Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia, Part II
Author: Tom Stoppard
Date: 2011-05-16 04:00:00+00:00
Keywords: Plays; Drama; Theatre; Historical Fiction; British Literature
Description: The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term "intelligentsia" was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of politics, lov
Publisher: Grove Press
Rights: All rights reserved

Shipwreck

THE COAST OF UTOPIA PART II

Tom Stoppard’s other work includes Enter a Free Man, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, The Real Inspector Hound, Jumpers, Travesties, Night and Day, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (with Andre Previn), After Magritte, Dirty Linen, The Real Thing, Hapgood, Arcadia, Indian Ink and The Invention of Love. His radio plays include: If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank, Albert’s Bridge, Where Are They Now?, Artist Descending a Staircase, The Dog It Was That Died and In the Native State. His work for television includes Professional Foul and Squaring the Circle. His film credits include Empire of the Sun, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which he also directed, Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman) and Enigma.

PLAYS
Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead*
Enter a Free Man*
The Real Inspector Hound*
After Magritte*
Jumpers*
Travesties*
Dirty Linen and New-Found-Land*
Every Good Boy Deserves Favour*
Night and Day
Dogg’s Hamlet and Cahoot’s Macbeth*
The Real Thing
Rough Crossing
Hapgood
Arcadia
Indian Ink
The Invention of Love*
Voyage: The Coast of Utopia Part I*
Salvage: The Coast of Utopia Part III*

TELEVISION SCRIPTS
A Separate Peace
Teeth
Another Moon Called Earth
Neutral Ground
Professional Foul
Squaring the Circle

RADIO PLAYS
The Dissolution of Dominic Boot
“M” Is for Moon Among Other Things
If You’re Glad, I’ll Be Frank
Albert’s Bridge
Where Are They Now?
Artist Descending a Staircase
The Dog It Was That Died
In the Native State

SCREENPLAYS
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead
Shakespeare in Love (with Marc Norman)

FICTION
Lord Malquist & Mr. Moon

* Available from Grove Press

Shipwreck

THE COAST OF UTOPIA PART II

TOM STOPPARD

Copyright © 2002 by Tom Stoppard

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form or by any electronic or mechanical means, including information storage and retrieval systems, without permission in writing from the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may quote brief passages in a review. Any members of educational institutions wishing to photocopy part or all of the work for classroom use, or publishers who would like to obtain permission to include the work in an anthology, should send their inquiries to Grove/Atlantic, Inc., 841 Broadway, New York, NY 10003.

CAUTION: Professionals and amateurs are hereby warned that Shipwreck: The Coast of Utopia Part II is subject to a royalty. It is fully protected under the copyright laws of the United States, Canada, United Kingdom, and all British Commonwealth countries, and all countries covered by the International Copyright Union, the Pan-American Copyright Convention, and the Universal Copyright Convention. All rights, including professional, amateur, motion picture, recitation, public reading, radio broadcasting, television, video or sound taping, all other forms of mechanical or electronic reproduction, such as information storage and retrieval systems and photocopying, and rights of translation into foreign languages, are strictly reserved.

First-class professional, stock, and amateur applications for permission to perform it, and those other rights stated above, must be made in advance to Peters, Fraser & Dunlop, Drury House, 34-43 Russell Street, London, WC2B 5HA, England, ATTN: Kenneth Ewing, and must pay the requisite fee, whether the play is presented for charity or gain and whether or not admission is charged.

First published in hardback and paperback in 2002 by Faber and Faber Limited, London, England

Printed in the United States of America

FIRST AMERICAN EDITION

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Stoppard, Tom.
Shipwreck / Tom Stoppard.
p. cm. — (The Coast of Utopia; pt. 2)
eBook ISBN-13: 978-0-8021-9530-2
1. Herzen, Aleksandr, 1812-1870—Drama.   2. Bakunin, Mikhail
Aleksandrovich, 1814–1876—Drama.   3. Belinsky, Vissarion Grigoryevich,
1811–1848—Drama.   4. Russians—France—Drama.   5. Revolutionaries—Drama.
6. Paris (France)—Drama.   7. Anarchists—Drama.   I. Title.
PR6069.T6S54 2003
822′.914—dc21                                                                                  2003042186

Grove Press
841 Broadway
New York, NY 10003

03  04  05  06  07    10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I am gratefully indebted to Trevor Nunn
for encouraging me towards some additions
and subtractions while The Coast of Utopia
was in rehearsal

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I would like to thank, first, Aileen Kelly, who has written extensively about Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin. I am indebted to her for her kindness as well as her scholarship. Moreover, Dr Kelly is, with Henry Hardy, who also has my gratitude for our exchanges, the coeditor of the book which was my entry to the world of The Coast of Utopia, namely Russian Thinkers, a selection of essays by Isaiah Berlin. Berlin is one of two authors without whom I could not have written these plays, the other being E. H. Carr, whose The Romantic Exiles is in print again after nearly seventy years, and whose biography of Bakunin deserves to be. I received valuable help from Helen Rappaport on Russian matters in general. I am particularly indebted to her for Russian translation, including lines of dialogue. Krista Jussenhoven kindly made up for my deficiency in German, Rose Cobbe corrected my French, and Sonja Nerdrum supplied me with the lines in Italian. My thanks to all of them, and to the Royal National Institute for the Deaf for access to its library.

Shipwreck was first performed in the Olivier Auditorium of the National Theatre, London, as the second part of The Coast of Utopia trilogy, on 8 July 2002. The cast was as follows:

NICHOLAS OGAREV   Simon Day

NATALIE HERZEN   Eve Best

IVAN TURGENEV   Guy Henry

SASHA HERZEN   Lewis Crutch/Freddie Hale/Thomas Moll/Greg Sheffield

NURSE   Janet Spencer-Turner

ALEXANDER HERZEN   Stephen Dillane

TIMOTHY GRANOVSKY   Iain Mitchell

NICHOLAS KETSCHER   Paul Ritter

KONSTANTIN AKSAKOV   Sam Troughton

POLICEMAN   Richard Hollis

VISSARION BELINSKY   Will Keen

MADAME HAAG   Janine Duvitski

KOLYA HERZEN   Padraig Goodall/Matthew Thomas-Davies/David Perkins

GEORGE HERWEGH   Raymond Coulthard

EMMA HERWEGH   Charlotte Emmerson

NICHOLAS SAZONOV   Jonathan Slinger

JEAN-MARIE   Thomas Arnold

MICHAEL BAKUNIN   Douglas Henshall

KARL MARX   Paul Ritter

SHOP BOY   Dominic Barklem/Alexander Green/William Green/Ashley Jones

NATALIE (NATASHA) TUCHKOV   Lucy Whybrow

BENOIT   Martin Chamberlain

BLUE BLOUSE   John Nolan

MARIA OGAREV   Felicity Dean

FRANZ OTTO   Paul Ritter

ROCCA   Jack James

TATA HERZEN   Clemmie Hooton/Alice Knight/Harriet Lunnon/Casi Toy

MARIA FOMM   Anna Maxwell Martin

LEONTY IBAYEV   John Carlisle

Other parts played by Rachel Ferjani, Jasmine Hyde, Sarah Manton, Jennifer Scott Malden, Nick Sampson, Kemal Sylvester, David Verrey

Director   Trevor Nunn

Set, Costume and Video Designer   William Dudley

Lighting Designer   David Hersey

Associate Director   Stephen Rayne

Music   Steven Edis

Movement Director   David Bolger

Sound Designer   Paul Groothuis

Company Voice Work   Patsy Rodenburg

CHARACTERS

ALEXANDER HERZEN, a radical writer

NATALIE HERZEN, Alexander’s wife

TATA HERZEN, the Herzens’ daughter

SASHA HERZEN, the Herzens’ son

KOLYA HERZEN, the Herzens’ younger son

NICHOLAS OGAREV, a poet and radical

IVAN TURGENEV, a poet and writer

TIMOTHY GRANOVSKY, a historian

NICHOLAS KETSCHER, a doctor

KONSTANTIN AKSAKOV, a Slavophile

NURSE, a household serf

POLICEMAN

VISSARION BELINSKY, a literary critic

GEORGE HERWEGH, a radical poet

EMMA HERWEGH, his Wife

MADAME HAAG, Herzen’s mother

NICHOLAS SAZONOV, a Russian émigré

MICHAEL BAKUNIN, a Russian émigré activist

JEAN-MARIE, a French servant

KARL MARX, author of The Communist Manifesto

SHOP BOY

NATALIE (NATASHA) TUCHKOV, Natalie’s friend

BENOIT, a French servant

BLUE BLOUSE, a Paris worker

MARIA OGAREV, Ogarev’s estranged wife

FRANZ OTTO, Bakunin’s defence lawyer

ROCCA, an Italian servant

MARIA FOMM, a German nanny

LEONTY IBAYEV, Russian Consul in Nice

The action takes place between 1846 and 1852
at Sokolovo, a gentleman’s estate fifteen miles
outside Moscow; Salzbrunn, Germany;
Paris; Dresden; and Nice

Shipwreck

ACT ONE

SUMMER 1846

The garden of Sokolovo, a gentleman’s estate fifteen miles outside Moscow.

NICHOLAS OGAREV, aged thirty-four, has been reading to NATALIE HERZEN, aged twenty-nine, from a so-called thick journal, the Contemporary. IVAN TURGENEV, aged twenty-eight, is supine, out of earshot, with his hat over his face.

NATALIE   Why have you stopped?

OGAREV   I can’t read any more. He’s gone mad. (He closes the book and lets it fall.)

NATALIE   Well, it was boring anyway.

SASHA HERZEN, aged seven, runs across the garden followed by a NURSE pushing a baby carriage. Sasha has a fishing cane and a jar for tiddlers.

NATALIE   (cont.) Sasha, not too close to the river, darling!—(to the Nurse) Don’t let him play on the bank!

The Nurse follows Sasha out.

OGAREV   But … it was a fishing rod, wasn’t it?

NATALIE   (calling) And where’s Kolya?—(looking aside) Oh, all right, I’ll keep an eye. (resuming) I don’t mind being bored, especially in the country, where it’s part of the attraction, but a boring book I take personally. (looking aside, amused) Far better to spend the time eating marigolds. (glancing at Turgenev) Has he gone to sleep?

OGAREV   He didn’t say anything about it to me.

NATALIE   Alexander and Granovsky will be back from picking mushrooms soon … Well, what should we talk about?

OGAREV   Yes … by all means.

NATALIE   Why does it feel as though one has been here before?

OGAREV   Because you were here last year.

NATALIE   But don’t you ever have the feeling that while real time goes galloping down the road in all directions, there are certain moments … situations … which keep having their turn again? … Like posting stations we change horses at …

OGAREV   Have we started yet? Or is this before we start talking about something?

NATALIE   Oh, don’t be sideways. Anyway, something’s wrong this year … even though it’s all the same people who were so happy together when we took the house last summer. Do you know what’s different?

OGAREV   I wasn’t here last summer.

NATALIE   No, it’s not that. Ketscher’s gone into a sulk … grown men squabbling over how to make coffee …

OGAREV   But Alexander was right. The coffee is not good, and perhaps Ketscher’s method will improve it.

NATALIE   Oh, I’m sure it’s not like Parisian coffee! … Perhaps you’re wishing you’d stayed in Paris.

OGAREV   No. Not at all.

Turgenev stirs.

NATALIE   Ivan …? He’s in Paris anyway, dreaming about the Opera!

OGAREV   Yes, I’ll say one thing, Viardot can sing.

NATALIE   But she’s so ugly.

OGAREV   Anyone can love a beauty. Turgenev’s love for his opera singer is a reproach to us for batting the word about like a shuttlecock. (Pause.) When Maria wrote to introduce herself to you and Alexander after we got married, she described herself as ugly. I’m paying myself a compliment.

NATALIE   She also wrote that she had no vanity and loved virtue for its own sake … She was no judge of her looks either, forgive me, Nick.

OGAREV   (tolerantly) Well, if we’re talking about love … Oh, the letters one wrote … ‘Ah, but to love you is to love God and His Universe, our love negates egoism in the embrace of all mankind.’

NATALIE   We all wrote that—why not?—it was true.

OGAREV   I remember I wrote to Maria that our love would be a tale told down the ages, preserved in memory as a sacred thing, and now she’s in Paris living quite openly with a mediocre painter.

NATALIE   That’s a different thing—one might say a normal coaching accident—but at least you had each other body and soul before the coach went into the ditch. Our friend here simply trails along in Viardot’s dust shouting brava, bravissima for favours forever withheld … not to mention her husband, the postillion.

OGAREV   Are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about highway travel?

NATALIE   Would that be less painful for you?

OGAREV   For me it’s the same thing.

NATALIE   I love Alexander with my whole life, but it used to be better, when one was ready to crucify a man or be crucified for him for a word, a glance, a thought … I could look at a star and think of Alexander far away in exile looking at the same star, and feel we were … you know …

OGAREV   (Pause.) Triangulated.

NATALIE   Foo to you, then.

OGAREV   (surprised) Believe me, I …

NATALIE   Now grown-upness has caught up with us … as if life were too serious for love. The wives disapprove of me, and it didn’t help that Alexander’s father died and left him quite rich. Duty and self-denial are the thing among our group.

OGAREV   Duty and self-denial restrict our freedom to express our personality. I explained this to Maria—she got it at once.

NATALIE   Well, she didn’t love you properly. I know I love Alexander, it’s just that we’re not the intoxicated children we were when we eloped in the dead of night and I didn’t even bring my hat … And there was that other thing, too … He told you. I know he told you.

OGAREV   Oh, well, yes …

NATALIE   I suppose you’re going to say it was only a servant girl.

OGAREV   No, I wouldn’t say that. ‘Only a countess’ is more the line I take on these things.

NATALIE   Well, it put an end to stargazing, and I’d never have known if Alexander hadn’t confessed it to me … Men can be so stupid.

OGAREV   It’s funny, though, that Alexander, who goes on about personal freedom, should feel like a murderer because on a single occasion, arriving home in the small hours, he …

Turgenev stirs and raises his head.

OGAREV   (cont.) (adjusting) … travelled without a ticket …

Turgenev relapses.

OGAREV   (cont.) … changed horses, do I mean?—no, sorry …

Turgenev sits up, taking the creases out of himself. He is somewhat dandified in his dress.

TURGENEV   Is it all right for him to eat them?

Natalie looks quickly toward Kolya but is reassured.

NATALIE   (calls) Kolya! (then leaving) Oh, he’s getting so muddy! (Natalie leaves.)

TURGENEV   Have I missed tea?

OGAREV   No, they’re not back yet.

TURGENEV   I shall go in search.

OGAREV   Not that way.

TURGENEV   In search of tea. Belinsky told me a good story I forgot to tell you. It seems some poor provincial schoolmaster heard there was a vacancy in one of the Moscow high schools, so he came up to town and got an interview with Count Strogonov. ‘What right have you to this post?’ Strogonov barked at him. ‘I ask for the post,’ said the young man, ‘because I heard it was vacant.’ ‘So is the ambassadorship to Constantinople,’ said Strogonov. ‘Why don’t you ask for that?’

OGAREV   Very good.

TURGENEV   And the young man said—

OGAREV   Oh.

TURGENEV   ‘I had no idea it was in Your Excellency’s gift, I would accept the post of ambassador to Constantinople with equal gratitude.’ (Turgenev laughs loudly by himself. He has a light high voice, surprising in one of his frame, and a braying laugh.) Botkin’s taken up a collection to send Belinsky to a German spa … doctor’s orders. If only my mother would die, I’d have at least twenty thousand a year. Perhaps I’ll go with him. The waters might reassure my bladder. (He picks up the Contemporary.) Have you read what Gogol’s got in here? You could wait till the book comes out …

OGAREV   If you ask me, he’s gone mad.

Natalie returns, wiping soil from her hands.

NATALIE   I call to him as if he can hear me. I still think one day I’ll say, ‘Kolya!’ and he’ll turn his face to me. (She wipes a tear with her wrist.) What do you think he thinks about? Can he have thoughts if he has no names to go with them?

TURGENEV   He’s thinking muddiness … flowerness, yellowness, nice-smellingness, not-very-nice-tastingness … The names for things don’t come first, words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

NATALIE   How can you say that—you, a poet?

OGAREV   That’s how we know.

Turgenev turns to Ogarev, silenced and deeply affected.

TURGENEV   (Pause.) I thank you. As a poet. I mean, you as a poet. I myself have started writing stories now. (Turgenev starts to leave towards the house.)

OGAREV   I like him. He’s not so affected as he used to be, do you think?

Turgenev returns, a little agitated.

