The Coast of Utopia
May. 22nd, 2012 14:10![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
starladyStoppard, 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.
I liked Bakunin better at the end of the book; I liked Herzen less, in some ways, but admired him more, and liked Turgenev a lot more than I thought I would. And, sitting down and reading the whole thing at one sitting helps comprehend the place of each part of the trilogy, and each character, in the whole. It is, in the end, a painful and complicated story in which a set of very human characters discuss art and life and revolution and philosophy, with some very real, and very high, stakes: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 forms the emotional high point of the whole trilogy, which is only fitting.
I think I agree that the trilogy, taken as a whole, is Stoppard's masterpiece; certainly it articulates and re-articulates, from multiple angles, the concerns that have animated his entire career, and it also contains some of his most complicated staging (which, given Stoppard's penchant for complicated staging, is saying a lot). I was very glad that Stoppard gave Herzen the last word over Marx and the nihilism-cum-Hegelian-revolutionism of the so-called "new men" whom Herzen and company helped to create, for Herzen's and Stoppard's conclusion is, in the end, mine too:
To this, of course, the true revolutionary and the true nihilist can think up a hundred different objections. What struck me is that in some ways The Coast of Utopia feels so relevant because none of these ideas have really left us, or in any case, their after-effects reverberate still. Marx and company, after all, had their day, and in the end we are left with a society that is more like the London of 1868 than the Moscow of 1921. It's Herzen's less absolute vision that we need now, as little as many would acknowledge it.
The one thing I was also forcibly reminded of is that the revolution was a very gendered business. Herzen and the menfolk revolutionize Russian society, literature, and culture; their women and children, no less intelligent or passionate, are almost uniformly disbarred from the political sphere (well symbolized by Herzen's son's marriage to, as Herzen's common-law wife--also the wife of his best friend--describes her, "an Italian peasant"). It would be folly to attribute this division of labor to the failure of the characters' grand dreams of a world changed (and I should note that, like Bakunin, I don't always agree with Herzen, but I agree that even when Herzen's wrong, he's right). But it does seem telling that this is one area that no one in the play can even conceptualize as a sphere in needs of its own turning.
Stoppard's introduction to the book is short and quite interesting; at one point he remarks of the play that "If my purpose had been to inform, I would have left out most of the play. In fact, I would have been mad to write a play at all" (xii). This is part of why, when the interpretation of Stoppard is firing on all cylinders and everything works right, Stoppard's plays can be so exhilarating: the plays and the actors in them can bring the characters and their ideas to life in a way that not even the most vivid prose can, and make us feel for the people who were so affected by them--and, in the end, see ourselves in them too. And the other reason Stoppard's plays are so grand, to me, is the way that they are all about ideas, and the power of them, and their way of changing everything whether people want it or not.
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.
I liked Bakunin better at the end of the book; I liked Herzen less, in some ways, but admired him more, and liked Turgenev a lot more than I thought I would. And, sitting down and reading the whole thing at one sitting helps comprehend the place of each part of the trilogy, and each character, in the whole. It is, in the end, a painful and complicated story in which a set of very human characters discuss art and life and revolution and philosophy, with some very real, and very high, stakes: the emancipation of the serfs in 1861 forms the emotional high point of the whole trilogy, which is only fitting.
I think I agree that the trilogy, taken as a whole, is Stoppard's masterpiece; certainly it articulates and re-articulates, from multiple angles, the concerns that have animated his entire career, and it also contains some of his most complicated staging (which, given Stoppard's penchant for complicated staging, is saying a lot). I was very glad that Stoppard gave Herzen the last word over Marx and the nihilism-cum-Hegelian-revolutionism of the so-called "new men" whom Herzen and company helped to create, for Herzen's and Stoppard's conclusion is, in the end, mine too:
To go on, and to know there is no landfall on the paradisal shore, and still to go on. To open men's eyes and not tear them out. To bring what's good along with them. The people won't forgive when the future custodian of a broken statue, a stripped wall, a desecrated grave, tells everyone who passes by, "Yes--yes, all this was destroyed by the revolution." The destroyers wear nihilism like a cockade--they think they destroy because they're radicals. But they destroy because they're disappointed conservatives--let down by the ancient dream of a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way towards it, we won't be grown up as human beings. Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, on our time. We have no other. (346-47)
To this, of course, the true revolutionary and the true nihilist can think up a hundred different objections. What struck me is that in some ways The Coast of Utopia feels so relevant because none of these ideas have really left us, or in any case, their after-effects reverberate still. Marx and company, after all, had their day, and in the end we are left with a society that is more like the London of 1868 than the Moscow of 1921. It's Herzen's less absolute vision that we need now, as little as many would acknowledge it.
The one thing I was also forcibly reminded of is that the revolution was a very gendered business. Herzen and the menfolk revolutionize Russian society, literature, and culture; their women and children, no less intelligent or passionate, are almost uniformly disbarred from the political sphere (well symbolized by Herzen's son's marriage to, as Herzen's common-law wife--also the wife of his best friend--describes her, "an Italian peasant"). It would be folly to attribute this division of labor to the failure of the characters' grand dreams of a world changed (and I should note that, like Bakunin, I don't always agree with Herzen, but I agree that even when Herzen's wrong, he's right). But it does seem telling that this is one area that no one in the play can even conceptualize as a sphere in needs of its own turning.
Stoppard's introduction to the book is short and quite interesting; at one point he remarks of the play that "If my purpose had been to inform, I would have left out most of the play. In fact, I would have been mad to write a play at all" (xii). This is part of why, when the interpretation of Stoppard is firing on all cylinders and everything works right, Stoppard's plays can be so exhilarating: the plays and the actors in them can bring the characters and their ideas to life in a way that not even the most vivid prose can, and make us feel for the people who were so affected by them--and, in the end, see ourselves in them too. And the other reason Stoppard's plays are so grand, to me, is the way that they are all about ideas, and the power of them, and their way of changing everything whether people want it or not.