Culture at the turn of the century 
Automatic translate
At the turn of the XIX-XX centuries. in Russia there was an unusual surge in cultural development. Both science and art developed rapidly. The number of students in elementary school reached 6 million people by the beginning of the First World War (1914-1918). Fundamental higher education was given by 11 universities, in addition to them there were 40 university-type schools, 64 institutes and higher schools, 7 theological academies, in which a total of 120 thousand students studied. In 1900, after a long break, the Higher Women’s Courses of V.I. Gerier were reopened in Moscow, and then similar educational institutions appeared in other cities: Petersburg, Tomsk, Voronezh, Kiev, Tiflis, Odessa, Yuriev, etc. At the same time, 75% of the country’s population was illiterate, and in some national suburbs the proportion of illiterates was more than 99%. Not a single higher educational institution was in Central Asia or the Caucasus.
The turn of the century was marked by great discoveries in the field of physics, including the sensational report of P. N. Lebedev on light pressure, due to which the connection between matter and light, their unity was experimentally proved. K. A. Timiryazev (1843-1920) brilliantly substantiated the theory of the energy laws of photosynthesis as a process of using light to form organic substances in plants. This made it possible from a materialistic point of view to raise the question of the conversion of inorganic substances to organic in nature. In addition to photosynthesis, the scientist was engaged in other areas of plant physiology, in particular, at the invitation of the Royal Society of London in 1903, he taught the course “The Cosmic Role of Plants” in the UK.
In the field of organic chemistry, ND Zelinsky was widely known. N.E. Zhukovsky was rightly called the "father of Russian aviation." One of the founders of aerodynamics was S.A. Chaplygin. The founder of modern astronautics, K. E. Tsiolkovsky (1857-1935), for the first time, justified the possibility of using rockets for interplanetary communications and indicated rational ways of developing space exploration and rocket science.