TURGENEV   You don’t understand Gogol, if I may say so. It’s Belinsky’s fault. I love Belinsky and owe a great deal to him, for his praise of my first poem, certainly, but also for his complete indifference to all my subsequent ones—but he browbeat us into taking Gogol as a realist …

ALEXANDER HERZEN, aged thirty-four, and TIMOTHY GRANOVSKY, aged thirty-three, approach, Herzen with a basket.

NATALIE   (jumps up) They’re here … Alexander!

She embraces Herzen as warmly as decorum allows her.

HERZEN   My dear … but what’s this? We haven’t come from Moscow.

Granovsky goes unsmilingly towards the house.

NATALIE   Have you been quarrelling?

HERZEN   Disputing. He’ll get over it. The only trouble is, we were having such an interesting talk …

He turns the basket upside down, letting a single mushroom fall out.

NATALIE   Oh, Alexander! I can see one from here!

She snatches the basket and runs off with it. Herzen takes her chair.

HERZEN   What were you and Natalie saying about me? Well, thank you very much, anyway.

OGAREV   What were you and Granovsky arguing about?

HERZEN   The immortality of the soul.

OGAREV   Oh, that.

NICHOLAS KETSCHER, aged forty, a thin, avuncular figure to the younger men, comes from the house carrying, with a slightly ceremonial air, a tray with a coffeepot on a small spirit lamp, and cups. In silence Herzen, Ogarev and Turgenev watch him put the tray on a garden table and pour a cup, which he brings to Herzen. Herzen sips the coffee.

HERZEN   It’s the same.

KETSCHER   What?

HERZEN   It tastes the same.

KETSCHER   So you think the coffee is no better?

HERZEN   No.

The others are now nervous. Ketscher gives a short barking laugh.

KETSCHER   Well, it really is extraordinary, your inability to admit you’re wrong even on such a trifling matter as a cup of coffee.

HERZEN   It’s not me, it’s the coffee.

KETSCHER   No, I mean it’s beyond anything, this wretched vanity of yours.

HERZEN   I didn’t make the coffee, I didn’t make the coffeepot, it’s not my fault that—

KETSCHER   To hell with the coffee! You’re impossible to reason with! It’s over between us. I’m going back to Moscow! (Ketscher leaves.)

OGAREV   Between the coffee and the immortality of the soul, you’ll end up with no friends at all.

Ketscher returns.

KETSCHER   Is that your last word?

Herzen takes another sip of coffee.

HERZEN   I’m sorry.

KETSCHER   Right.

Ketscher leaves again, passing Granovsky entering.

GRANOVSKY   (to Ketscher) How’s the …? (Seeing Ketscher’s face, Granovsky lets the matter drop.) Aksakov’s in the house.

HERZEN   Aksakov? Impossible.

GRANOVSKY   (helping himself to coffee) Just as you like. (He makes a face at the taste of the coffee.) He’s ridden over from some friends of his …

HERZEN   Well, why doesn’t he come out? There’s no need for old friends to fall out over …

Ketscher returns as though nothing has passed. He pours himself coffee.

KETSCHER   Aksakov’s come. Where is Natalie?

HERZEN   Picking mushrooms.

KETSCHER   Ah … good. I must say they were excellent at breakfast. (He sips his coffee while the others watch him, and considers it.) Vile. (He puts the cup down and, in a flurry, he and Herzen are kissing each other’s cheeks and clasping each other, competing in self-blame.)

KETSCHER   By the way, did I tell you, we’re all going to be in the dictionary?

HERZEN   I’m already in the dictionary.

GRANOVSKY   He doesn’t mean the German dictionary, in which you make a singular appearance, Herzen, and only by accident …

KETSCHER   No, I’m talking about a new word altogether.

HERZEN   Excuse me, Granovsky, but I wasn’t an accident, I was the child of an affair of the heart, given my surname for my mother’s German heart. Being half Russian and half German, at heart I’m Polish, of course … I often feel quite partitioned, sometimes I wake up screaming in the night that the Emperor of Austria is claiming the rest of me.

GRANOVSKY   That’s not the Emperor of Austria, it’s Mephistopheles, and he is.

Turgenev laughs.

OGAREV   What’s the new word, Ketscher?

KETSCHER   You can whistle for it now. (furiously to Herzen) Why do you feel you have to make off with every conversation like a bag-snatcher?

HERZEN   (protesting, to Ogarev) I don’t, do I, Nick?

GRANOVSKY   Yes, you do.

KETSCHER   (to Granovsky) It’s you as well!

HERZEN   In the first place, I have a right to defend my good name, not to mention my mother’s. In the second place—

OGAREV   Stop him, stop him!

Herzen joins in the laughter against himself.

KONSTANTIN AKSAKOV, aged twenty-nine, comes from the house. He seems to be in costume. He wears an embroidered side-fastening shirt and a velvet skullcap. His trousers are tucked into tall boots.

HERZEN   Aksakov! Have some coffee!

AKSAKOV   (formally) I wanted to tell you in person that relations are over between us. It’s a pity, but there is no help for it. You understand that we can no longer meet as friends. I want to shake you by the hand and say goodbye.

Herzen allows his hand to be shaken. Aksakov starts to walk back.

HERZEN   What is the matter with everybody?

OGAREV   Aksakov, why do you dress like that?

AKSAKOV   (turning angrily) Because I am proud to be Russian!

OGAREV   But people think you’re a Persian.

AKSAKOV   I have nothing to say to you, Ogarev. As a matter of fact, I don’t hold it against you, compared with some of your friends who spend their time gallivanting around Europe … because I understand that in your case you’re not chasing after false gods but only after a false—

OGAREV   (hotly) You be careful, sir, or you will hear from me!

HERZEN   (leaping in) That’s enough of that talk!—

AKSAKOV   You Westernisers apply for passports with letters from your doctors and then go off and drink the water in Paris …

Ogarev relapses, seething.

TURGENEV   (mildly) Not at all, not at all. You can’t drink the water in Paris.

AKSAKOV   Go to France for your cravats if you must, but why do you have to go to France for your ideas?

TURGENEV   Because they’re in French. You can publish anything you like in France, it’s extraordinary.

AKSAKOV   And what’s the result? Scepticism. Materialism. Triviality.

Ogarev, still furious and agitated, leaps up.

OGAREV   Repeat what you said!

AKSAKOV   Scepticism—materialism—

OGAREV   Before!

AKSAKOV   Censorship is not all bad for a writer—it teaches precision and Christian patience.

OGAREV   (to Aksakov) Chasing after a false what?

AKSAKOV   (ignoring) France is a moral cesspit, but you can publish anything you like, so you’re all dazzled—blinded to the fact that the Western model is a bourgeois monarchy for philistines and profiteers.

HERZEN   Don’t tell me, tell them.

Ogarev goes out.

AKSAKOV   (to Herzen) Oh, I’ve heard about your socialist utopianism. What use is that to us? This is Russia … (to Granovsky) We haven’t even got a bourgeoisie.

GRANOVSKY   Don’t tell me, tell him.

AKSAKOV   It’s all of you. Jacobins and German sentimentalists. Destroyers and dreamers. You’ve turned your back on your own people, the real Russians abandoned a hundred and fifty years ago by Peter the Great Westerniser!—but you can’t agree on the next step.

Ogarev enters.

OGAREV   I demand that you finish what you were going to say!

AKSAKOV   I’m afraid I can’t remember what it was.

OGAREV   Yes, you can!

AKSAKOV   A false beard …? No … A false passport …?

Ogarev goes out.

AKSAKOV   (cont.) We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It’s not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie, yes, and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation. It can even be our destiny to unite the Slav nations and lead Europe back to the true path. It will be the age of Russia.

KETSCHER   You’ve left out our own astronomy unpolluted by Copernicus.

HERZEN   Why don’t you wear a peasant’s shirt and bast shoes if you want to advertise the real Russia, instead of dressing it up like you in your costume? Russia before Peter had no culture. Life was ugly, poor and savage. Our only tradition was submitting ourselves to invaders. The history of other nations is the history of their emancipation. The history of Russia goes the opposite way, to serfdom and obscurantism. The Church of your infatuated iconpainter’s imagination is a conspiracy of pot-house priests and anointed courtiers in trade with the police. A country like this will never see the light if we turn our backs to it, and the light is over there. (He points.) West. (He points the other way.) There is none there.

AKSAKOV   Then you that way, we this way. Farewell.

Leaving, Aksakov meets Ogarev storming in.

AKSAKOV   (cont.) We lost Pushkin—(He ‘shoots’ with his finger.)—we lost Lermontov. (He ‘shoots’ again.) We cannot lose Ogarev. I ask your forgiveness.

He bows to Ogarev and leaves. Herzen puts his arm around Ogarev.

HERZEN   He’s right, Nick.

GRANOVSKY   It’s not the only thing he’s right about.

HERZEN   Granovsky … let’s not be quarrelling when Natalie comes back.

GRANOVSKY   I’m not quarrelling. He’s right about us having no ideas of our own, that’s all.

HERZEN   Where would they come from when we have no history of thought, when nothing has been handed on because nothing can be written or read or discussed? No wonder Europe regards us as a barbarian horde at the gates. This huge country, so vast it takes in fur-trappers, camelherders, pearl-fishers … and yet not a single original philosopher, not one contribution to political discourse …

KETSCHER   Yes—one! The intelligentsia!

GRANOVSKY   What’s that?

KETSCHER   It’s the new word I was telling you about.

OGAREV   Well, it’s a horrible word.

KETSCHER   I agree, but it’s our own, Russia’s debut in the lexicon.

HERZEN   What does it mean?

KETSCHER   It means us. A uniquely Russian phenomenon, the intellectual opposition considered as a social force.

GRANOVSKY   Well … !

HERZEN   The … intelligentsia! …

OGAREV   Including Aksakov?

KETSCHER   That’s the subtlety of it, we don’t have to agree with each other.

GRANOVSKY   The Slavophiles are not entirely wrong about the West, you know.

HERZEN   I’m sure they’re entirely right.

GRANOVSKY   Materialism …

HERZEN   Triviality.

GRANOVSKY   Scepticism above all.

HERZEN   Above all. I’m not arguing with you.

GRANOVSKY   But—don’t you see?—it doesn’t follow that our own bourgeoisie has to adopt the same values as in the West.

HERZEN   No. Yes.

GRANOVSKY   How would you know, anyway?

HERZEN   I wouldn’t. It’s you and Turgenev who’ve been there. I still can’t get a passport. I’ve applied again.

KETSCHER   For your health?

HERZEN   (laughs) It’s for little Kolya … Natalie and I want to consult the best doctors …

OGAREV   (looking) Where is Kolya …?

KETSCHER   I’m a doctor. He’s deaf. (Shrugs.) I’m sorry.

Ogarev, unheeded, leaves to look for Kolya.

TURGENEV   It’s not all philistines, either. The only thing that’ll save Russia is Western culture transmitted by … people like us.

KETSCHER   No, it’s the Spirit of History, the ceaseless March of Progress …

HERZEN   (venting his anger) Oh, a curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood—at least spare them your conceit that they’re acting out the biography of an abstract noun!

KETSCHER   Oh, it’s my conceit? (to the others) There was nothing wrong with that coffee, either.

HERZEN   (to Granovsky, conciliatory) I’m not starry-eyed about France. To sit in a café with Louis Blanc, Leroux, Ledru-Rollin … to buy La Réforme with the ink still wet, and walk in the Place de la Concorde … the thought excites me like a child, I admit that, but Aksakov is right—I don’t know the next step. Where are we off to? Who’s got the map? We study the ideal societies … power to the experts, to the workers, to the philosophers … property rights, property sanctions, the evil of competition, the evil of monopoly … central planning, free housing, free love … limited to eight hundred families or unconstrained by national frontiers … and all of them uniquely harmonious, just and efficient. But Proudhon is the only one who understands what the question is: why should anyone obey anyone else?

GRANOVSKY   Because that’s what society means. You might as well ask, why should an orchestra play together? And yet it can play together without being socialist.

TURGENEV   That’s true!—my mother keeps an orchestra at Spasskoye. What I find even harder to grasp, however, is that she also owns the nightingales.

HERZEN   Bringing in Russia always seems to confuse things. I’m not saying socialism is history’s secret plan, it just looks like the rational step.

GRANOVSKY   To whom?

HERZEN   To me. Not just me. The future is being scrawled on the factory walls of Paris.

GRANOVSKY   Why? Why necessarily? We have no factory districts. Why should we wait to be inundated from within by our very own industrialised Goths? Everything you hold dear in civilisation will be smashed on the altar of equality … the equality of the barracks.

HERZEN   You judge the common people after they’ve been brutalised. But people are good, by nature. I have faith in them.

GRANOVSKY   Without faith in something higher, human nature is animal nature.

HERZEN   Without superstition, you mean.

GRANOVSKY   Superstition? Did you say superstition?

Herzen forgets to keep his temper, and Granovsky starts to respond in kind until they are rowing.

HERZEN   Superstition! The pious and pitiful belief that there’s something outside or up there, or God knows where, without which men can’t find their nobility.

GRANOVSKY   Without ‘up there,’ as you call it, scores have to be settled down here—that’s the whole truth about materialism.

HERZEN   How can you—how dare you—throw away your dignity as a human being? You can choose well or badly without deference to a ghost!—you’re a free man, Granovsky, there’s no other kind.

Natalie arrives hurriedly and frightened. Her distress is at first misinterpreted. She runs to Alexander and hugs him, unable to speak. There are some mushrooms in her basket.

NATALIE   Alexander …

HERZEN   (apologetically to Natalie) It’s only a little argument …

GRANOVSKY   (to Natalie) It grieves me deeply to have to absent myself from a household in which I have always received a kind welcome. (Granovsky starts to leave.)

NATALIE   There’s a policeman come to the house—I saw him from the field.

HERZEN   A policeman?

A Servant comes from the house, overtaken by a uniformed

POLICEMAN.

HERZEN   (cont.) Oh God, not again … Natalie, Natalie …

POLICEMAN   Is one of you Herzen?

HERZEN   I am.

POLICEMAN   You’re to read this. From Count Orlov.

The Policeman gives Herzen a letter. Herzen tears it open.

NATALIE   (to the Policeman) I want to go with him.

POLICEMAN   I wasn’t told …

Herzen hugs Natalie.

HERZEN   It’s all right. (announces) After twelve years of police surveillance in and out of exile, Count Orlov has graciously let it be known, I can now apply to travel abroad … !

The others gather round him in relief and congratulation. The Policeman hesitates. Natalie snatches the letter.

KETSCHER   You’ll see Sazonov again.

GRANOVSKY   He’s changed.

TURGENEV   And Bakunin …

GRANOVSKY   He hasn’t, I’m afraid.

NATALIE   ‘… to travel abroad to seek medical assistance in respect of your son Nikolai Alexandrovich …’

HERZEN   (lifting her up) Paris, Natalie!

Her basket of mushrooms falls and spills.

NATALIE   (weeping with joy) … Kolya! … (Natalie runs off.)

HERZEN   Where’s Nick?

POLICEMAN   Good news, then.

Herzen takes the hint and tips him. The Policeman leaves.

NATALIE   (returning) Where’s Kolya?

HERZEN   Kolya? I don’t know. Why?

NATALIE   Where is he?

Natalie runs out, calling the name.

HERZEN   (following hurriedly) He can’t hear you …

Turgenev rushes out after them, Granovsky and Ketscher following anxiously.

After a pause, during which Natalie can be heard distantly, silence falls.

Distant thunder.

Sasha enters from another direction and turns to look back. He comes forward and sees the spilled mushrooms. He rights the basket. Ogarev enters at peace, carrying Sasha’s fishing cane and jar, glancing behind him.

OGAREV   (calls) Come on, Kolya!

SASHA   He can’t hear you.

OGAREV   Come along!

SASHA   He can’t hear you.

Ogarev goes back towards Kolya.

Distant thunder.

OGAREV   There, you see? He heard that.

He goes out.

Sasha starts putting the mushrooms into the basket.

JULY   1847

Salzbrunn, a small spa town in Germany.

[VISSARION BELINSKY and Turgenev took rooms on the ground floor of a small wooden house in the main street. A shack in the courtyard served them as a summer pavilion.] Belinsky and Turgenev are reading separate manuscripts, a short story and a long letter respectively, while drinking water from large beakers. Belinsky is thirty-six and less than a year from death. His face is pale and smooth. He has a stout walking stick to hand. Turgenev finishes first. He puts the letter on the table. He waits for Belinksy to finish reading, and drinks from his beaker, making a face. Belinsky finishes reading and gives the manuscript to Turgenev. Turgenev waits for the verdict. Belinsky nods thoughtfully, drinks from his beaker.

BELINSKY   Hm. You don’t tell the reader what you think.

TURGENEV   What I think? What has that got to do with the reader?

