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The Coast of Utopia
May. 22nd, 2012 14:10Stoppard, Tom. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007.
This one-volume edition collects the revised ("New York") text of Stoppard's trilogy, which as far as I can tell is now the preferred performance script. I saw a production of Voyage in Berkeley earlier this spring, and having read the full trilogy, I am looking forward very much to seeing the rest of it.
The trilogy is loosely organized around three towering figures--Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anarchism; Alexander Herzen, the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia and an architect of the emancipation of the serfs; and Ivan Turgenev, one of the giants of Russian literature. They and their set were the people for whom the term "intelligentsia" was coined, and Turgenev also coined the term "nihilism"--in one memorable scene in the third play, the central character of his masterpiece Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, comes to him in a dream. I loved Herzen when I saw Voyage, and hated Bakunin, and liked Turgenev okay, but my reactions changed as I read the rest of the trilogy.
( To Russia. We know. They don't. But they will. )
This one-volume edition collects the revised ("New York") text of Stoppard's trilogy, which as far as I can tell is now the preferred performance script. I saw a production of Voyage in Berkeley earlier this spring, and having read the full trilogy, I am looking forward very much to seeing the rest of it.
The trilogy is loosely organized around three towering figures--Mikhail Bakunin, the father of anarchism; Alexander Herzen, the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia and an architect of the emancipation of the serfs; and Ivan Turgenev, one of the giants of Russian literature. They and their set were the people for whom the term "intelligentsia" was coined, and Turgenev also coined the term "nihilism"--in one memorable scene in the third play, the central character of his masterpiece Fathers and Sons, Bazarov, comes to him in a dream. I loved Herzen when I saw Voyage, and hated Bakunin, and liked Turgenev okay, but my reactions changed as I read the rest of the trilogy.
( To Russia. We know. They don't. But they will. )