In 1758, a new school opened in Kazan, saving his mother the difficulty of sending him to Saint Petersburg. The grammar school offered instruction in Latin, French, German, and arithmetic, as well as dancing, fencing and music. The instruction quality was still poor overall, with no textbooks. The school also offered opportunities for the students to perform tragedies by Molière and Alexander Sumarokov. Derzhavin eventually excelled in geometry and was informed he would be joining the corps of engineers in Saint Petersburg. However, a bureaucratic mistake led to him being made a private in the Preobrazhensky Regiment, the bodyguards of the royal family.