Belinsky laughs, coughs, slams his stick, recovers.

BELINSKY   And what do you think about my letter to Gogol?

TURGENEV   Oh … well, I don’t see the necessity for it.

BELINSKY   Be careful, boy, or I’ll stand you in the corner.

TURGENEV   You said what you had to say about his book in the Contemporary. Is this the future of criticism?—first the bad notice, then the abusive letter to the author?

BELINSKY   The censor cut at least a third of my review. But that’s not the point. Gogol evidently thinks I rubbished his book, because he took a swipe at me. I’m not having that. He has to be made to understand that I took personal offence from cover to cover! I loved that man. I found him. Now he’s gone mad—and this apostle of Tsar Nicholas, this champion of serfdom, corporal punishment, censorship, ignorance and obscurantist piety, thinks I gave him a bad notice out of pique. His book is a crime against humanity and civilisation.

TURGENEV   No—it’s a book … a bad, stupid book but with all the sincerity of religious mania—why drive him madder? You should pity him.

Belinsky thumps angrily with his stick.

BELINSKY   It’s too important for pity. In other countries, the advance of civilised behaviour is everybody’s business. In Russia, there’s no division of labour, literature has to do it all. That was a hard lesson for me, boy. When I started off, I thought art was aimless, pure spirit. I was a young ruffian from the provinces, with the artistic credo of a Parisian dandy. Remember Gautier?—‘Fools! Cretins! A novel is not a pair of boots!’

TURGENEV   ‘A sonnet is not a syringe! A play is not a railway!’

BELINSKY   (chiming in with Turgenev) ‘A play is not a railway!’ Well, we have no railways, so that’s another job for literature, to open up the country. Are you laughing at me, boy? I once heard a government minister say he was against railways because they encouraged people who should stay put to indulge in purposeless travel with who knows what results. That’s what we’re up against.

TURGENEV   I’m not pure spirit, but I’m not society’s keeper either. No, listen, Captain! People complain about me having no attitude in my stories. They’re puzzled. Do I approve or disapprove? Do I want the reader to agree with this man or the other man? Whose fault is it that this peasant is a useless drunkard, his or ours? What about this story I gave you?—is the bailiff worse than the master, or the master worse than the bailiff? Where does the author stand? Why doesn’t he come clean with us? Well, maybe I’m wrong, but how would that make me a better writer? What has it got to do with anything? (raising his voice) Why are you getting at me, anyway? I’m not well, you know—well, I’m not not well like you’re not well—(hastily)—though you’ll get better, don’t worry—sorry—but coming all this way to this dump to keep you company … Can we not talk about art and society with the waters sloshing through my kidneys? …

Belinsky, who has been coughing, is suddenly in distress. Turgenev comes to his aid.

TURGENEV   (cont.) Easy, Captain! Easy …

BELINSKY   (recovering) The waters of Salzbrunn are not the elixir of life, in my opinion. It’s a mystery how these places get their reputation. Anyone can see they’re killing people off like flies.

TURGENEV   Let’s get out! Come with me to Berlin. I’ve got some friends going to London, I promised to see them off—or we can meet in Paris.

BELINSKY   No, I …

TURGENEV   You can’t go home without seeing Paris!

BELINSKY   I suppose not.

TURGENEV   Are you all right now?

BELINSKY   Yes. (He drinks some water.)

TURGENEV   (Pause.) So you didn’t like my story?

BELINSKY   Who said? You’re going to be one of our great writers, one of the few—I’m never wrong.

TURGENEV   (moved) Oh … (lightly) You said Fenimore Cooper was as great as Shakespeare.

BELINSKY   That wasn’t wrong, it was only ridiculous.

There is a transition.

JULY   1847

Paris. La Place de la Concorde.

Turgenev and Belinsky are out walking. Belinsky stares gloomily around.

TURGENEV   Herzen has established himself in the Avenue Marigny. He’s got a chandelier, and a footman to bring things in on a silver tray. The snow on his boots is all gone like les neiges d’antan. (He points.) The obelisk marks the spot where they had the guillotine.

BELINSKY   They say the Place de la Concorde is the most beautiful square in the world, don’t they?

TURGENEV   Yes.

BELINSKY   Good. Well, I’ve seen it now. Let’s walk back to where I saw that red-and-white dressing gown in the window.

TURGENEV   It was expensive.

BELINSKY   I only want to look at it.

TURGENEV   I’m sorry about … you know … going off to London like that.

BELINSKY   It’s all right. (He coughs painfully.)

TURGENEV   Are you getting tired? You wait here, I’ll go to the cab rank.

BELINSKY   I could write amazing things in a dressing gown like that.

Turgenev leaves.

SEPTEMBER   1847

Belinsky recovers. A chandelier descends into view. Belinsky looks at it.

Herzen’s voice makes him turn, as the stage—the room—-fills simultaneously from different directions. Turgenev is unwrapping a shopping parcel. Natalie has a bag of toys and books from a shop. MADAME HAAG, who is Herzen’s mother and in her fifties, is in charge of Sasha and Kolya, who is technically aged four. Sasha is ‘speaking’ face-to-face with Kolya, saying ‘Kol-ya, Kol-ya’ with extra enunciation. Kolya has a spinning top. GEORGE HERWEGH, aged thirty, a beautiful young man with a feminine delicacy notwithstanding luxuriant facial hair and beard, lies on a chaise, romantically exhausted, having his brow dabbed with cologne by EMMA, his wife, who is blonde and handsome rather than pretty. NICHOLAS SAZONOV, aged thirty-five, a gentleman down on his luck, is in sympathetic attendance. A Nurse appears and involves herself with Madame and the two children. There is a SERVANT, a footman-valet, making himself useful as a waiter. In their dress, Herzen and Natalie have altered strikingly, transformed into Parisians. Herzen’s previously combed-back hair and ‘Russian’ beard have been stylishly barbered. In the first part of the scene, there are separate conversations going on. They take turns to occupy the vocal foreground, but they are all continuous.

HERZEN   You always look at my chandelier.

TURGENEV   (about the parcel) Can we see it? …

SASHA   Kol-ya … Kol-ya …

HERZEN   … there’s something about that chandelier …

BELINSKY   No … I was just …

HERZEN   … it makes my Russian friends uneasy. It says, ‘Herzen is our first bourgeois worthy of the name! What a loss to the intelligentsia!’

The Servant offers a tray of titbits to Mother with an aristocratic assurance.

SERVANT   Madame … may one tempt you?

MOTHER   No …

SERVANT   Of course. Perhaps later.

The Servant offers his tray here and there, then leaves.

NATALIE   Vissarion, look … look what I found in the toy shop …

SASHA   Can I see?

MOTHER   It’s not for you, you’ve got toys of your own, too many.

Natalie is delayed by Mother.

MOTHER   (cont.) (upset) I can’t get used to your servant’s manner.

NATALIE   Jean-Marie? But he has beautiful manners, Granny.

MOTHER   That’s what I mean—he behaves as if he’s on equal terms, he makes conversation …

Turgenev reveals, from its tissue paper, a flamboyant silk robe with a large red design on white. He puts it on.

TURGENEV   Yes … yes, very nice. You think you know somebody, and then it turns out you don’t.

BELINSKY   (embarrassed) When I said Paris was a swamp of bourgeois greed and vulgarity, I meant apart from my dressing gown.

NATALIE   It’s beautiful, you were right to get it. (showing her shopping) Now, see here, look—you can’t go home without something for your daughter …

BELINSKY   Thank you …

SASHA   Look, Kolya …

NATALIE   Leave it alone! Come on, out you go … (to Nurse) Prenez les enfants …

SASHA   (to Belinsky) They’re all girls’ things.

BELINSKY   Yes … I had a little boy, but he died.

MOTHER   Come on, my lamb, let’s go and see Tata … come, Sasha … a big boy like you, you want to play all the time …

HERZEN   Oh, let him be a child, Maman.

Turgenev takes off the dressing gown. Natalie takes it and wraps it loosely.

NATALIE   (to Turgenev) You’ve been in London?

TURGENEV   Just for a week.

NATALIE   Don’t be mysterious.

TURGENEV   I’m not. Some friends of mine, the Viardots …

NATALIE   You went to hear Pauline Viardot sing?

TURGENEV   I wanted to see London.

NATALIE   (laughs) All right, then, tell me what London is like.

TURGENEV   Very foggy. Streets full of bulldogs …

Meanwhile, Mother, Sasha and Kolya negotiate their way out with the Nurse. Kolya leaves his top behind.

They encounter MICHAEL BAKUNIN entering. He is thirty-five, grandly bohemian. He greets Mother, kisses the children, and helps himself to a glass from the Servant’s salver.

BAKUNIN   The Russians are here! (He kisses Natalie’s hand.) Natalie.

HERZEN   Bakunin. Who’s with you?

BAKUNIN   Annenkov and Botkin. We kept our cab—they’ve gone for two more.

NATALIE   Good—we’re all going to the station.

BAKUNIN   Sazonov! Mon frère! (confidentially) The green canary flies tonight—ten o’clock—usual place—pass it on.

SAZONOV   I told you.

BAKUNIN   (to George and Emma) I knew George was here. I could smell eau de cologne in the street. You’re supposed to drink it, you know, that’s the whole thing about German water—(to Belinsky) You didn’t waste your time in Salzbrunn dabbing it behind your ears, I hope. Turgenev! (He draws Turgenev aside.) This is the last thing I’ll ever ask of you.

TURGENEV   No.

BELINSKY   Is it time to go?

HERZEN   Plenty of time.

BAKUNIN   Belinsky!—Herzen says your letter to Gogol is a work of genius, he calls it your testament.

BELINSKY   That doesn’t sound too hopeful.

BAKUNIN   Listen, why go back to Russia? The Third Section’s got a cell all ready for you.

NATALIE   Stop it!

BAKUNIN   Bring your wife and daughter to Paris. Think of it—you could publish free of censorship.

BELINSKY   That’s enough to put anyone off.

BAKUNIN   What are you talking about? You could publish your letter to Gogol, and everyone would read it.

BELINSKY   It wouldn’t mean anything … in this din of hacks and famous names … filling their columns every day with their bellowing and bleating and honking … it’s like a zoo where the seals throw fish to the public. None of it seems serious. At home the public look to writers as their real leaders. The title of poet or novelist really counts with us. Writers here, they think they’re enjoying success. They don’t know what success is. You have to be a writer in Russia, even one without much talent, even a critic … My articles get cut by the censor, but a week before the Contemporary comes out, students hang around Smirdin’s bookshop asking if it’s arrived yet … and then they pick up every echo the censor missed, and discuss it half the night and pass copies around … If the writers here only knew, they’d pack their bags for Moscow and St Petersburg.

He is met with silence. Then Bakunin embraces him, and Herzen, mopping his eyes, does likewise.

EMMA   Sprecht Deutsch, bitte! [Speak German, please!]

Herzen, still moved, raises his glass to the room. The Russians soberly raise their glasses, toasting.

HERZEN   Russia. We know. They don’t. But they’ll find out.

The Russians drink the toast.

BAKUNIN   And I never said goodbye to you when I left.

BELINSKY   We weren’t speaking.

BAKUNIN   Ah—philosophy! Great days!

NATALIE   (to Belinsky) Now, what about your wife?

BELINSKY   Cambric handkerchiefs.

NATALIE   That’s not very romantic.

BELINSKY   Well, she’s not.

NATALIE   Shame on you.

BELINSKY   She’s a schoolteacher.

NATALIE   What’s that got to do with it?

BELINSKY   Nothing.

BAKUNIN   (to Belinsky) Well, I’ll see you soon in St Petersburg.

HERZEN   How can you go home? You’ve been sentenced in absentia for not going home when they summoned you.

BAKUNIN YOU   forget about the revolution.

HERZEN   What revolution?

BAKUNIN   The Russian revolution.

HERZEN   I’m sorry, I haven’t seen a paper today.

BAKUNIN   The Tsar and all his works will be gone within a year, or two at the most.

SAZONOV   (emotionally) We were children of the Decembrists. (to Herzen) When you were arrested, by some miracle they overlooked me and Ketscher.

HERZEN   This is not a sensible conversation. There will have to be a European revolution first, and there’s no sign of it. There’s no movement among the people here. The opposition has no faith in itself. Six months ago meeting Ledru-Rollin or Louis Blanc in a café felt like being a cadet talking to veterans. Their superior condescension to a Russian seemed only proper. What had we got to offer? Belinsky’s articles and Granovsky’s lectures on history. But these celebrities of the left spend their time writing tomorrow’s headlines and hoping that someone else will make the news to go with them. And don’t they know what’s good for us! Virtue by decree. They’re building prisons out of the stones of the Bastille. There’s no country in the world that has shed more blood for liberty and understands it less. I’m going to Italy.

BAKUNIN   (excitedly) Forget about the French. Polish independence is the only revolutionary spark in Europe. I’ve been here six years and I know what I’m talking about. I’m in the market for a hundred rifles, by the way, payment in cash.

Sazonov shushes him urgently. The Servant has entered. He whispers to Bakunin.

BAKUNIN   (cont.) My cabbie wants to go home. Can you lend me five francs?

HERZEN   No. You should have walked.

TURGENEV   I’ll do it.

Turgenev gives five francs to the Servant, who leaves.

BELINSKY   Isn’t it time to go?

SAZONOV   (to Belinsky) It’s a shame. With your abilities, you could have done more, instead of wasting your time in Russia.

HERZEN   (to Sazonov) And do tell us, what have you done? You don’t think discussing the borders of Poland with the émigrés every day in the Café Lamblin is doing something?—

SAZONOV   Hold on, hold on, you forget our situation.

HERZEN   What situation? You’ve lived in freedom all these years, playing statesmen-in-waiting and calling yourselves pink budgerigars—

SAZONOV   (furiously) Who told you about the—

HERZEN   You did.

SAZONOV   (bursting into tears) I knew I wasn’t to be trusted!

EMMA   Parlez français, s’il vous plaît!

BAKUNIN   (comforting Sazonov with a hug) I trust you.

NATALIE   Is George all right?

HERZEN   I never saw a man more all right.

Natalie goes to George and Emma.

BAKUNIN   (to Herzen) Don’t be deceived by George Herwegh. He got expelled from Saxony for political activity.

HERZEN   Activity? George?

BAKUNIN   And he’s got what every revolutionary needs, a rich wife.

HERZEN   Nick Ogarev knew him when they were together in Paris … Nick gave me a letter …

BAKUNIN   What’s more, she’ll do anything for him. I once heard Marx explaining economic relations to George for an hour while Emma rubbed his feet.

HERZEN   Why?

BAKUNIN   He said his feet were cold … other parts of him, it seems, are kept warm by the Contesse d’Agoult.

NATALIE   (to Emma) Continuez, continuez …

HERZEN   (offended) I won’t have tittle-tattle about my friends in my house … and anyway, you don’t know it’s true.

BAKUNIN   (laughs) You’re right—maybe he’s only boasting.

Emma continues to smooth George’s brow.

NATALIE   (arriving) Ah, that’s what love should be!

BAKUNIN   Love is a mystery, and woman’s privilege is to be the priestess of the mystery, vestal of the sacred flame.

HERZEN   Am I being reproached because I don’t let you mother me?

NATALIE   I don’t reproach you, Alexander, I only say it’s a fine thing to see.

HERZEN   What is? George having the vapours?

NATALIE   No … a woman’s love that transcends egoism.

HERZEN   Love without egoism cheats women of equality and independence, not to mention any other … satisfaction.

BAKUNIN   He’s right, madame!

HERZEN   But you just said the opposite!

BAKUNIN   (unabashed) He’s right again!

GEORGE   (in German) Emma, Emma …

EMMA   Was ist denn, mein Herz? [What is it, my precious?]

GEORGE   Weiss ich nicht … Warum machst du nicht weiter? [I don’t know … Why have you stopped?]

Emma resumes stroking his brow.

NATALIE   (privately to Herzen) You’re being unkind.

HERZEN   I like George, but I’d feel ridiculous.

NATALIE   (angrily) Idealised love doesn’t mean a lack of … or perhaps you think it does?

HERZEN   What’s this?

NATALIE   It’s despicable to imply George doesn’t … satisfy a woman …

HERZEN   (stung) I’m sure he does—I’m told she’s a countess.

NATALIE   I see. Well, if it’s only a countess …

She leaves the room abruptly, leaving Herzen baffled. Belinsky is now on his knees on the floor, puzzling over some small flat wooden shapes, one of the toys. Bakunin loudly calls for attention.

BAKUNIN   My friends! Comrades! I give you a toast! The liberty of each, for the equality of all!

There is a mild, dutiful attempt to repeat the toast.

HERZEN   What does that mean? It doesn’t mean anything.

BAKUNIN   I am not free unless you, too, are free!

