his years at the lycée and the gymnasium… Alexander never missed a single church service at St. Alexander Nevsky Cathedral. It took an hour to walk to church where he first served as an altar boy, then a reader, then later a sub-deacon” (Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” SVTQ 28, no. 1 [1984]; Juliana Schmemann, My Journey with Father Alexander, Alexander Press, 2007, p. 20). The Sobornost obituary adds that he served in the sanctuary under Metropolitan Evlogy (Sobornost obituary of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, 1984, at schmemann.org/memoriam). In his own diary he recalled: “at how many such vigils in that church Andrei and I served” (Schmemann, Дневники, entry of 11 January 1977, azbyka.ru).

[Disputed: no source gives a date or celebrant for *Alexander's* subdiaconal tonsure. The detail "1940, by Metropolitan Evlogy" is documented only for his twin Andrei and should not be transferred to Alexander.]

It matters for everything that followed that Schmemann came to the Liturgy first as a boy in church and only afterward as a scholar. His later insistence that liturgical theology must begin from the Liturgy as actually celebrated and experienced, and not from texts and rubrics studied at a desk, has an autobiographical root (see Liturgy as Theology).

The Cadet Corps — and Three Corrections

For five years the twins were educated at the Corps-Lycée of Emperor Nicholas II (Русский кадетский корпус-лицей имени императора Николая II), the last Russian cadet corps of the emigration, founded on 1 January 1930 and closed in 1964 — a school that formed Russian boys in the manner of the vanished imperial corps, with uniforms, drill, and a curriculum saturated in Russian history and letters (ru.wikipedia, “Русский кадетский корпус-лицей имени императора Николая II в Версале”; cadethistory.ru). Three details in the usual retelling need correcting, and the corrections come from Schmemann himself.

First, “Versailles” is an anachronism for him. The corps is universally called the corps “at Versailles” because that is where it spent most of its life — but it was located at Villiers-le-Bel from 1930 to 1937 and moved to Versailles only in 1937. Schmemann was a cadet from 1930 to 1935 and was therefore never at Versailles. He names the real place himself, recalling in his diary “almost half of our ‘first platoon’ at Villiers-le-Bel thirty-five years ago” (Schmemann, Дневники, entry of 19 October 1973, azbyka.ru; corps location per ru.wikipedia and cadethistory.ru).

Second, he did not graduate in 1938. The claim that he completed the course in 1938 appears in the standard encyclopedic entries but is unsourced and is contradicted by his own account. It most likely arose because the corps alumni lists absorbed Alexander into the class year of his twin Andrei, who did complete the course.

Third, the reason he left is documented, and it is not the story usually told. The director of the corps, Lieutenant-General Vladimir Rimsky-Korsakov — who had opened Russian poetry to him and copied out poems for him by hand — died of stomach cancer on 8 November 1933. The senior cadets carried his body on a bedsheet to the corps church because the coffin would not pass down the corridor. It was Schmemann’s first conscious encounter with death, and he traced his departure directly to it. Writing on the anniversary in 1974:

“It was precisely after his death that my inner detachment from the corps began; everything in it became stale and hollow, and a little over a year later I myself asked my mother to transfer me to a French lycée — which I did, in the autumn of 1935, the Lycée Carnot.”

(Schmemann, Дневники, entry of 8 November 1974, azbyka.ru; the internal arithmetic is exact — forty-one years before 8 November 1974 is 8 November 1933, Rimsky-Korsakov’s independently attested death date.)

Juliana Schmemann corroborates: “After the director of the military academy died, he transferred to the prominent French Lycée Carnot” (Juliana Schmemann, My Journey with Father Alexander, 2007, p. 22, quoted in David W. Fagerberg, “Why We Need Alexander Schmemann,” Communio 48, no. 4, p. 828). Meyendorff and the Sobornost obituary likewise say transferred, not graduated.

[Apocryphal: the widely retold story that Schmemann "walked out" of the cadet corps during a service or parade is not found in any source available to this guide — not in Meyendorff, Juliana Schmemann, Serge Schmemann, Hopko, Louth, Fagerberg, Mills, or the *Journals* themselves. It appears to be a conflation with a genuine but quite different diary passage (10 December 1973), in which the lycée student would step off the noisy rue Legendre into the *Roman Catholic* church of St-Charles de Monceau for two or three minutes of silent Mass. The collection does not repeat the walkout story.]

