  The higher Sugawara operators acting on the Verma modules over the affine
Kac-Moody algebra at the critical level are related to the higher Hamiltonians
of the Gaudin model due to work of Feigin, Frenkel and Reshetikhin. An explicit
construction of the higher Hamiltonians in the case of gl_n was given recently
by Talalaev. We propose a new approach to these results from the viewpoint of
the vertex algebra theory by proving directly the formulas for the higher order
Sugawara operators. The eigenvalues of the operators in the Wakimoto modules of
critical level are also calculated.