HERZEN   That’s nonsense. You were free when I was locked up.

BAKUNIN   Freedom is a state of mind.

HERZEN   No, it’s a state of not being locked up … of having a passport … I am devoted to you, Bakunin, I delight in the fanfare, no, the funfair of your pronouncements, I would name my child for you, but equally I would name you for my child, because everything which is simple you make difficult and everything difficult simple. You’ve made yourself a European reputation by a kind of revolutionary word-music from which it is impossible to extract an ounce of meaning, let alone a political idea, let alone a course of action. What freedom means is being allowed to sing in my bath as loudly as will not interfere with my neighbour’s freedom to sing a different tune in his. But above all, let my neighbour and I be free to join or not to join the revolutionary opera, the state orchestra, the Committee of Public Harmony …

TURGENEV   This is a metaphor, is it?

HERZEN   Not necessarily.

SAZONOV   An orchestra is a very good metaphor. There is no contradiction between individual freedom and duty to the collective—

HERZEN   I’d like to be there when they play.

SAZONOV   —because being in the orchestra is the individual right.

HERZEN   We all missed it, Plato, Rousseau, Saint-Simon, me …

BAKUNIN   The mistake is to put ideas before action. Act first! The ideas will follow, and if not—well, it’s progress.

HERZEN   Belinsky—save me from this madness!

BELINSKY   I can’t fit the pieces together to make a square—it’s a children’s puzzle, and I can’t do it …

TURGENEV   Perhaps it’s a circle.

Natalie enters and hurries to Herzen, making it up with him.

NATALIE   Alexander …?

Herzen embraces her.

GEORGE   Mir geht es besser. [I feel better.]

BELINSKY   Turgenev’s got a point …

EMMA   Georg geht es besser! [George is feeling better!]

The dialogues which follow are written to be ‘wasted’. They are spoken on top of each other, to make a continuum of word-noise.

BELINSKY   Our problem is feudalism and serfdom. What have these Western models got to do with us? We’re so big and backward!

TURGENEV   (to Belinsky) My mother’s estate is ten times the size of Fourier’s model society.

BELINSKY   I’m sick of Utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them.

Simultaneously with the above dialogue:

BAKUNIN   The Poles should go in with the Slavs. Nationalism is the only movement that’s reached a revolutionary stage. A rising of all the Slav nations! Let me finish! Three necessary conditions—break up the Austrian Empire—politicise the peasants—organise the working class!

SAZONOV   (talking over Bakunin) Some of the Poles think you’re a Tsarist agent. The French despise the Germans, the Germans distrust the French, the Austrians can’t agree with the Italians, the Italians can’t agree among themselves … but everybody hates the Russians.

Simultaneously with the above, the Servant enters to talk to Herzen.

HERZEN   (to George) Du riechst wie eine ganze Parfumerie. [You smell like a perfume shop.]

GEORGE   Wir haben der Welt Eau de Cologne und Goethe geschenkt. [Eau de cologne and Goethe, we gave to the world.]

SERVANT   (to Herzen) Il y a deux messieurs en bas, Monsieur le Baron, qui retiennent deux fiacres. [There’s two gentlemen downstairs, Baron, keeping on two cabs.]

HERZEN   Allez les aider à descendre leurs baggages. [Please help with the luggage.]

SERVANT   Hélas, c’est mon moment de repos—c’est l’heure du café. [It’s my time to go to the café, alas.]

HERZEN   Bien. C’est entendu. [Of course. I quite understand.]

SERVANT   Merci, Monsieur le Baron. [Thank you, Baron.]

The Servant leaves.

NATALIE   (talking over the above) And Heine!

EMMA   Und Herwegh!

NATALIE   Yes! Yes!

EMMA   Du bist so bescheiden und grosszuegig. Schreibst du bald ein neues Gedicht? [You’re so modest and generous. Are you going to write a new poem soon?]

GEORGE   Ich hasse solche Fragen! [I hate you asking me that!]

EMMA   Verzeihg mir—sonst weine ich. [Forgive me—don’t make me cry!]

Kolya enters in search of his top. All the conversations cut off into silence simultaneously, but ‘continue.’

Turgenev and Belinsky are finally interrupted by Herzen (see reprise at end of Act One), signalling a general break-up and exodus, still ‘silent.’

Turgenev and Sazonov help Belinsky with his valise and parcels.

Kolya is left alone.

There is distant thunder, which Kolya doesn’t hear. Then there is a roll of thunder nearer. Kolya looks around, aware of something.

There is the growing sound of a roaring multitude, of rifle fire, shouting, singing, drumming … and a female voice, representing the famous actress Rachel, singing ‘The Marseillaise.’

Red banners and the Tricolour.

Natalie enters, picks up Kolya and takes him out.

[The monarchy of Louis Philippe fell on 24 February 1848.]

MARCH 1848

Exterior (Place de la Concorde).

[Herzen’s memoirs: These were the happiest days of Bakunin’s life.]

Bakunin flourishes a huge red banner on a pole. He has just encountered KARL MARX, aged thirty. Marx is carrying a yellow-wrapped book, The Communist Manifesto. Turgenev is gazing around in astonishment. A pigeon evidently excretes onto his head. He reacts.

BAKUNIN   Marx! Who’d have thought it?!

MARX   It was bound to happen. I was expecting it.

BAKUNIN   Why didn’t you tell me? All our lives we’ll remember where we were when France became a republic again!

MARX   I was in Brussels, waiting for the first copy of The Communist Manifesto to come from the printer …

BAKUNIN   I was in Brussels, too, waiting for La Réforme to arrive with my open letter to the French government …

TURGENEV   No! I was in Brussels! … The Barber of Seville … Can I have a look?

Marx gives him the book.

BAKUNIN   I’ve been on my feet twenty hours a day—

MARX   Minister Flocon said that with three hundred more like you …

BAKUNIN   … preaching rebellion, destruction …

MARX   … France would be ungovernable.

BAKUNIN   I’ve been living in barracks with the Republican Guard. You won’t believe this, but it’s the first time I’ve actually met anyone from the working class.

MARX   Really? What are they like?

BAKUNIN   I’ve never come across such nobility.

TURGENEV   (reading) ‘A ghost is going round Europe—the ghost of Communism!’

BAKUNIN   A Polish National Committee has already been set up in Prussian Poland to plan the invasion of Russia. I’ve got to get there. Turgenev, this is the last thing I’ll ever ask of you—

TURGENEV   Ask Flocon.

BAKUNIN   You think the Provisional Government will give me the money to go to Poland?

TURGENEV   I’m certain of it.

MARX   (to Turgenev) You’re a writer. Do you think there’s something funny about ‘the ghost of Communism’? I don’t want it to sound as if Communism is dead.

Herwegh enters in red, black and gold military uniform.

BAKUNIN   Herwegh!

MARX   (to Turgenev) Do you know English?

TURGENEV   Fairly well. Let me see … (in ‘English’) ‘A ghost … a phantom is walking around Europe …’

HERWEGH   (somewhat embarrassed) What do you think?

BAKUNIN   Nice. Are you a mason?

HERWEGH   No—I’m in command of a brigade of German Democratic Exiles. We’re going to march on Baden!

BAKUNIN   March all the way to Germany?

HERWEGH   No, no, we’re going to the frontier by train—I’ve got six hundred tickets.

TURGENEV   Did Flocon give you the money?

HERWEGH   Yes, how did you know?

BAKUNIN   Wonderful!

HERWEGH   It was Emma’s idea.

TURGENEV   I knew you weren’t really a poet. Only a poet. Have you had any military experience?

HERWEGH   Emma says whether you’re a poet or a revolutionary, genius is genius.

BAKUNIN   She’s right. Look at Byron.

HERWEGH   Byron wrote far too much, actually.

Turgenev returns to pondering the book. Emma enters. She, too, is in military mode, with a red, black and gold cockade. She is accompanied by a small shop boy in the livery of a fashionable store, who is burdened with elegantly wrapped parcels. He may have a small pushcart in the same livery.

MARX   (intervening sternly) Just a moment, Herwegh!

Then Marx sees Emma.

EMMA   I’ve got provisions for the march, my angel—the most wonderful little meat pasties from Chevet, and a turkey stuffed with truffles—

MARX   Scoundrel!

EMMA   He’s got to eat, Karl. Come with us to the Champs Élysées—George is going to review the troops!

Marx is now beside himself with rage. He pursues the Herweghs out.

MARX   Adventurist! By what right do you interfere in the economic struggle with this diversionary folly?

EMMA   Don’t take any notice of him, darling.

MARX   Victory in Europe will be decided between the proletariat and the bourgeoisie!—only ceaseless propaganda and agitation …

The shop boy follows Marx and the Herweghs out.

TURGENEV   (thoughtfully) ‘A spook … a spectre …’

BAKUNIN   (transported) This is what it was all for, from the beginning … studying Kant, Schelling, Fichte … with Stankevich and Belinsky … with you in Berlin, do you remember, you in your lilac waistcoat, I in my green, walking down Unter den Linden talking furiously about the spirit of history …

TURGENEV   (jogged) ‘A spirit … a spirit is haunting Europe …’

BAKUNIN   We were on a journey to this moment. Revolution is the Absolute we pursued at Premukhino, the Universal which contains all the opposites and resolves them. It’s where we were always going.

TURGENEV   (taps the book, triumphantly satisfied) ‘A hobgoblin is stalking around Europe—the hobgoblin of Communism!’

He closes the book, looks up and ‘shoots’ twice.

Natalie and NATALIE (NATASHA) TUCHKOV, aged nineteen, enter rapidly in high spirits. Natasha’s hair is wet. Natalie has a tricolour wrapped round her as a shawl.

NATALIE   Vive la République! Vive la République!

The two women have entered the next scene.

15 MAY 1848

A different apartment, near the newly completed Arc de Triomphe. Herzen is with Kolya, holding Kolya’s palms to his—Herzen’s—face.

HERZEN   Vive la République, Kol-ya! (to Natalie) Where did you get that?

NATASHA   Everybody’s wearing them!

Natalie and Natasha are in a state of ecstatic, romantic friendship in which everything is joyous or hilarious or soulful.

NATALIE   It’s a present for you from Natasha.

HERZEN   Well … thank you.

Natalie removes the ‘shawl’ and presents it to Herzen, leaving herself déshabillée but only her shoulders and arms actually bare.

HERZEN   (cont.) But you’ve got no clothes on.

NATASHA   I’m wearing them!

NATALIE   Poor darling, she arrived wet through, so I said—

NATASHA   ‘Take off your clothes! At once!’

NATALIE   I made her put on my dress.

HERZEN   Of course. I had no idea you had only one dress. In fact, my impression was that you had a dress shop …

NATALIE   But I want her to smell of me, and I want to smell of her—

NATASHA   You smell like camellias …

Natalie inhales rapturously from Natasha’s hair.

NATALIE   Russia!

Mother enters.

MOTHER   Natalie!—suppose the servant came in … ! (taking Kolya) Look at your terrible mother … If this is what goes on in a republic … (to Natalie) There’s a letter for you.

NATASHA   It’s from me!

Natalie and Natasha embrace. Herzen drapes the flag over Natalie as a manservant, BENOIT, opens the door to admit Sazonov with an air of condescension.

SAZONOV   Citoyens!—you’re back at last …

Natalie and Natasha dash out past Sazonov, who is thrown off his stride. Benoit follows the women out.

SAZONOV   (cont.) And who was the young …?

HERZEN   (lightly) My wife has fallen in love … We met the family in Rome, they’re neighbours of Ogarev back home.

Mother accepts Sazonov’s bow.

MOTHER   We arrived back ten days ago. (to Kolya) Come on, it’s time for your and Tata’s tea …

HERZEN   Maman, ask Benoit to post this for me, please …

He puts his written sheets into the prepared envelope and seals it.

MOTHER   The Marquis? All right, but he’s grander than the last one—the last one spoke, the new one always seems about to ask me to dance …

Mother leaves with Kolya, leaving behind Kolya’s top.

HERZEN   French servants were the biggest surprise. I knew you weren’t allowed to send them into the army or sell them … but nothing prepares you for their amazing efficiency, politeness and absolute lack of calling.

SAZONOV   Forget France! Don’t you see?—our time has come. The Russian government is in an impasse. They won’t want to be the pariahs of Europe. They’ll have to make a gesture.

HERZEN   Oh, they will! They’ll cancel all leave for the Cossacks, Tsar Nicholas will be the last righteous ruler in a wilderness of cowards and constitutions.

SAZONOV   No, history is being made! Russia is going to need a liberal cultured ministry, men with European experience. Have you thought of that?

HERZEN   I promise you, I never have.

SAZONOV   Well, the government will have to appeal to us.

HERZEN   You and me?

SAZONOV   Well, people of our circle.

HERZEN   (laughs) Which ministry do you fancy?

SAZONOV   You can laugh … but the stage is now bigger than your little articles for the Contemporary.

HERZEN   Nevertheless, the workers are marching on the National Assembly this morning … so let’s see if the elected government acts like republicans …

There is a transition to some hours later, with a sound of rioting.

Herzen enters tired and angry. Turgenev is shown in by Benoit.

HERZEN   (cont.) (to Benoit) Du vin. [Wine.]

Benoit leaves.

HERZEN   (cont.) So, what do you think now of your democratic republic?

TURGENEV   Mine? I’m a tourist like you. You should be asking what the Parisians thought of it … and the remarkable thing is, you couldn’t tell. It was as if they’d bought tickets and were interested to see how it would turn out. The lemonade and cigar sellers circulated, very content, like fishermen hauling in a good catch. The National Guard waited to see which way it was going, and then set about the mob.

HERZEN   The mob? Workers marching behind their banners.

TURGENEV   Invading the National Assembly to demand the self-abolition of an elected parliament which happens to be not to their taste.

HERZEN   Turgenev!—you talk to me of taste? A republic behaving like the monarchy it displaced is not a failure of aesthetics. This is a republic by superstition only, by incantation. Vive la République! But it turns out the Republic makes revolution unnecessary and, in fact, undesirable. Power is not to be shared with the ignoramuses who built the barricades. They’re too poor to have a voice.

TURGENEV   It was an insurrection, and order has triumphed.

HERZEN   Well, don’t imagine today was the end. When the lid blows off this kettle, it’ll take the kitchen with it. All your civilised pursuits and refinements which you call the triumph of order will be firewood and pisspots once the workers kick down the doors and come into their kingdom. Do I regret it? Yes, I regret it. But we’ve enjoyed the feast, we can’t complain when the waiter says, ‘L’addition, messieurs!’

TURGENEV   Goodness me … the sins of the Second Republic won’t bear the weight of this revenge drama of cooks and waiters. The Provisional Government promised elections. Elections took place. Nine million Frenchmen voted for the first time. Well, they voted for royalists, rentiers, lawyers … and a rump of socialists for the rest to kick. You have a complaint? A coup d’état by the organised workers, and a salutary period of Terror, would put that right. You could be Minister of Paradox, with special responsibility for Irony. Herzen … Herzen! For all the venality you see around you, France is still the highest reach of civilisation.

Natalie and Natasha enter with George, who is shorn of his beard, moustache and dignity.

HERZEN   (puzzled) Yes …?

TURGENEV   It’s Herwegh, back from Germany.

Benoit follows with glasses of wine.

HERZEN   Ach, mein armer Freund … [Oh, my dear fellow … ]

NATALIE   There was a price on his head!

Herzen embraces George, who bursts into tears.

HERZEN   Trink einen Schluck Wein. Du bist ein Held! [Take some wine. You’re a hero!]

Herzen gives a glass to George. Turgenev, Natasha and Natalie take glasses from the salver.

HERZEN   (cont.) (toasting) Auf die Revolution in Deutschland! [To the revolution in Germany!]

GEORGE   Dankeschoen, danke … [Thank you, thank you … ] (toasting) Auf die Russische Revolution … und auf die Freundschaft! [To the Russian revolution … and to friendship!]

NATALIE   To friendship!

NATASHA   And love!

TURGENEV   (toasting) Vive la République!

HERZEN   (toasting) A bas les bourgeois! Vive le prolétariat!

Benoit, leaving, registers pained reproach, just perceptibly.

HERZEN   (cont.) Mille pardons, Benoit.

George weeps afresh. Natalie comforts him. There is a transition to a month later.

JUNE 1848

A ‘BLUE BLOUSE,’ an old workman in tattered clothes, stands in the room, a desperate motionless figure, invisible to Natalie and Natasha who, innocently embraced, recline on the couch, with George in attendance moping.

GEORGE   Everybody’s being horrible about me. They say I hid in a ditch as soon as the enemy came in sight. You don’t believe it, do you?

NATALIE   Of course we don’t.

NATASHA   Of course not.

