The article is devoted to an interesting and little–studied issue - the construction of the image of St. Petersburg University in the memory practices of Russian emigration. The study provides a brief overview of the process of folding the order of celebrating university anniversaries in the XIX-early XX centuries, as well as describes the process of transformation of these practices in the Soviet period. The task of the authors of this work is to demonstrate what place St. Petersburg University occupied in the memory of prominent representatives of Russian science and culture who were forced to emigrate outside Russia during the revolution and the civil war. The article describes the references to the university in the memoirs of prominent emigrants (A.N. Benois, M.V. Dobuzhinsky , A.F. Kerensky, N.O. Lossky , P.A. Sorokin and others) and describes the features of celebrating university anniversaries in the emigrant environment in the 1950s and 1970s. Russian Russian Russian Russian News, articles and reports from newspapers such as Russkaya Mysl, Russkoye Voskresenie, Russkie Novosti, Novoye Russkoye Slovo serve as the main source for the reconstruction of university memorials abroad. The authors conclude that the differences between the emigrant myth of the departed Imperial University and the image of the university formed in Soviet memoiristics and historiography are not too great. The university appears in my memories not only as a center of science, but also of the liberation movement. Only in rare texts of emigrants is the latter circumstance interpreted critically. The general pathos of emigrant memoirs differs from Soviet narratives in that in emigrant discourse, after the revolutionary coup and the "defeat" of the university, both science and freedom lost, while in Soviet texts the situation is the opposite – the victory of the liberation movement led to the flourishing of science. The first version of the corporate memory of the universalists can be called victimized, where students and professors, victims of the autocracy and the Soviet regime, appear in the same row. The second one is glorified, where the same characters appear in the image of the victorious heroes. Meanwhile, it is impossible not to notice the tendency of a kind of reconciliation of the parties, statements of the achievements of Leningrad University in the late emigrant press, and most importantly, the formation of a common image for the Soviet and emigrant audience of the "golden age" of St. Petersburg University at the turn of the XIX - XX centuries.