Biography | Pavel Durov — The Philology Faculty Where a Programmer Took a Language Degree

People who meet Pavel Durov through Telegram often assume he was a computer-science product of a technical institute.

The degree he actually finished, in 2006, was in English philology and translation at the Faculty of Philology of Saint Petersburg State University, at 11 Universitetskaya Embankment.

The building sits on the Neva side of Vasilyevsky Island and is shared with the university's Faculty of Oriental Studies.

His father, Valery Durov, a classicist, headed the department of classical philology in the same faculty for years.

The younger Durov had already left the university's Academic Gymnasium in 2001 and entered the faculty in 2002.

He coded on the side. Student sites and an electronic library preceded the social network that would carry his name across the Russian-speaking internet.

VKontakte went live the same autumn he graduated.

The mismatch is the point. A language faculty on a granite embankment is an odd hatchery for a messaging app used by hundreds of millions of people.

It is also a precise one. The person who later argued that software should refuse to hand private conversations to a state had spent four years inside a department that treats texts, translation, and the gap between what is said and what is kept.

Stand on the embankment and the faculty block is the yellow-and-white range at number 11, not the long Twelve Collegia building that tourists photograph as "the university."

The pin is the faculty, because that is where the degree was taken.

No current office, no private address. This is a public teaching building that was already on every city map when he walked out of it with a first-class diploma in 2006.

Photo: NickLubushko, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. Portrait taken 2012, early VK years rather than student years.