NATALIE   Nor does Emma. Well, she was there.

GEORGE   She pushed me into it.

NATALIE   The ditch?

GEORGE   No, the whole business … chairman of the German democrats in exile, and suddenly I was Napoleon at Austerlitz.

NATASHA   Waterloo. Oh, sorry … but you looked so defeated.

GEORGE   Emma still has faith in me. Perhaps she’ll invade Poland. She was in love with me before she met me. So were half the women in Germany. My book of poems went through six editions. I met the King. Then I met Emma.

NATALIE   And she’s the one who got you!

GEORGE   I wish I’d listened to Marx.

NATALIE   Marx? Why?

GEORGE   He tried to talk me out of it.

NATALIE   (amazed) Marrying Emma?

GEORGE   No, the Legion of German Democrats.

NATALIE   Oh … !

GEORGE   Now he’s crowing over my humiliation … after all I’ve done for him, taking him to all the best houses, introducing him at Marie d’Agoult’s salon …

NATASHA   The countess?

GEORGE   Yes, the writer, one of my admirers.

NATALIE   And you were one of hers, surely … I admire her, too. When she fell in love with Liszt, she followed her heart. Everything had to give way to love—reputation, society, husband, children … just like George Sand and Chopin! … Do you play?

GEORGE   A little. I compose a bit, too. Emma says if I practised, Chopin and Liszt better watch out.

NATASHA   Shto praiskhódit? [What’s this?]

NATALIE   (to Natasha) George looks like Onegin ought to look, don’t you think? (Natalie jumps up and pulls George by the hand.) Come on, then!

Herzen enters.

NATALIE   (cont.) George is going to play for us!

There is a distant sound of riot, and a transition. Herzen and the Blue Blouse remain.

NATASHA   (to Natalie, warningly) Natalie.

NATALIE   (dissembling) What?

NATASHA   You haven’t got a piano.

NATALIE   (brazenly) Well?

The two women embrace hilariously and take George out.

Herzen sees the Blue Blouse.

HERZEN   What do you want? Bread? I’m afraid bread got left out of the theory. We are bookish people, with bookish solutions. Prose is our strong point, prose and abstraction. But everything is going beautifully. Last time—in 1789—there was a misunderstanding. We thought we had discovered that social progress was a science like everything else. The First Republic was to have been the embodiment of morality and justice as a rational enterprise. The result was, admittedly, a bitter blow. But now there’s a completely new idea. History itself is the main character of the drama, and also its author. We are all in the story, which ends with universal bliss. Perhaps not for you. Perhaps not for your children. But universal bliss, you can put your shirt on it, which, I see, you have. Your personal sacrifice, the sacrifice of countless others on History’s slaughter-bench, all the apparent crimes and lunacies of the hour, which to you may seem irrational, are part of a much much bigger story which you probably aren’t in the mood for—let’s just say that this time, as luck would have it, you’re the zig and they’re the zag.

The noise of insurrection increases.

21 JUNE 1848

Street.

[From Turgenev’s Literary Reminiscences: ‘At first there was nothing particular that I could see … But the farther I went the more did the appearance of the boulevard change. Carriages became less frequent, the omnibuses disappeared completely; the shops and cafés were being hastily closed … there were many fewer people in the street. On the other hand, all the windows of the houses were open, and a great number of people, mostly women, children, maids and nursemaids, were crowded in the doorways. They were all talking, laughing, not shouting but calling to one another, looking round, waving their hands—as though in expectation of some pageant. A light-hearted, festive curiosity seemed to have taken possession of people. Ribbons of many colours, kerchiefs, caps, white, pink, blue dresses shimmered and glittered, rose and rustled in the light summer breeze … The uneven line of the barricade, about eight feet high, came into sight. In the middle of it, surrounded by other tricolour and gold-embroidered banners, a small red flag fluttered with its ominous pointed tongue … I moved a little nearer. The space just in front of the barricade was almost deserted, only a few men walking to and fro in the roadway. The workers exchanged jokes with the spectators in the street who came up to them … One of them, with a white soldier’s sword-belt round his waist, held out an uncorked bottle and a half-filled glass to them, as if inviting them to come up and have a drink; another, next to him, with a double-barrelled gun over his shoulder, yelled in a drawn-out voice, “Long live the democratic and socialist republic!” Beside him stood a black-haired woman in a striped dress, also with a sword-belt and a revolver thrust in it; she alone did not laugh … Meanwhile the sound of drums drew nearer and grew louder …’]

Natalie, carrying Kolya, the Nurse pushing a stroller containing a three-year-old (TATA), as it were, and Mother holding Sasha’s hand, hurry across the street. Sasha carries a tricolour on a pole, which encumbers him.

NATALIE   Oh God—oh God—quickly … There were omnibuses full of corpses.

MOTHER   You must be calm for the children …

Herzen meets them and takes Kolya.

HERZEN   (to Sasha) Go with Mama. What are you doing with that?

SASHA   Benoit says to wave it for the Garde Mobile!

HERZEN   Go inside.

NATALIE   Did you see?

HERZEN   Yes.

NATALIE   The omnibuses?

HERZEN   Yes.

Rachel’s voice is heard again … but ‘The Marseillaise’ is drowned out in volleys of rifle fire.

27 JUNE 1848

There is a transition to the interior, with cheerful music heard from the street.

Kolya remains with Herzen and sits on the floor with his top. Turgenev is with Herzen. Benoit delivers some letters to Herzen on a salver and leaves.

TURGENEV   Have you been out? It’s amazing how life settles back. The theatres are open. There’s carriages in the streets again, and ladies and gentlemen inspecting the ruins as if they were in Rome. To think it was only on Friday morning the laundress who brought my washing said, ‘It’s started!’ And then four days shut away in this awful heat, listening to the guns, knowing what must be happening and helpless to do anything … oh, that was torture.

HERZEN   But with clean laundry.

TURGENEV   I trust if we’re going to have this conversation—

HERZEN   I didn’t invite conversation. If I were you, I’d take avoiding action. These four days could make one hate for a decade.

TURGENEV   I’ll go, then. (Pause.) But allow me to express the opinion that somebody must do your laundry, too.

HERZEN   Letter from Granovsky! Just wait till he hears! (He opens the letter.) All you liberals are splashed with blood no matter how you tried to keep your distance. Yes, I have a laundress, possibly several, how would I know? The whole point of the serving class is that the rest of us, the fortunate minority, can concentrate on our higher destinies. Intellectuals must be allowed to think, poets to dream, landowners to own land, dandies to perfect their cravats. It’s a kind of cannibalism. The uninvited are necessary to the feast. I’m not a sentimental moralist. Nature, too, is merciless. So long as a man thinks it’s the natural order of things for him to be eaten and for another to eat, then who should regret the death of the old order if not we who write our stories or go to the opera while others do our laundry? But once people realise the arrangement is completely artificial, the game is up. I take comfort in this catastrophe. The dead have exposed the republican lie. It’s government by slogan for the sake of power, and if anyone objects, there’s always the police. The police are the realists in a pseudo-democracy. From one regime to the next, power passes down the system until it puts its thumbprint on every policeman’s forehead like the dab of holy oil at an emperor’s coronation. The conservatives can’t keep the smiles off their faces, now they know the whole thing was a confidence trick. The liberals wanted a republic for their own cultivated circle. Outside it they’re conservatives. They cheered on Cavaignac’s butchers while wringing their hands with their fingers crossed. Well, now we know what the reactionaries have always known: liberty, equality and fraternity are like three rotten apples in their barrel of privilege, even a pip could prove fatal—from now on it’s all or nothing, no quarter, no mercy.

TURGENEV   (mildly) You sound like Belinsky, adjusting some poet’s reputation … Do you think there’s something Russian about taking everything to extremes?

HERZEN   No doubt. Single-minded conviction is a quality of youth, and Russia is young. (pointedly) Compromise, prevarication, the ability to hold two irreconcilable beliefs, both with ironic detachment—these are ancient European arts, and a Russian who finds them irresistible is, I would say, exceptional.

TURGENEV   (disingenuously) How interesting that you should say that. Because I myself, you see—

Herzen, despite himself, laughs, and Turgenev laughs with him, but almost at once his laughter turns to anger.

TURGENEV   (cont.) Putting yourself in another’s place is a proper modesty, and yes, it takes centuries to learn it. Impatience, pig-headed stubbornness to the point of destruction—yes, these are things to be forgiven in the young, who lack the imagination to see that almost nothing in this life holds still, everything is moving and changing—

HERZEN   (with Granovsky’s letter, cries out) Who is this Moloch who eats his children?

TURGENEV   Yes, and your taste for melodramatic, rhetorical—

HERZEN   Belinsky’s dead.

TURGENEV   No, no … oh, no, no, no … No! … No more blather, please. Blather, blather, blather. Enough.

Natalie enters and goes to Herzen.

NATALIE   Alexander …?

SEPTEMBER 1847 (REPRISE)

Herzen, Natalie, Turgenev and Kolya remain, their positions corresponding to the reprised scene which now reassembles itself at the point of Natalie’s re-entrance.

GEORGE   Mir geht es besser. [I feel better.]

BELINSKY   Turgenev’s got a point.

EMMA   Georg geht es besser. [George is feeling better!]

BELINSKY   Our problem is feudalism and serfdom.

The rest of the scene now repeats itself with the difference that instead of the general babel which ensued, the conversation between Belinsky and Turgenev is now ‘protected,’ with the other conversations virtually mimed. At the point where the babel went silent before, nothing now alters.

BELINSKY   (cont.) What have these theoretical models got to do with us? We’re so big and backward!

TURGENEV   My mother’s estate is ten times the size of Fourier’s model society.

BELINSKY   I’m sick of Utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them. I’d trade the lot for one practical difference that owes nothing to anybody’s ideal society, one commonsensical action that puts right an injury to one person. Do you know what I like to do best when I’m at home?—watch them build the railway station in St Petersburg. My heart lifts to see the tracks going down. In a year or two, friends and families, lovers, letters, will be speeding to Moscow and back. Life will be altered. The poetry of practical gesture. Something unknown to literary criticism! I’m sick of everything I’ve ever done. Sick of it and from it. I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life. No woman had a more fervent or steadfast adorer. I picked up every handkerchief she let fall, lace, linen, snot rag, it made no difference. Every writer dead or alive was writing for me personally, to transport me, insult me, make me shout for joy or tear my hair out, and I wasn’t fooled often. Your Sportsman’s Sketches are the best thing since Gogol was young, and this Dostoevsky is another if he can do it twice. People are going to be amazed by Russian writers. In literature we’re a great nation before we’re ready.

TURGENEV   You’re going round again, Captain.

HERZEN   My God! We’re going to miss it! (comforting Natalie) You’re pale. Stay here. Stay with the children.

Natalie nods.

NATALIE   (to Belinsky) I won’t come to the station. Have you got everything?

BAKUNIN   It’s not too late to change your mind.

BELINSKY   I know—it’s my motto.

Natalie embraces Belinsky. Turgenev and Sazonov help Belinsky with his valise and his parcels.

HERZEN   Don’t try to talk French. Or German. Just be helpless. Don’t get on the wrong boat.

There is a general exodus, as before.

Kolya is left alone. There are sounds of the cabs departing. There is distant thunder, which Kolya ignores. Then there is a roll of thunder nearer. Kolya looks around, aware of something. Natalie enters. She kisses Kolya on the nose, enunciating his name. He watches her mouth.

NATALIE   Kolya … Kolya …

Natalie notices Belinsky’s dressing gown. She gives a cry of dismay and runs out of the room with it.

KOLYA   (absent-mindedly) Ko’ ya … Ko’ ya. (He plays with his top.)

ACT TWO

JANUARY 1849

Paris.

George has been reading to Herzen and Natalie. Natalie sits with George at her feet. Herzen lies on the couch with a silk handkerchief over his face. The book—or booklet—is The Communist Manifesto in its yellow wrapper.

NATALIE   Why have you stopped?

George closes the book and lets it fall. Natalie smoothes George’s hair.

GEORGE   I don’t see the point.

NATALIE   He’s saying that all history up to now is the history of class struggle. And by sheer luck, Marx himself, the discoverer of this fact, is living in the very place, at the very time, when, thanks to industrialisation, these centuries of class struggle, from feudal times onwards—

GEORGE   Yes, I’ve got that.

NATALIE   Well, then. It’s all now arriving at the end of history, with the final—

GEORGE   But there’s no point if, every time you want to argue back, Karl just says, ‘Well you would think that, because as a product of your class, you can’t think anything else.’ In my opinion, that’s cheating.

NATALIE   I agree. But then I would, wouldn’t I, because—

GEORGE   You think what you are! You say, ‘Karl, I don’t agree good and evil are to be defined entirely by our economic relations,’ and Karl replies—

NATALIE   ‘Well, you would think that—’

GEORGE   ‘—because you’re not a member of the proletariat!’

Natalie and George delightedly clasp hands in mutual congratulation. Herzen removes the handkerchief from his face. Natalie continues to smooth George’s hair.

HERZEN   But Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up.

NATALIE   Alexander! I won’t have that word …

HERZEN   Sorry, middle-class.

GEORGE   It’s German genius, that’s what it is.

NATALIE   What is?

GEORGE   That if you’re a miserable exploited worker, you’re playing a vital role in a historical process that’ll put you on top as sure as omelettes was eggs. Everything’s functioning perfectly, you see! With the French geniuses, your miserable exploited no-accountness means there’s a fault in the plumbing, and they’re here to fix it because you’re too stupid to do it for yourself … So the workers have to hope the plumber knows what he’s doing and won’t cheat them. No wonder it didn’t catch on.

HERZEN   But how can Communism catch on? It asks a worker to give up his … aristocracy. A cobbler with his own last is an aristocrat compared with the worker in a factory. A minimum of control over your own life, even to make a mess of it, is something necessarily human. What do you think goes wrong with those experimental societies? It’s not the mosquitoes. It’s something human refusing to erase itself.

Still, at least Marx is an honest-to-God materialist. Those ‘Marseillaise’-singing orators of the left won’t let go of nurse. I feel sorry for them. They’re preparing for themselves a life of bewilderment and grief … because the republic they want to bring back is the last delirium of two thousand years of metaphysics … the elevation of spirit over matter … brotherhood before bread, equality by obedience, salvation through sacrifice. To save this tepid bathwater, they’ll chuck out the baby and wonder where it went. Marx gets it. We didn’t get it—or we didn’t have the courage.

NATALIE   George risked his life on the field of battle!

HERZEN   So he did. You know, now that people have started recognising you clean-shaven, you should grow a beard.

NATALIE   You’re a brute. (to George) He’s only teasing. Nobody cares about that anymore, it’s all forgotten.

HERZEN   I haven’t forgotten.

NATALIE   Stop it.

GEORGE   I don’t mind. Would you like me to grow my beard?

NATALIE   I’ve got used to you without it. What does Emma say?

GEORGE   She said I should ask you.

NATALIE   Oh! How flattering. But it’s not me who gets the tickles if you grow it back.

HERZEN   Why doesn’t Emma come with you anymore?

GEORGE   I need to have an hour or two free from family life. What an abominable institution.

HERZEN   I thought this was family life.

GEORGE   Yes, but your wife is a saint. It’s not Emma’s fault. Her father was ruined by the dialectic of history, and he blames me. … It’s very hard on Emma, losing her allowance. But what can I do? I’m a poet of revolution between revolutions.

Herzen takes up a few newly arrived letters and looks through them.

HERZEN   Write an ode to Prince Louis Napoleon on his election as President of the Republic. In a free vote, the French public renounced freedom.

GEORGE   ‘Bonaparte Plumbers, a name you can trust.’

HERZEN   How naive we were at Sokolovo that last summer in Russia, do you remember, Natalie?

NATALIE   I remember you quarrelling with everyone.

HERZEN   Arguing, yes. Because we were agreed that there was only one thing worth arguing about—France! France, the sleeping bride of revolution. What a joke. All she wanted was to be the kept woman of a bourgeois … Cynicism fills the air like ash and blights the leaves on the freedom trees.

Herzen gives one of the letters to Natalie.

NATALIE   Thank you … Oh, from Natasha! I miss her so, since she went home.

GEORGE   One must learn to be a stoic. Look at me.

HERZEN   You’re a stoic?

GEORGE   What does it look like?

HERZEN   Apathy?

GEORGE   Exactly. But apathy is misunderstood.

HERZEN   I’m very fond of you, George.

GEORGE   Apatheia! To the ancient stoics there was nothing irresolute about apathy, it required strenuous effort and concentration.

HERZEN   Very fond of you.

GEORGE   Because being a stoic didn’t mean a sort of uncomplaining putting up with misfortune, that’s only how it looks on the outside—inside, it’s all about achieving apathy …

HERZEN   (laughs) No, I love you.

