St. Tatyana was a third-century martyr whom any undergraduate could appreciate: Her name day allowed students to eat free, drink to excess and stay up late on a school night. The law couldn't touch them, and refills were on the house.


Quite understandably, intellectuals all over Russia have been joining in the dissipation for centuries, but Tatyana, and the holiday named for her, are in fact the property of Moscow State University, as university officials were careful to point out this year.


Moscow State University, or MGU, celebrated its patron saint with marked decorum Wednesday, the 240th anniversary of the university's founding. But they didn't want to be territorial about it.


"(People think) Jan. 25 is a holiday for all students," said MGU's rector, Viktor Sadovnichevo, to the newspaper Moskovsky Komsomolets, and so it is celebrated by all universities. "In fact, that is not the case. The holiday first appeared because MGU -- the nation's first institution of higher learning -- was founded. It is our birthday," he stressed. "Of course, we are happy to share it, but ..."


On Wednesday, anyway, the venerable university was monopolizing St. Tatyana's Day, marking its anniversary with high ceremony. At Uspensky Cathedral, Patriarch Alexy II blessed the school, and President Boris Yeltsin officially called it Russia's "source of advanced science and social thought." At the old MGU campus on Ulitsa Gertsena, the Chapel of St. Tatyana housed its first full Orthodox mass in 80 years.


Tatyana Fraulova, 27, peered into the chapel where Tsar Nicholas II worshipped, Nikolai Gogol was buried and where her classmates went for Theatrical Society meetings. The entrance was stacked with scaffolding and lights for student productions. Inside, 80 parishioners were lighting candles.


"When I was a student, we had to go outside the city for a proper mass," said Fraulova. "It means something for students to have their own church, for it to be built into the university."


Traditionally, until it was recast as Proletarian Students' Day, in 1923, Tatyana's Day was the occasion of broader and less dignified revelry.


An agricultural calendar describes the holiday as being "for all those who feel themselves to be participants in the quest of Thought and Soul."


The calendar explains that "Moscow students traditionally gathered in the Hermitage, where there were poetry readings, hymns sung, and scholarly contests between schoolfellows."


And then there was the vodka. Restaurants all over the city pulled up their carpets and waited to be overrun by threadbare intellectuals demanding a free meal. The calendar adds, pointedly, that "on Tatyana's Day free rein was given to all merrymakers," and the Moscow militia was under strict instructions not to interfere. These days, the municipal police force has gone on record as being less tolerant.