You are flowing as a river, With a strange name, And your transparent asphalt Looks like water. That’s how the poet wrote about Arbat. If you follow the flow of the ‘street stream’ and turn upstream into one of its tributaries – Starokonjushenny Alley, at the very end you will see an old four-storied building with an unusual architectural design. This is School No 59, named after N.V. Gogol. The school building, originally a classic gymnasium for boys, was erected in 1904, but the school itself was founded in 1901. The idea of creating the most progressive school in Russia goes back to the end of the 19th – beginning of the 20th century, contemporary with a new educational reform, a situation that is quite typical for our distressful motherland. The reform was supposed to be executed under the leadership of a newly appointed minister of education, Nikolay P. Bogolepov, who clearly saw and formulated the main drawbacks of the secondary school of his time