GEORGE   (hardening) … which meant: a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn’t passive, it’s the freedom that comes from recognising new borders, a new country called Necessity … it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can’t for the moment be altered … which people find quite difficult. We’ve had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it’s going to do. God, we were busy!—bustling about under the sky, shouting directions to the winds, remonstrating with the clouds in German, Russian, French … and hailing every sunbeam as proof of the power of words, some of which rhymed and scanned. Well … would you like to share my umbrella? It’s not too bad under here. Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that can’t-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production. Stoical freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it’s bucketing down on your picnic.

HERZEN   George … George … (to Natalie) He’s the only real Russian left in Paris. Bakunin’s in Saxony under a false name—he wrote and told me! Turgenev is guess where, and Sazonov has disappeared into an aviary of Polish conspirators who are planning a demonstration. We should go to live in … Italy, perhaps, or Switzerland. The best school for Kolya is in Zurich. When he’s a little older, my mother’s going to move there to be with him.

NATALIE   (to George) They’ve got a new system. Put your hands on my face.

GEORGE   Like that?

George touches her face lightly. Natalie stammers M’s and pops P’s.

NATALIE   Can you feel? That’s how you learn if you’re doing it right. Mama … Papa … Baby … Ball … George … George …

Herzen jumps up with his letter.

HERZEN   Ogarev’s engaged to Natasha!

Natalie cries out and opens her letter. They both read.

GEORGE   My wife is in an interesting condition, did I tell you?

HERZEN   Good for Nick!

NATALIE   It all started before Christmas!

GEORGE   Well, it’s not very interesting. In fact, it’s the least interesting condition she’s ever in.

NATALIE   I’m going to write to her this minute!

GEORGE   (vaguely) Oh … all right.

NATALIE   Let me see what he says.

Natalie, delighted, takes Herzen’s letter and gives him hers. She hurries out.

GEORGE   There was always something that appealed to me about Ogarev. I don’t know what it was … He’s such a vague, lazy, hopeless sort of person. (Pause.) I thought he had a wife. He had a wife when I knew him in Paris.

HERZEN   Maria.

GEORGE   Maria! She kept company with a painter, to speak loosely. Well, he applied paint to canvas and was said to have a large brush. Did she die?

HERZEN   No, she’s alive and kicking.

GEORGE   What’s to be done about marriage? We should have a programme, like Proudhon. ‘Property is theft, except for wives.’

HERZEN   Proudhon’s programme of shackles from altar to coffin is an absurdity. Passions are facts. Making cages for them is the vanity of Utopians, preachers, lawgivers … Still, passions running free, owing nothing to yesterday or tomorrow, isn’t what you’d call a programme either. Ogarev is my programme. He’s the only man I know who lives true to his beliefs. Fidelity is admirable, but proprietorship disgusting. But Maria was vain, flighty, I worried for Nick. She was not like my Natalie. But with Ogarev, love doesn’t turn out to be pride. It’s love like on the label, and he suffered it. You think that’s weakness? No, it’s strength.

Natalie enters wearing a hat and adjusts it, pleased, in an imaginary mirror.

MARIA OGAREV, aged thirty-six, poses nude for an unseen painter.

HERZEN   (cont.) He’s a free man because he gives away freely. I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided up like a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the cooperation of other people—who are each making the same balance for themselves. What is the largest number of individuals who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.

APRIL 1849

Natalie looks around. She reacts to an (imaginary) painting. Maria enters, robing herself.

MARIA   I’ve already written to Nick … I told him I had no intention of marrying again, and so had no need of a divorce.

NATALIE   No … the need is Nick’s.

MARIA   Exactly. Mine is to protect my position as his wife.

NATALIE   Your position? But Maria, you haven’t been his wife for years now, except in name.

MARIA   That’s a large exception, and while it’s so, there’s three hundred thousand roubles in the six-per-cents, secured against his property. Where would it leave me if I were divorced? Worse still when there’s a new wife with her own ideas about her position. You know what a child Nicholas is about money. Anyone can get round him. He had four thousand souls when his father died, and almost the first thing he did was hand over the largest property to his serfs. He’s simply not someone you can depend on. And now he sends you to plead for him and his eager bride. Do you know her?

NATALIE   (nods) The Tuchkovs went home last year. Nick knew her before, but it was only when she returned from abroad … well, you know … and anybody would fall in love with Natasha, I fell in love with her myself!

MARIA   Really? Really in love?

NATALIE   Yes!—really, utterly, transported by love, I’ve never loved anyone as I loved Natasha, she brought me back to life.

MARIA   You were lovers?

NATALIE   (in confusion) No. What do you mean?

MARIA   Oh. Utterly, transportedly, but not really. Why won’t you look at my picture?

NATALIE   Your …? Well … it seems rude to …

MARIA   You’ve always idealised love, and you think—surely this can’t be it? (She laughs.) Painted from life, one afternoon when we lived in the Rue de Seine over the hat shop, do you know it? I’ll take you there, we’ll find something that suits you. Go on, have a good look.

NATALIE   (looking) He’s got the porcelain quite well … What do you do with it when just anybody comes, your … companion’s friends, the landlord, strangers …? Do you cover it up?

MARIA   No … it’s art.

NATALIE   And you don’t mind?

Maria shakes her head.

MARIA   (confidentially) I’m in the paint!

NATALIE   What do you … (mean)?

MARIA   Mixed in.

NATALIE   (Pause.) I’ve only been sketched in pencil.

MARIA   Naked?

NATALIE   (laughs shyly) Alexander doesn’t draw.

MARIA   If an artist asks you, don’t hesitate. You feel like a woman.

NATALIE   But I do feel like a woman, Maria. I think our sex is ennobled by idealising love. You say it as if it meant denying love in some way, but it’s you who’s denying it its … greatness … which comes from being a universal idea, like a thought in nature, without which there’d be no lovers, or artists either, because they’re the same thing only happening differently, and neither is any good if they deny the joined-upness of everything … oh dear, we should speak German for this …

MARIA   No … I could follow it, being in much the same state when I met Nicholas Ogarev at the Governor’s Ball in Penza. A poet in exile, what could be more romantic? We sat out and talked twaddle at each other, and knew that this was love. We had no idea we were in fashion, that people who didn’t know any better were falling in love quite adequately without dragging in the mind of the Universe as dreamt up by some German professor who left out the irritating details. There was also talk of the angels in heaven singing hosannas. So the next time I fell in love, it stank of turpentine, tobacco smoke, laundry baskets … the musk of love! To arouse and satisfy desire is nature making its point about the sexes, everything else is convention.

NATALIE   (timidly) But our animal nature is not our whole nature … and when the babies start coming …

MARIA   I had a child, too … born dead. Yes, you know, of course you know—what wouldn’t Nicholas tell your husband? … Being taken to meet Alexander for the first time was like being auditioned for my own marriage.

NATALIE   It was the same for me, meeting Nick, and I was expecting Sasha.

MARIA   Poor Nick. Even my having another man’s child, it was nothing to the agony he went through when he found himself caught in the middle between his wife and his best friend.

NATALIE   But we all loved each other at the beginning. Don’t you remember how we joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other?

MARIA   Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.

NATALIE   That’s not so, is it?

MARIA   Yes—it is so. I found it embarrassing … childish—

NATALIE   Even at the beginning! How sad for you, Maria … I’m sorry …

Maria, to Natalie’s complete surprise, suddenly gives in to her rage.

MARIA   Don’t you look down on me with your stuck-up charity, you’re still the simpering little fool you always were—giving away your birthright, idealising it away in your prattle of exalted feelings … You can tell Ogarev he’ll get nothing out of me, and that goes for all his friends!

The interview is evidently over. Natalie remains composed.

NATALIE   I’ll go, then. I don’t know what I said to make you angry. (She gathers herself to leave.) Your portrait, by the way, is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation … If he dips his brush here and prods it there, he’ll get this time what he got last time, and so on till you’re done. But that’s neither art nor love. You and your portrait resemble each other only in crudeness and banality. But that’s a trivial failure. Imitation isn’t art, everyone knows that. Technique by itself can’t create. So, where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry, and who are you to call it prattle? German philosophy is the first time anyone’s explained everything that can’t be explained by the rules. Why can’t your expert lover satisfy a desire to paint like Raphael or Michelangelo? That would shut me up, wouldn’t it? What’s stopping him? Why can’t he look harder and see what the rules are? Because there aren’t any. Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it’s nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can’t all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what’s our consolation, we fall short at love. (She pauses for a last look at the portrait.) I know what it is. He’s got your tits too high and your arse too small. (Natalie leaves.)

MAY 1849

Saxony. In a prison room, a lawyer (FRANZ OTTO) is seated at a table. Bakunin is in chains, sitting opposite.

OTTO   What were you doing in Dresden?

BAKUNIN   When I arrived or when I left?

OTTO   Just generally.

BAKUNIN   When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire. But after a week or two, a local revolution broke out against the King of Saxony, so I joined it.

OTTO   (Pause.) You understand who I am?

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   I am your lawyer, nominated by the Saxon authorities to present your defence.

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   You are charged with treason, for which the penalty is death. (Pause.) What brought you to Dresden? I suspect it was to visit the art gallery with its famous Sistine Madonna by Raphael. In all probability you had no knowledge of any popular insurrection brewing against the King. On May the third, when the barricades appeared, it was a complete surprise to you.

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   Ah. Good. You never planned any revolt, you had no obligation to it or connection with it, its objectives were of no interest to you.

BAKUNIN   Absolutely true! The King of Saxony is welcome to dismiss his parliament, as far as I’m concerned. I look on all such assemblies with contempt.

OTTO   There you are. At heart, you’re a monarchist.

BAKUNIN   On May the fourth I met a friend of mine in the street.

OTTO   Quite by chance.

BAKUNIN   Quite by chance.

OTTO   His name?

BAKUNIN   Wagner. He’s a music director of the Dresden opera, at least he was till we burned it down—

OTTO   Er … don’t get too far ahead.

BAKUNIN   Oh, he was delighted—he despised the taste of the management. Anyway, Wagner said he was on his way to the Town Hall to see what was going on. So I went with him. The provisional government had just been proclaimed. They were out of their depth. The poor things hadn’t the faintest idea how to conduct a revolution, so I took charge—

OTTO   Just—just a moment—

BAKUNIN   The King’s troops were waiting for reinforcements sent by Prussia, and there was no time to be lost. I had them tear up the railway tracks, showed them where to place the cannons—

OTTO   Stop, stop—

BAKUNIN   (laughs) There’s a story that I suggested hanging the Sistine Madonna on the barricades on the theory that Prussians would be too cultured to open fire on a Raphael …

Otto jumps to his feet and sits again.

OTTO   You know who I am?

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   What brought you to Dresden? Before you answer, I should tell you, both the Austrian and the Russian Emperors have asked for you to be handed over to them.

BAKUNIN   (Pause.) When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire, which I consider a necessary first step to put Europe in flames and thus set off a revolution in Russia. But after a week or two, to my amazement, a revolution broke out against the King of Saxony …

JUNE 1849

[From Herzen’s essays, From the Other Shore: ‘Of all the suburbs of Paris I like Montmorency best. There is nothing remarkable there, no carefully trimmed parks as at St Cloud, no boudoirs of trees as at Trianon … In Montmorency nature is extremely simple … There is a large grove there, situated high up, and quiet … I do not know why but this grove always reminds me of our Russian woods … one thinks that in a minute a whiff of smoke will drift across from the byres … The road cuts through a clearing, and I then feel sad because instead of Zvenigorod, I see Paris … A small cottage with no more than three windows … is Rousseau’s house …’]

‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ … There is a tableau which anticipates—by fourteen years—the painting by Manet. Natalie is the undressed woman sitting on the grass in the company of two fully clothed men, George and Herzen. Emma, stooping to pick a flower, is the woman in the background. The broader composition includes Turgenev, who is at first glance sketching Natalie but in fact is sketching Emma. The tableau, however, is an overlapping of two locations, Natalie and George being in one, while Herzen, Emma and Turgenev are together elsewhere. Emma is heavily pregnant. There is a small basket near Natalie.

HERZEN   I let Sazonov talk me into joining his march. A few hours in custody have left me with no desire to be locked up in the Conciergerie with hundreds of prisoners and a slop bucket. I’ve borrowed a Wallachian passport. What we should do is take a house together, our two families across the frontier …

GEORGE   Can I open?

NATALIE   Not yet.

TURGENEV   The police aren’t interested in stopping you.

HERZEN   I’m not going to stay to find out like Bakunin in Saxony.

TURGENEV   But this is a republic.

HERZEN   The Crimson Cockatoo has already left for Geneva.

NATALIE   Are you peeping?

GEORGE   No—tight shut. What are you doing?

HERZEN   Can I look?

TURGENEV   If you want.

NATALIE   All right, then—you can open now.

HERZEN   (looking over Turgenev’s shoulder) Ah …

GEORGE   Oh, my God!

EMMA   I have to move—I’m sorry—!

GEORGE   Natalie …

TURGENEV   Of course! Move!

NATALIE   Sssh …

TURGENEV   I’m so sorry—

GEORGE   My dear …

TURGENEV   I don’t need you anymore.

EMMA   Terrible words! …

GEORGE   But suppose somebody …

NATALIE   Sssh …

HERZEN   He’s doing clouds. I wonder what Russian modern art would be like.

NATALIE   I wanted to be naked for you, you see.

GEORGE   I do. I do see.

EMMA   Where’ve they got to, I wonder?

NATALIE   Just once!

TURGENEV   They’re hunting mushrooms.

NATALIE   So, when I’m sitting across from you in the objective world, listening to Alexander reading Schiller in the evenings—or picnicking at Montmorency!—you’ll remember there is an inner reality, my existence-in-itself, where my naked soul is one with yours!

GEORGE   I am deeply … Just once?

HERZEN   What would it be like?

NATALIE   Let’s not talk … let’s close our eyes and commune with the spirit of Rousseau among the woods where he walked!

HERZEN   That’s where Rousseau lived, that cottage. Montmorency is the only bit of country round Paris which reminds me of Russia. Nature here is simple, not like the park at St Cloud, which is somebody’s masterpiece, or the disciplinarian planting at Trianon. How is the country where you go to stay?

TURGENEV   Delightful.

EMMA   Do your friends have land?

TURGENEV   It wouldn’t count for much at home. You can see right across it.

HERZEN   How many souls do they have?

TURGENEV   One each.

NATALIE   Oh, George! I ask for nothing but to give!

GEORGE   Please get dressed before …

NATALIE   I ask nothing of you but to take!

GEORGE   I will, I will, but not here …

NATALIE   To take strength from me.

GEORGE   Oh, yes, yes, you’re the only one who understands me.

HERZEN   Well, what do you do there?

TURGENEV   We like to go out shooting.

HERZEN   Madame Viardot shoots?

TURGENEV   No, she’s not an American, she’s an opera singer. Her husband shoots.

HERZEN   Ah. Is he accurate?

Turgenev crumples up his drawing.

EMMA   Oh—what a waste of being still.

GEORGE   But Emma must be wondering …

NATALIE   Let’s tell her!

GEORGE   No!

NATALIE   Why ever not?

GEORGE   Besides, she’d tell Alexander.

NATALIE   Do you think so? Alexander must never know.

GEORGE   I agree.

NATALIE   He wouldn’t understand.

GEORGE   No, he wouldn’t

NATALIE   If only he could see there’s no egoism in my love.

GEORGE   We’ll find a way.

NATALIE   One day, perhaps …

GEORGE   Yes, let me think—Tuesday …

NATALIE   But until then …

GEORGE   Yes—so put your clothes on, my dear spirit, my beautiful soul!

NATALIE   Don’t look, then.

GEORGE   Oh God, we haven’t found a single mushroom!

George snatches up the basket and hurries away. Natalie starts getting dressed.

TURGENEV   (to Herzen) You still own a small estate at home, I believe. How many souls do you have?

HERZEN   None now. The government took it. But you’re quite right. I apologise.

TURGENEV   I freed my mother’s household serfs, with land, but I receive quit-rent from the rest.

EMMA   Honestly, you Russians.

HERZEN   I’m going to find George and Natalie. (Herzen leaves.)

EMMA   What are you writing now?

TURGENEV   A play.

EMMA   Is it about us?

TURGENEV   It takes place over a month in a house in the country. A woman and a young girl fall in love with the same man.

EMMA   Who wins?

TURGENEV   Nobody, of course.

EMMA   I want to ask you something, but you might be angry with me.

TURGENEV   I’ll answer anyway. No.

EMMA   But how do you know the question?

TURGENEV   I don’t. You can apply my answer to any question of your choice.

EMMA   That’s a good system … Well, I’m sorry. Devotion such as yours should not go unrewarded.