Lycée Carnot and the Russian Gymnasium

He was at the Lycée Carnot from the autumn of 1935 to 1938 — a date he fixes himself, noting on a later visit with his daughter Anya that it was his first return to the lycée “since 1938” (Schmemann, Дневники, azbyka.ru). He then moved to the Russian gymnasium in Paris, where he took the baccalauréat in philosophy (Juliana Schmemann, My Journey with Father Alexander, 2007, p. 22; Meyendorff, “A Life Worth Living,” 1984, noting the transfer to a gimnaziya). [Disputed: ru.wikipedia states that he graduated from the Lycée Carnot in 1939; this is unsourced and conflicts with both his own diary and the two memoirs, which place the move to the Russian gymnasium after 1938.]

Two Worlds

What the schools together did to him is more interesting than any anecdote, and it is visible on every page he wrote. The cadet corps gave him Russia — the language, the poetry, the history, the imaginative furniture of a country he had never seen and would never see. The lycée gave him France — analytic clarity, literary polish, the habit of the essay, the Western intellectual culture in which he moved with complete ease. He was formed as a genuinely bilingual and bicultural person, and the double formation is the condition of his later achievement: a man who could read the Fathers and the Russian theologians from within, and address the modern West in its own idiom without translation (Louth, Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present, SPCK, 2015, on the émigré theological generation; see Orthodoxy: Russian Theologians).

He belonged wholly to no country: a Russian who had never lived in Russia, a Frenchman by education who was not French, and afterward an American by choice who remained to the end an émigré. In The Journals this doubleness surfaces constantly — delight in French literature and in ordinary American life set beside a permanent inner distance, and the sense of being at home nowhere but in the Liturgy (Schmemann, The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983, trans. Juliana Schmemann, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 2000; see The Journals).

That homelessness was theologically productive. A man with no earthly homeland is unusually free to say, as Schmemann said with more force than anyone of his generation, that the Church’s home is the Kingdom of God and that her worship is her passage into it; and he is correspondingly impatient with every attempt to make Orthodoxy the property of a nation or a nostalgia. The critique of Orthodoxy reduced to folklore, which runs through his American writings and underlies his labor for an American Orthodox Church, was written by a man who had watched the emigration turn its faith into a museum of a lost country (Schmemann, Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West, Crestwood, NY: SVS Press, 1979; see An American Orthodoxy and the Recognition Dispute). The difference between the brothers is instructive here and should not be moralized: Andrei gave his life to preserving Russia Abroad, and Alexander to building a Church that would not be Russia Abroad. Both were faithful to something real.

References

Schmemann, Alexander. Дневники, 1973–1983. Full Russian text at azbyka.ru/otechnik/Aleksandr_Shmeman/dnevniki/. (Entries of 19 October 1973 on Villiers-le-Bel; 8 November 1974 on Rimsky-Korsakov’s death and the transfer to the Lycée Carnot in autumn 1935; 10 December 1973 on St-Charles de Monceau; 11 January 1977 on serving with Andrei at the rue Daru. The Russian edition is unabridged and contains biographical material absent from the English translation.)
Schmemann, Alexander. The Journals of Father Alexander Schmemann, 1973–1983. Translated by Juliana Schmemann. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 2000. (The English edition; abridged.)
Meyendorff, John. “A Life Worth Living.” St Vladimir’s Theological Quarterly 28, no. 1 (1984). Text at schmemann.org/memoriam. (The Baltic German ancestry; service as altar boy and subdeacon; the transfer from the corps.)
Schmemann, Juliana. My Journey with Father Alexander. Alexander Press, 2007. (Pp. 20 and 22: the rue Daru service; the transfer to the Lycée Carnot after the director’s death.)
Fagerberg, David W. “Why We Need Alexander Schmemann.” Communio 48, no. 4. (Quoting Juliana Schmemann, p. 828.)
Sobornost obituary of Protopresbyter Alexander Schmemann, 1984. Text at schmemann.org/memoriam.
“Шмеман, Александр Дмитриевич” and “Шмеман, Андрей Дмитриевич.” Russian Wikipedia. (Family, dates, the moves via Belgrade, Andrei’s career. Used to locate the underlying Russian sources, not as terminal citation.)
“Русский кадетский корпус-лицей имени императора Николая II в Версале.” Russian Wikipedia; and cadethistory.ru, “Корпус-лицей императора Николая II.” (The corps’ foundation in 1930, its location at Villiers-le-Bel until 1937, and its move to Versailles.)
RIA Novosti, obituary of Andrei Dmitrievich Schmemann, 7 November 2008.
Schmemann, Alexander. Church, World, Mission: Reflections on Orthodoxy in the West. Crestwood, NY: St. Vladimir’s Seminary Press, 1979.
Louth, Andrew. Modern Orthodox Thinkers: From the Philokalia to the Present. London: SPCK, 2015.