A pillowcase embroidered by Olga Ulyanova, Vladimir Lenin’s younger sister, is preserved in the collection of the House-Museum. The exhibition presents a copy made exactly after the original, which is housed in the museum funds.

The front side of the pillowcase is made of red and black squares with an embroidered vegetal pattern: black threads on a red background and vice versa. The backside of the piece is black. The cushion cover is made from a mix of wool and cotton fabric; the threads and edging cord are also cotton.

This pillowcase was intended for a sofa cushion. Olga Ulyanova cross-stitched it for the final exam on needlework in the Mariinsk Female Gymnasium in Simbirsk in 1887. According to the curriculum, all pupils were required to prepare some item for the exam. Classes on needlework took place in women’s gymnasiums once a week and lasted 1.5-2 hours.

In the gymnasium, they also studied the Law of God, Russian language and literature, French and German, history, geography, arithmetic, geometry, natural sciences, fundamentals of pedagogy and hygiene, penmanship, drawing, singing, gymnastics and dances. Those who enter gymnasium had to be able to read. Girls were graded on a 12-point system, in which marks below 10 were considered low.

The priorities of the educational process set in the 1880s by Nikolay Sveshnikov, head of the Mariinsky Gymnasium, who succeeded Fyodor Kerensky, were very revealing. Sveshnikov wrote:

Although Olga graduated from the Mariinsky Gymnasium with a gold medal, she was not given a position of a teacher, since she was the sister of the executed terrorist Alexander Ulyanov in 1887. It was not until 1890 that she was able to enroll in the physics and mathematics department of the Bestuzhev courses in St. Petersburg. Six months later Olga died of typhoid fever.