Pause.

EMMA   (cont.) Now I want to ask you something else.

TURGENEV   Yes.

Emma starts to weep.

TURGENEV   (cont.) I’m sorry.

EMMA   But you’re right. If you knew how I suffer. George was my first.

TURGENEV   My first was a serf. I think my mother put her up to it. I was fifteen. I was in the garden. It was a drizzly sort of day. Suddenly I saw a girl coming towards me … she came right to me. I was her master, you must remember. She was my slave. She took hold of me by the hair and said, ‘Come!’ … Unforgettable … Words stagger after. Art despairs.

EMMA   That’s different. That’s eroticism.

TURGENEV   Yes.

EMMA   Have you ever been happy?

TURGENEV   But I have moments of extreme happiness … ecstasy!—

EMMA   Do you?

TURGENEV   —watching a duck scratching the back of its head with that quick back-and-forth of its damp foot … and the way slow silver threads of water stream from a cow’s mouth when it raises its head from the edge of the pond to stare at you …

Herzen enters.

HERZEN   Rousseau has a lot to answer for.

George follows Herzen, with the basket.

GEORGE   Oh … why do you say that?

Natalie leaves. Emma takes the basket and upends it. A single virulent toadstool falls out.

HERZEN   I idolised Rousseau when I was young … Man in his natural state, uncorrupted by civilisation, desiring only those things which are good to desire …

GEORGE   Oh, yes.

HERZEN    … and everybody free to follow their desires without conflicts, because they’d all want the same things …

EMMA   Where’s Natalie?

GEORGE   Didn’t she come back?

HERZEN   She’ll be rounding up the nurse and the children.

GEORGE   (to Emma) My love, what do you think? We’re going to share a house with Alexander and Natalie in Nice! He’s going to go on ahead and find a place.

EMMA   Why … why leave Paris?

HERZEN   We belong to Egypt, not to the Promised Land. The people faltered. I wouldn’t insult them by absolving them. They had no programme, and no sovereign brain to carry one out. The Sovereign People are our invention. The masses are more like a phenomenon in nature, and nature isn’t interested in our fantasy that ink is action. Ask George. We’re dupes.

Natalie enters.

HERZEN   (cont.) (to Natalie) I’m a dupe. Well and good. We, too, will look to our faults—our passions and vices—and prepare ourselves by living by our ideals in a republic of our own. We are many!—Nine, counting my mother and the children.

NATALIE   The children must be hungry. I’m starving.

TURGENEV   It’s going to rain.

HERZEN   (to Natalie) George has offered to escort you and the children on your journey south. (to Emma) Your husband is kindness itself.

GEORGE   (to Emma) And when you’ve had the baby, you’ll join us.

EMMA   (to Herzen) There’s nothing he wouldn’t do for you.

NATALIE   Come on—we can go in that empty cottage.

Herzen and Natalie leave, holding hands.

GEORGE   (to Turgenev) Are you writing anything?

TURGENEV   Well … no …

EMMA   Yes, he is. It’s a comedy.

TURGENEV   Here it comes.

Turgenev puts his palm out to the first drops. They leave, following Herzen and Natalie.

SEPTEMBER 1850

Nice (at this time an Italian town).

Herzen is writing on the verandah of a large house on the Promenade. The light is Mediterranean, the sea washing the shingles is audible, part of the garden is visible. The verandah is a large area containing a family dining table and chairs, and some comfortable chairs around a smaller table. There is a door to the interior. Mother and Kolya are absorbed together, at a distance from Herzen, using a hand mirror (in which Kolya studies his mouth movements). An Italian servant, ROCCA, is laying the table and singing for his own enjoyment. As he goes indoors, he passingly ‘serenades’ Mother and Kolya. Mother manages a game smile. With her collusion, Kolya trots over to Herzen. Herzen slightly over-enunciates for Kolya.

HERZEN   Was moechtest du denn? [What do you want, darling?]

Kolya looks back to Mother for assurance. She smiles him on.

KOLYA   Ich spreche Russisch! [I speak Russian!] (in ‘English’) ‘Sunny day! My name is Kolya!’

HERZEN   Wunderbar! [Wonderful!]

Great delight, made physical, on all sides.

HERZEN   (cont.) Jetzt sprichst du Russisch! [Now you speak Russian!]

KOLYA   Ich spreche Russisch! [I speak Russian!]

Rocca returns, singing, with more things for the table.

HERZEN   Zeig es Mami! [Show Mummy!] Do vei Signora? [Where is the Signora?]

ROCCA   Sta nel giardino. [She was in the garden.]

Rocca leaves singing.

MOTHER   I suppose the next one will juggle.

Herzen places Kolya’s hands on Herzen’s face and enunciates while Kolya lip-reads.

HERZEN   (to Kolya) Garten. [Garden.]

Kolya trots off out of sight.

MOTHER   But Italy is friendlier than Switzerland, especially to children and old ladies. The school in Zurich was the last straw—what a shock when they discovered they were harbouring the child of a dangerous revolutionary instead of a Russian nobleman.

HERZEN   I was pleased that my little book made such an impression on the good burghers of Zurich … and we stole the school’s best teacher for Kolya, so it’s ended well—(He looks at his watch.)—and I have to meet him off the diligence at Genoa. He’ll soon have Kolya orating on the seashore like Demosthenes with a pebble in his mouth. But I want you to be happy here, too.

MOTHER   I, too? (She kisses him.)

HERZEN   I liked Nice when we came through here on our way to Rome three years ago, do you remember?

MOTHER   I remember the shingle beach when we were on our way back after the French Republic was declared … and the excitement, when we reached the border, of having Republican stamps in our passports … A French stamp, even before the Republic, would get you into trouble at home, Sasha …

HERZEN   How can I go back? I’ve tried suffocation, darkness, fear and censorship—and I’ve tried air, light, security and freedom to publish—and I know which is better. There’s no emperor or king or pope in Europe who can match the Tsar for despotism, especially now, after the almighty scare he got … The people here have had a civilisation for two thousand years, and they keep something of themselves which no passing tyranny can eradicate. But I’ll show you why I can’t go home again. (He goes to the table where he has been working and picks up a French journal.) Here’s a man writing about us. It’s a French paper. He’s the first person in France to write about the Russian people, and he can prove that the Russian people are not human, because they are devoid of moral sense. The Russian is a thief and a liar, and is so innocently because it’s his nature.

MOTHER   He doesn’t mean us, he means the peasants.

HERZEN   Yes, they lie to landowners, officials, judges, policemen … and steal from them—and they are right, because they are denied every kind of self-protection and dignity. What have our moral categories got to do with the Russians we’ve abandoned? Not to steal would be to concede the fairness of their portion. For two hundred years their whole life has been one long dumb passive protest against the existing order. They have no one to speak for them.

MOTHER   What time is the diligence?

HERZEN   God give me Medea!

MOTHER   (indicating the garden) Kolya’s nagging Natalie to go to the beach—and she’s in no fit state—where’s the nurse?

HERZEN   (throwing down the journal) This is not some demented pamphleteer, he’s a distinguished historian famous for his humanitarian views, writing for intelligent Frenchmen—(shouting after her) It’s about time to acquaint Europe with Russia, don’t you think?

Mother leaves.

Herzen looks at his watch, hurries away, reverses direction and shouts towards the garden.

HERZEN   (cont.) Don’t let go of his hand in the water!

Leaving again, he encounters Emma, who is no longer pregnant, wheeling a small baby carriage.

HERZEN   (cont.) Is there any news of George? When is he coming?

EMMA   I don’t know.

HERZEN   Well, it’s too bad of him. We’re not complete without him.

Natalie, seven months pregnant, comes into view.

HERZEN   (cont.) (to Natalie) I’m going to pick up Spielmann. That’s his name!—Spielmann!

Laughing, he runs off calling for Rocca. Natalie comes forward.

NATALIE   Was there a letter?

Emma gives Natalie a sealed letter.

NATALIE   (cont.) Thank you. (Natalie puts the letter in her bosom.)

EMMA   If he says when he’s coming, perhaps you’ll tell me.

NATALIE   Yes, of course.

EMMA   If you loved him, you’d leave Alexander.

NATALIE   (shakes her head) Alexander must be spared this. The one time he began to wonder … he nearly lost his mind. I would have done anything to reassure him.

EMMA   You did the simplest thing. If you weren’t in a state where you can hardly be said to be of practical use, George would be here now.

NATALIE   You mustn’t humiliate yourself, Emma. He loves you, too.

EMMA   I’m a post office, and living upstairs in your house like a lodger, which is all we can afford to be—there is no further humiliation I could suffer. But I’m glad to do it for my George. He was unrecognisable when I came from Paris. He was suffering more than I. If you can’t make him happy—or cure him—give him back. He’ll come back anyway. This is not love, it’s exaltation.

Emma’s baby starts crying. She picks it up and paces.

NATALIE   You haven’t understood anything. All my actions spring from the divine spirit of love, which I feel for all creation. Your logical way of looking at things just shows that you have grown apart from Nature. George is not the way you talk about him. He understands. He loves you. He loves Alexander. He loves your children and mine. Together, our love will be strong enough for all of us.

George enters, in travelling clothes. He takes one look at his wife, baby and pregnant mistress, and turns about.

NATALIE   George!

EMMA   George!

Natalie, with a glad cry, runs after him, followed by Emma.

NOVEMBER   1850

A newborn baby starts squalling inside the house. Bouquets of flowers arrive, by messenger and butler (Rocca). Herzen and George appear from indoors in smoking jackets, with cigars and glasses of champagne.

HERZEN   (toasts) To Natalie and baby Olga.

GEORGE   To Natalie and Olga.

HERZEN   Where’s Emma?

George looks around.

GEORGE   There.

DECEMBER 1850

The same place. A nurse (MARIA FOMM) wheels a smart pram. Emma is holding her crying eighteen-month-old child and close to hysteria. Herzen is writing what turns out to be a cheque and an IOU. When the baby raises its voice, Emma continues louder, so the decibel level threatens sometimes to become ludicrous.

EMMA   On our honeymoon in Italy, George didn’t like the cologne they had there, so I sent to Paris for his special cologne, and when it arrived in Rome we were in Naples, and when it reached Naples we were back in Rome, and so it went on until the cologne followed us back to Paris. The carriage charges were enormous. That’s how I’ve always been with George. Nothing was too good or too much. Daddy used to be rich, he supplied all the silk furnishings to the Prussian court, but somehow the revolution made him quite poor, and he resents George, it’s so unfair. I’ve borrowed and sold everything I can so that George isn’t troubled, and now I don’t know where else to turn.

Natalie, no longer pregnant, wearing white, is seen being painted in Mediterranean sunshine.

EMMA   (cont.) I felt you would be sympathetic because Natalie and I have such a close bond in George. He hardly wrote to me in all the months I was left behind in Paris. Natalie is the one who wrote, to tell me how wonderful and kind and sensitive George is, how good with your children, how adorable he is … She has such a broad loving heart, there’s room for everybody in it, it seems …

HERZEN   (giving her the cheque) Ten thousand francs for two years.

She signs the receipt, takes the cheque and leaves, with her crying baby.

JANUARY   1851

Natalie, with the painting she posed for, comes to show it to Herzen.

HERZEN   Oh yes … Where will we put it?

NATALIE   Oh … but it’s a present for George for the New Year.

HERZEN   How silly of me.

NATALIE   Do you like it?

HERZEN   Very much. If Herwegh will permit it, I’ll order a copy made for myself.

NATALIE   You’re angry.

HERZEN   What should I have to be angry about?

NATALIE   Take it for yourself, then.

HERZEN   Nothing would induce me.

Natalie becomes tearful and confused.

NATALIE   George is like my child. He becomes distressed—destroyed—or elated—by the smallest things. You’re a grown man among men, you don’t understand the yearning for love of a sensitive being for a different kind of love—

HERZEN   Please speak plainly.

NATALIE   He worships you, he lives for your approval, spare him this—

HERZEN   Natalie, examine your heart calmly, be open with yourself, and with me. If you want me to go, I’ll go—I’ll go to America with Sasha—

Natalie becomes almost hysterical.

NATALIE   How can you! How can you! As though such a thing were possible! You’re my homeland, my whole life. I’ve lived on my love for you as in God’s world, without it I wouldn’t exist, I’d have to be born again to have a life at all—

HERZEN   Plain speech, for God’s sake! Has Herwegh—known you?

NATALIE   If only you could understand!—you would beg my forgiveness for what you’re saying.

HERZEN   Has he taken you?

NATALIE   I have taken him—to my bosom like a babe.

HERZEN   Is this poetry or infantilism? I want to know if he’s your lover.

NATALIE   I am pure before myself and before the world—I bear no reproach in the very depths of my heart—now you know.

HERZEN   (exasperated) Now I know what?

NATALIE   That I am yours, that I love you, that my affection for George is God-given—if he went away, I would sicken—if you went away, I would die! Perhaps I should be the one to go—to Russia for a year—Natasha is the only one who would understand the purity of my love. Oh, how did this happen? How did this innocent world of my loving heart shatter to fragments?

HERZEN   Christ! Just tell me without the double-talk!—Is Herwegh your lover?!

NATALIE   He loves me, yes—he loves me—

HERZEN   Is he your lover? Have you been to his bed?

NATALIE   Oh—I see. You have no objection if I take him to my heart, only to my bed—

HERZEN   Precisely. Or his bed, or a flower bed, or up against the back of the town hall—

NATALIE   Alexander, Alexander, this is not you, this is not the great-hearted soul I gave my tender innocent heart to when I—

Herzen shakes her.

HERZEN   Tell me, damn your speeches! Is it true?

Natalie collapses weeping.

HERZEN   (cont.) It’s true, then. Say it. Say it.

NATALIE   He is my lover! There!

HERZEN   Thank you. That guttersnipe—that unctuous, treacherous, lecher—that thiefl—

NATALIE   Oh my God, what have we done—and the children!

HERZEN   There was a time to think of that before you besmirched all of us with your common little fall from grace—well, I shall go!

NATALIE   No—no!—It’ll kill him!

HERZEN   Kill him? What kind of mockery of a love affair is this?

NATALIE   I swear it—he’ll kill himself. He’s got a pistol.

Herzen laughs madly.

HERZEN   Well, he’d better clean it if it’s the one he went to war with—the barrel must be full of mud!

NATALIE   Alexander, aren’t you ashamed? I’m at your mercy, and you make a joke of a love which gave me back my life.

HERZEN   Oh—thank you! Thank you! And what was your life before I took you from it in the clothes you stood up in?

NATALIE   It was wretched. You’re right. I gave it to you joyfully, it belongs to you to do what you want with, so kill me all at once and not little by little!

Natalie collapses sobbing. Herzen sits next to her and takes her hands, his fury spent.

HERZEN   And you forgot to bring your hat. (He gives way to tears, embracing her.) Forgive me, too—forgive everything I said. They are not things I believe. I have lost something I hardly gave a thought to. My existence. My purchase on my life.

Emma enters.

EMMA   George wants you to kill him.

Herzen laughs.

HERZEN   Can’t he ask me himself?

EMMA   This is a calamity for both of us, but compare your behaviour with mine. Let Natalie go away with him.

HERZEN   Of course! If she wants to.

Emma goes to Natalie and kneels by her.

EMMA   Save him.

NATALIE   I can’t. What strength I have, I need for Alexander. I will go wherever he goes.

HERZEN   It’s him who’s going. (to Emma) I’ll pay your fares to Genoa provided you leave in the morning.

Emma gets up.

EMMA   We can’t leave. There are tradesmen’s accounts we have to settle.

HERZEN   It will be my pleasure.

Emma runs back to Natalie and flings herself down in desperation.

EMMA   If you won’t go with George, ask him to take me when he goes!—Ask him not to abandon me!

HERZEN   You’re asking my wife to plead for you …?

EMMA   Will you?

Natalie nods. Emma gets up to go.

EMMA   (cont.) (to Herzen) Egoist!

HERZEN   But you’ve made yourself a slave, and this is where it’s got you.

Emma leaves.

HERZEN   (cont.) Of course I’m an egoist! How strange people are!—taking pride in humility … in servitude to others … and the whole system of duties designed by authority to keep us quiet and as little different from each other as possible … Why should we damp down everything in us which is our uniqueness, the salt of our personality … the tiny furnace which needs to be constantly fed with selfesteem to keep us warm and vital and, yes, of use to our brothers and neighbours? Egoism isn’t an acquired vice. It’s not an acquired virtue either. It’s just part of what comes with being human, to keep us free, to create our own destiny, and our values. It’s not the enemy of love! It’s what love feeds on. That’s why without you I’d be destroyed.

Herzen’s self-assurance collapses. Natalie comforts him. She is altered back, and speaks as one who is dry-eyed.

