Abstract
The purpose of the article is to analyze the prerequisites, reasons and circumstances of the establishment of one of the oldest educational institutions in Ukraine, and to characterize the quality of its teaching staff. The research methodology is based on a combination of general scientific and special historical methods and adherence to the main principles of historical research: historicism, objectivity, systematicity in the process of processing archival sources and documents and preparing conclusions. The scientific novelty is that, for the first time, a set of archival sources related to the history of the First Boys' Gymnasium in Zhytomyr has been thoroughly processed, the historiography of the problem has been characterized, and the process of the foundation and formation of this educational institution, the formation of the teaching staff, has been followed in detail. For the first time, biographical information about the teachers of the gymnasium from the initial period of its existence is presented. New archival sources were introduced into scientific circulation. Conclusions. The establishment of the First Boys' Gymnasium in Zhytomyr took place in the context of a change in the national policy of tsarism towards the Poles after the suppression of the Polish uprising of 1830-1831. By creating a network of Russian-language educational institutions, the tsarist authorities aimed to overcome Polish influence on the territory of the Volyn Governorate and implement the imperial Russification policy in the region. The Boys' Gymnasium in Zhytomyr, founded in 1833, is one of the oldest educational institutions in Ukraine and one of the first (after Kyiv and Nizhyn) to train future scientists for the newly established Kyiv University. Using the example of the First Boys' Gymnasium in Zhytomyr, we state that in the initial period of formation of gymnasium education in Ukraine, turnover of teaching staff, their flow from one educational institution to another, was characteristic. By transferring teachers from the Zhytomyr Boys' Gymnasium to St. Volodymyr University, the problem of staff shortage in the latter was solved.