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  • Ministry of Darkness: How Sergei Uvarov Created Conservative Modern Russia by Lesley Chamberlain
  • Lucien Frary (bio)
Igor Fedyukin, The Enterprisers: The Politics of School in Early Modern Russia (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2019). 316 pp. Bibliography. Index. ISBN: 978-0-19-084500-1.

Count Sergei Semenovich Uvarov, the tsarist minister of enlightenment (1833–1849) and the president of the Russian Academy of Sciences (1818–1855), was an enigmatic figure fraught with paradox. Lampooned by radicals such as Herzen, Bakunin, and Belinsky and denigrated by the conservative elite for lacking moral strength, Uvarov was among nineteenth-century Russia's best officials: his reforms greatly expanded education at the parish and district levels; his leadership advanced the quality of the Academy of Sciences by leaps and bounds; as a translator he worked in six languages (he wrote in four); as a literary critic he impressed geniuses like Goethe and Pushkin. Over the past decades, serious studies by Cynthia Whittaker, Andrei Zorin, and Maksim Shevchenko (to name just three scholars) have firmly rooted Uvarov in the most vanguard European intellectual currents of the time.1 An overall portrait has emerged that, on balance, is sympathetic, if apologetic. Leslie Chamberlain's new biography departs from this general interpretation and reverts to the traditional depiction of Uvarov as a reactionary. Indeed, Chamberlain goes further and calls Uvarov a "fanatic" "quasi-European" whose life story can "help Europeans understand that strange, persistently illiberal heritage" (P. 133) [End Page 410] of modern Russia.2 This picture of the count and his country is exaggerated and incomplete, but it should not be too lightly dismissed.

Organized into eighteen short descriptive chapters, the book is grounded in published primary sources. Nearly half the book recounts the count's early years in government. The son of a dashing bandurist and a denizen in the entourage of Catherine II (his godmother), Uvarov came from "an ancient Russian family" that had fallen into penury. Marriage connections provided a French tutor, who very quickly recognized the boy's "peerless ability" (P. 13). Despite chronic concerns about money, in his late teens, while abroad, Uvarov interacted with European luminaries. His facility in French and German (and neglect of Russian) became legendary. Comfortable studying idealism in Göttingen, flirting with Madame de Staël in Vienna, and dazzling the epigones of elegant salons in Paris, by 1812, Uvarov had developed into an enlightened cosmopolitan, pro-Western thinker, yet his success enhanced his vanity and love of flattery that later gained notoriety. At the same time, he remained an ardent Russian patriot who lamented the poverty of his motherland's intellectual soil.

At home, Uvarov suffered from the intellectual barrenness of the "Northern Capital" where pitifully few could match his erudite interests. Yet the yearning to engage in ideas inspired him and his companions to form the Arzamas society, a reading club that gradually got drawn into politics. The Arzamasians included Uvarov's close friends the great poet and translator Vasily Zhukovsky and the reformist minister Mikhail Speransky.

In his twenties, Uvarov was a dedicated scholar (among the first in Russia to write on archaeology). His plan for an Asiatic Academy (1810) to explore the vast realm of Oriental studies drew the attention of Napoleon and established his administrative prominence. Soon he became the superintendent of the St. Petersburg educational district, where he transformed the Pedagogical Institute into St. Petersburg University. Studying his educational reforms makes it clear that Uvarov possessed an ideological vision based on a knowledge of history, which he believed should be mastered by citizens and society at large. As a gradualist, Uvarov [End Page 411] favored Russia's integration with Europe and the introduction of ideas through strident education. His dedication to learning involved him with Alexander Golitsyn, who was the head of the dual Ministry of Religious Affairs and Public Enlightenment (1816–1824). Unfortunately, Chamberlain's assessment of Golitsyn as "strongly reactionary" (P. 84), "weak and blind to all causes except fundamental religion" (P. 85), "a pathetic figure" (P. 86) but also a "gifted and prodigious raconteur" and "highly dependable" (P. 189) is superficial and diminishes the activity of the Bible Society, which dovetailed with Uvarov...

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