NATALIE   No … no … You wouldn’t be destroyed, Alexander. I’m only a little part of your … your sense of worth. I can’t give it back to you. But it’s not lost between us. It passes to me. I’ll never leave you. But think what I have lost, too … the ideal of a love which is greater the more it includes, instead of more hurtful, squalid and ridiculous.

Rocca is heard—and then seen—singing. He is laying the table and making the verandah festive.

NOVEMBER 1851

Herzen is working on the verandah. Rocca, singing, is making the verandah and dining table festive, helped by a Maid. Rocca leaves and returns.

ROCCA   Principe!

Rocca admits a man who is the Russian Consul. The CONSUL bows. Rocca leaves.

CONSUL   Leonty Vasilevich Ibayev. I am addressing Alexander Ivanovich Herzen, of course.

HERZEN   You are.

CONSUL   I am the Russian Consul in Nice.

HERZEN   Good heavens.

CONSUL   I have a communication to make to you.

HERZEN   From whom?

CONSUL   From Count Orlov.

HERZEN   Ah. Last time it was good news. Please sit down.

CONSUL   Thank you.

The Consul sits down and takes a document from his pocket. He reads it out.

CONSUL   (cont) ‘Adjutant-General Count Orlov has notified Count Nesselrode, Minister of Foreign Affairs, that—(He rises to his feet, inclining his head.)—His Imperial Majesty—(He sits again.)—has been graciously pleased to order that Alexander Ivanovich Herzen shall return to Russia at once—of which he is to be informed, accepting from him no reasons for delay and granting him no postponement under any circumstances.’ (He folds the document and puts it in his pocket.) What am I to answer?

HERZEN   That I’m not going.

CONSUL   How do you mean, ‘not going’?

HERZEN   Just that. Not going. Remaining. Staying put.

CONSUL   You don’t understand. His Imperial—(He stands, bows his head and sits.)—Majesty is ordering you …

HERZEN   Yes, and I’m not going.

CONSUL   You mean you are humbly requesting a delay in the execution of the will of His Imperial—

HERZEN   No, no, I can’t make myself any clearer. I’m not asking for a delay. I’m not going at any time.

CONSUL   An indefinite delay, you mean? You are ill, perhaps, too ill to travel. There would be precedents for that.

HERZEN   One of us is mad. I’m in excellent health, especially mental health, so it must be you. Do you really think I would hold out my wrists for the handcuffs on the say-so of His Imperial—sit down, for God’s sake!

CONSUL   But what am I to do? Look on it from my position. If I were to be the intermediary for an act of disobedience to the will of His Imp—(He starts to rise but checks himself.)—Majesty, it would call attention to my name in a most unfavourable context. It might even look as if I’m giving myself airs … being privy to something so inimicable to His Majesty’s dignity, so incommensurable with the vastness of his anger, before which nations tremble.

HERZEN   (amused now) I see what you mean.

CONSUL   Thank you.

HERZEN   But it would be Count Orlov to whom you’d be giving the bad news.

CONSUL   It’s the same thing. Count Orlov would never forget my name.

HERZEN   But you’re only the messenger.

CONSUL   There’s a streak of the Cleopatra in him.

HERZEN   We’d better have a drink. Rocca! Vino.

Rocca interrupts an aria to serve the wine.

HERZEN   (cont.) Why don’t I write personally to Count Orlov? Then you wouldn’t know what I’ve said.

CONSUL   Would you do that? I’d be immensely grateful.

Herzen starts writing. The wine is served.

CONSUL   (cont.) Are you having a celebration?

HERZEN   A homecoming. My mother has been in Paris with one of my children. They’re returning tonight on the Marseilles steamer.

CONSUL   Your little boy who is deaf?

HERZEN   I was wondering why Orlov would keep a consul in a place like this.

CONSUL   No, no … what an egoist! I see your children with their nurse, playing on the beach. But you’re right. Life is very quiet. Very few passports are being issued to travellers since the … events in Europe.

Natalie comes onto the verandah with Sazonov.

NATALIE   Look who’s come from Geneva!

HERZEN   (to the Consul) Allow me to present you to my wife. This is Mr …

CONSUL   Ibayev, Russian Consul.

Natalie is frightened.

NATALIE   What …? (to Herzen) Is everything all right?

HERZEN   Perfectly. (to the Consul) And this is …

Sazonov becomes suave.

SAZONOV   Ah. I’m impressed. I never told anyone I was coming.

CONSUL   I had business with Mr Herzen.

Sazonov laughs sceptically.

SAZONOV   Of course. Please compliment Count Orlov for me … on his excellent information.

CONSUL   Do you know Count Orlov?

SAZONOV   No. But I daresay he knows me. I was a thorn in his side for many years in Paris.

HERZEN   Sit down, have a drink—

SAZONOV   (ignoring Herzen) No doubt you know a little bit about my … activities in Geneva. Tell Orlov we will undoubtedly be meeting one day.

CONSUL   Certainly. What name shall I say?

SAZONOV   Just say … the blue nightingale is still flying in the sky … He’ll understand.

Herzen signs and seals the letter.

HERZEN   All done.

The Consul accepts the letter and bows to Natalie and Sazonov. Herzen accompanies him out. There is a transition to evening. Natalie and Rocca, perhaps with a maid, are completing the preparations for the reunion, with Chinese lanterns, bunting, toys on the table, and a ‘Welcome Kolya’ sign. (In an ideal world Sasha would be part of this, but he is eleven now. His never-seen sister, Tata, would be seven.) Sazonov is vaguely helping, too, but soon gives up to ramble on and drink. Natalie hardly bothers to listen to him.

SAZONOV   I’ve had a letter from Botkin … Alexander’s pamphlet on the development of revolutionary ideas in Russia gave heart attacks to his friends in the Moscow University circle … (He becomes conscious of Rocca and suddenly addresses him.) Watch out, look what you’re doing!

Rocca reacts late and baffled.

NATALIE   He doesn’t know Russian. He’s our Italian servant. (to Rocca) E niente. [It’s nothing.]

SAZONOV   You can’t be too careful.

NATALIE   Why aren’t they here yet? I should have gone with Alexander to meet the steamer …

SAZONOV   What else …? Moscow was en fête for the opening of the railway. Tsar Nicholas loves it. He inspected every bridge and tunnel personally. His German relatives impressed everyone by their appetites in the station refreshment room …

NATALIE   (distracted) Why are they so late? It’s probably Granny’s trunks. She travels like an archduchess.

SAZONOV   Who’s with them?

NATALIE   Only her maid, I think, and Spielmann, Kolya’s tutor. (to Rocca) Por favor, vai a vedere se vengano. [Please go and see if they’re coming.]

SAZONOV   The speech man? Are you mad? That can’t be his real name!

Rocca meets Herzen at the edge of the stage. Herzen brushes past him. Natalie sees him.

NATALIE   Alexander …? Where are they?

HERZEN   They’re not coming. The boat from Marseilles … isn’t coming.

Herzen embraces her, weeping.

NATALIE   (bewildered) They’re not coming at all?

HERZEN   No. There was an accident at sea … Oh, Natalie!

NATALIE   When is Kolya coming?

HERZEN   He’s never coming. I’m sorry.

Natalie fights out of his embrace and pummels him.

NATALIE   Don’t you dare tell me that! (She runs inside.)

HERZEN   (to Rocca) Get rid of everything. (Herzen gestures at the decorations.)

SAZONOV   God … what happened?

HERZEN   They got rammed by another boat. A hundred people drowned. (to Rocca in Italian) Get rid of all this.

Herzen follows Natalie indoors. She starts to howl in her grief. Rocca uncertainly starts to blow out the candles.

AUGUST 1852

At night Herzen stands by the guardrail on the deck of the crosschannel steamer at sea. After a few moments he realises that Bakunin is at the rail, too.

BAKUNIN   Where are we off to? Who’s got the map?

HERZEN   Michael? Are you dead?

BAKUNIN   No.

HERZEN   That’s good. I was just thinking about you, and there you are, how very … un-odd!—yes, looking just like you looked when I saw you off in the rain on the tender to Kronstadt where the steamer was waiting. Do you remember?

BAKUNIN   You were the only one who came to see me off.

HERZEN   And now you’re the only one who’s come to see me off!

BAKUNIN   Where are you going?

HERZEN   England.

BAKUNIN   Alone?

HERZEN   Natalie died three months ago … We lost Kolya. He was drowned at sea, my mother with him, and a young man who was teaching Kolya to speak. None of them was ever found. It finished my Natalie. She was expecting another baby, and when it came, she had no strength left. The baby died, too.

BAKUNIN   My poor friend.

HERZEN   Oh, Michael, you should have heard Kolya talk! He had such a funny, charming way … and he understood everything you said, you’d swear he was listening! The thing I can’t bear … (He almost breaks down.) … I just wish it hadn’t happened at night. He couldn’t hear in the dark. He couldn’t see your lips.

BAKUNIN   Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch …?

HERZEN   No, no, not at all! His life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child’s purpose is to grow up. But a child’s purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn’t disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into the each moment. We don’t value the lily less for not being made of flint and built to last. Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it’s been sung? The dance when it’s been danced? It’s only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade ourselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding our destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but there is something wrong with the picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature’s highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and wilfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it’s called Utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the death of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? That is a proper question, the only question. If we can’t arrange our own happiness, it’s a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us. (Pause.) What happened to you, Michael? Were you betrayed?

BAKUNIN No.   I ran out of revolutions. When the soldiers caught up with me, I was too tired to care. I only wanted to sleep. I had plenty of time to sleep after that … nine months in fetters in the fortress of Königstein, and when the Germans had done with me, as long againin Prague Castle. Thank you for the money you sent. I was allowed to order cigars and books. I learned English! (accented) ‘George and Mary go to the seaside.’ How is George? Thank him for me. Emma sent a hundred francs, too. Small sums of money came from democrats all over, from people I didn’t know. Brotherhood before bread, it’s not all bathwater.

HERZEN   You’ve become a myth. I heard that society ladies were collecting funds for a rescue attempt.

BAKUNIN   Word must have got back to Russia—there were twenty Cossacks waiting at the border to escort me to the Peter and Paul Fortress. No, it’s up to the revolution now.

HERZEN   What revolution?

BAKUNIN   The Russian revolution. It can’t be long coming now. Our Westerniser friends at home were waiting for a Russian bourgeoisie to make a revolution for their children, but—don’t you see?—not having a bourgeoisie is Russia’s good fortune!

HERZEN   Don’t tell me, tell them.

BAKUNIN   Our own revolution, Herzen! Not a bourgeois revolution like in Europe—they let us down very badly, the Germans and the French, they were all for getting rid of aristocratic privilege, but they closed ranks to defend their property.

HERZEN   What did you expect?

BAKUNIN   Well, why didn’t you tell me?

HERZEN   You never listened.

BAKUNIN   Why should I listen? There were more poor people with the vote than rich people … How could it turn out the way it did?

HERZEN   It’s as Proudhon said, universal suffrage is counterrevolutionary.

BAKUNIN   He kept coming out with those, Pierre-Joseph, didn’t he? I taught him Hegel. His wife would serve supper by the fire, go to bed, get up, and serve breakfast, and we’d still be sat there over the embers, going through the categories … Great days, Herzen!

HERZEN   Oh … Bakunin!

BAKUNIN   We were there for the February revolution. It was the happiest time of my life.

HERZEN   I was in Italy. Ten days after I got back to Paris, I knew the revolution was dead … and now the Republic is dead, too. Vive la mort! Did you know? President Louis-Napoleon turned himself into Emperor Louis-Napoleon with only a few thousand arrests. People didn’t care. It was one way out of a Republic which was ashamed of itself. The Second Empire arrived just in time to finish the year off nicely. Expect important changes in furniture and ladies’ fashions. You’re right. It’s over with us Russians and the Western model. Civilisation passed us by, we belonged to geography, not history, so we escaped. We can now get on without being distracted. The West has nothing to teach us. It’s sinking under its weight of precious cargo which it won’t jettison—all those shackles for the mind. With us it’s all ballast. Over the side with it! We’re too oppressed to make do with half-liberty. We’re free to act because we have nothing.

BAKUNIN   I couldn’t wait to get to the West! Twenty Cossacks couldn’t have held me back in my yearning for the other shore. But the answer was behind me all the time. A peasant revolution, Herzen! Marx bamboozled us. He’s such a townie, to him peasants are hardly people, they’re agriculture, like cows and turnips. Well, he doesn’t know the Russian peasant! There’s a history of rebellion there, and we forgot it.

HERZEN   Stop—Stop.

BAKUNIN   I don’t mean your hand-kissing, priest-fearing greybeards—the Slavophiles can have those. I mean men and women who are ready to burn everything in sight and string up the landlord!—with policemen’s heads on their pitchforks!

HERZEN   Stop!—’Destruction is a creative passion!’ You’re such a … child! We have to go to the people, bring them with us, step by step. But Russia has a chance. The village commune can be the foundation of true populism, not Aksakov’s sentimental paternalism, and not the iron bureaucracy of a socialist elite, but self-government from the ground up. Russian socialism! After the farce of 1848, I was in despair. My life meant nothing. Russia saved me … and then fate had another trick up its sleeve … Are you there, Michael?

BAKUNIN   Oh, yes. If it goes your way, I’ll be there for years. (Bakunin leaves.)

HERZEN   Nobody’s got the map. In the West, socialism may win next time, but it’s not history’s destination. Socialism, too, will reach its own extremes and absurdities, and once more Europe will burst at the seams. Borders will change, nationalities break up, cities burn … the collapse of law, education, manufacture, fields left to rot—military rule and money in flight to England, America … And then a new war will begin between the barefoot and the shod. It will be bloody, swift and unjust, and leave Europe like Bohemia after the Hussites. Are you sorry for civilisation? I am sorry for it, too.

Natalie’s voice—from the past—is heard distantly calling repeatedly for Kolya. Distant thunder.

HERZEN   (cont.) He can’t hear you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Natalie.

SUMMER 1846

Sokolovo as before: a continuation. Distant thunder. Sasha continues putting the fallen mushrooms into the basket. Natalie’s voice is still calling for Kolya. Sasha stops to look and listen. Men’s voices can be heard yet more distantly, calling to each other—i.e., Herzen and his friends directing each other in the search. Ogarev enters, calling to Natalie.

OGAREV   Kolya’s here! He’s with me.

NATALIE   (entering) Oh, thank God … thank God!

OGAREV   No panic, no panic … he followed the ditch, he’s filthy.

Natalie runs across.

NATALIE   (offstage) Mummy thought she’d lost you! Come on, let’s wash you in the stream. (receding) Alexander! … Here! …

Ogarev still has Sasha’s fishing cane and jam jar. Distantly, the men are heard shouting to each other, calling off the search. A final distant sound of thunder.

OGAREV   Life, life … (to Sasha) I got to know your papa because of a man nearly drowning … in the river at Luzhniki.

SASHA   (interested) Really?

OGAREV   Yes, really! A Cossack who was grazing his horse on the Sparrow Hills came running down into the water and saved him, a real hero! Your father was playing by the river and saw it all, and he told his papa, who wrote to the Cossack’s commanding officer about it. The man who was saved came to your house to thank your grandpa for doing that, and so he became friends with your family. And where do I come in? Well, the man in the water later became my tutor, and one day when I was about twelve years old, he took me to meet a boy he’d come to know because of being nearly drowned, and that’s how I met your daddy, and we became best friends.

SASHA   No, you’re not, I don’t know you.

OGAREV   Why, I patted your behind before you were born! It was the happiest day of my life, that day. We knelt down together, holding hands, your mother and father and my wife and I, and … But you’re right, later I went travelling. (Pause.) No, my happiest day was another day, before that, up on the Sparrow Hills, just where the Cossack had come running down, and your daddy and I … we climbed up to the top where the sun was setting on Moscow spread out below us, and we made a promise to … to be revolutionaries together. I was thirteen then. (He gives a little laugh and looks up.) The storm has missed us.

HERZEN   (offstage) Nick … !

Herzen enters with the letter from Orlov.

OGAREV   Tell Sasha who I am.

HERZEN   Look … from Count Orlov.

He gives the letter to Ogarev, who starts to read it.

HERZEN   (cont.) (to Sasha) Nick? Nick is my best friend.

Ogarev returns the letter to Herzen.

OGAREV   (to Sasha) See?

Ogarev embraces Herzen in joyous congratulation.

Natalie enters.

A slow fade begins.

Servants enter to clear up the coffee tray, etc.

Ogarev, Herzen, Natalie and Sasha stroll away towards the house, taking the basket of mushrooms.

Table of Contents

- Cover Page
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Dedication
- Acknowledgments
- Characters
- Act One
- Act Two