order to prevent their butlers and servants from eavesdropping on their conversations, a practice that was augmented by the boys' French private tutor. In 1899, at age 10, Elisséeff began attending Larinsky College, a gymnasium in St. Petersburg, where he received a traditional education in the Latin and Greek Classics. When he was 11, his parents added private English tutoring to his education, so that by his teenage years Elisséeff was already fluent in French, German, English, Latin, and Ancient Greek, in addition to his native Russian. As a youth, Elisséeff initially desired to pursue a career in oil painting, but was convinced by his Russian literature teacher that his wealthy background would prevent him from "knowing the suffering that any creative art requires", and that he should become a scholar of the humanities instead. His teacher arranged for Elisséeff to meet with Sergey Oldenburg, the secretary of the Russian Academy of Sciences and Russia's preeminent scholar of East Asia. Elisséeff told Oldenburg that he wanted to begin studying Chinese, but Oldenburg advised him to focus on Japanese instead, as there were already a number of well-trained Sinologists in Europe at that time but only one expert Japanologist – the British scholar Basil Hall Chamberlain. Oldenburg advised Elisséeff to enter the University of Berlin (modern Humboldt University of Berlin) and begin studying Japanese and Chinese, and then to move to Japan for further study. University study Elisséeff began his university studies at the University of Berlin in 1907, at age 18, in the Seminar für Orientalischen Sprachen (Seminar for Oriental Languages) led by German scholar Eduard Sachau. He studied Japanese language and history, and also began studying Chinese under German sinologists Wilhelm Grube and Otto Franke. In 1908, after one year at Berlin, Elisséeff transferred to Tokyo Imperial University (modern University of Tokyo), where, after some initial opposition, he became its first foreign student who had not come up through the Japanese "higher school" (kōtō gakkō ) system. In addition to his normal courses, Elisséeff also took a heavy load of private tutoring to make up for his limited background in Japanese. He graduated in 1912, scoring an 82 (equivalent to modern "A−") on his final oral examination and writing a thesis on the haiku of the famed Japanese poet Bashō entitled "Bashō kenkyū no ippen " ("An Aspect of Bashō Studies"), and graduated near the top of his class.