§16
Our other distinguished visitor was also “a Prometheus of our time” in a certain sense; only, instead of stealing fire from Zeus, he stole it from mankind. This Prometheus, whose fame was sung, not by Glinka but by Púshkin himself in his Epistle to Lucullus, was Uvárov, the Minister of Education.[[51]] He astonished us by the number of languages he spoke and by the amount of his miscellaneous knowledge; he was a real shopman behind the counter of learning and kept samples of all the sciences, the elements chiefly, in his head. In Alexander’s reign, he wrote reform pamphlets in French; then he had a German correspondence with Goethe on Greek matters. After becoming minister, he discoursed on Slavonic poetry of the fourth century, which made Kachenovsky remark to him that our ancestors were much busier in fighting bears than in hymning their gods and kings. As a kind of patent of nobility, he carried about in his pocket a letter from Goethe, in which Goethe paid him a very odd compliment: “You have no reason to apologise for your style: you have succeeded in doing what I could never do—forgetting German grammar.”
[51]. Serghéi Uvárov (1786-1855) was both Minister of Education and President of the Academy of Sciences. He used his power to tighten the censorship and suppressed The Moscow Telegraph, edited by Polevoi, which was the most independent of Russian journals; in this way he “stole fire from mankind.” The reference to Púshkin is malicious: what Púshkin wrote about Uvárov in that poem was the reverse of complimentary. “Lucullus” was Count Sheremétyev and Uvárov was his heir.
This highly placed Admirable Crichton invented a new kind of torture for our benefit. He gave directions that the best students should be selected, and that each of them should deliver a lecture in his own department of study, in place of the professor. The Deans of course chose the readiest of the students to perform.
These lectures went on for a whole week. The students had to get up all the branches of their subject, and the Dean drew a lot to determine the theme and the speaker. Uvárov invited all the rank and fashion of Moscow. Ecclesiastics and judges, the Governor of the city, and the old poet, Dmítriev—everyone was there.