Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.
Old Left/New Left. Old New Left/Newer New Left.
What goes around keeps coming around.
But are we getting anywhere?
Burton Weltman
“So, you say you want a revolution.”
The Beatles.
Generational Rebellion Today and the Relevance of The Coast of Utopia.
Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia is a trilogy of plays that dramatize the trials and tribulations of a group of mid-nineteenth century exiled Russian dissidents who sought to reform from abroad the repressive Czarist regime in their home country. It is a historical drama that draws upon real historical figures as its main characters, including the journalist Alexander Herzen, the insurrectionist Michael Bakunin, the novelist Ivan Turgenev and other members of what has been called the Russian Generation of the 1840’s. The plays focus on conflicts among the exiles as they try to figure out how to move Russia from a decadent old order to a new and better one.
Differences among the exiles are both ideological and generational. While all of them consider themselves progressives of some sort, some are liberal democrats, others are socialists, anarchists, or communists. Some are more militant and utopian, others are more moderate and pragmatic. These ideological differences are exacerbated by generational differences. The younger among them push for more extreme measures, and each generation of young people is more radical than the last. The exiles become more moderate as they get older, or at least appear so to the next generation of young people. And while members of the Generation of the 1840’s pride themselves on being more radical than reformers of the prior generation, they are, in turn, scorned as milk-toasts by more radical members of the next generation.
The plays portray the sorts of conflicts that can arise between militant and moderate factions of a progressive political movement, and the complications that can emerge when these conflicts are intergenerational. The plays treat the utopian hopes of the younger militants with sympathy, but the moral of the story seems to be that getting to the coast of utopia, getting nearer to a good society but never actually getting there, is about as close as people can plausibly hope to get. Utopia is out of reach and utopianism, insisting on perfection and on all-or-nothing, is not a wise strategy. A pragmatic moderation with a step-by-step strategy is a wiser alternative.
This essay is being written during the spring of 2020 in the midst of a horrible world-wide pandemic, the ongoing disaster of global climate change, and the worst Presidential administration in American history. In the midst of these problems, progressives are in danger of being split by conflicts between those who are more utopian and militant – disproportionately younger activists – and those who are more pragmatic and moderate – mostly middle-aged folks. What is largely a generational rebellion threatens to undermine the ability of progressives to defeat President Trump and his cadre of right-wingers in the upcoming elections, and to address problems that all progressives agree need remedying. As a self-styled progressive, that is of great concern to me and is why I think The Coast of Utopia is particularly relevant to our times.
Cycles of Generational Rebellion: What goes around comes around.
It has become a commonplace rite of passage in modern Western society for young people to seek to establish unique identities of their own.[1] Being able to define oneself by oneself is considered by most young people to be a sign of maturity. It is something they often try to do by distinguishing themselves from their parents, and sometimes by rebelling against them. This rebellion usually takes one of two forms. In the most common form, young people go off in a different direction than that taken by their parents. Spurning their elders’ values, goals and/or achievements, these rebels look for worthwhile means and ends in other places.
But some young rebels take a different tack. They accept their elders’ values and goals but then try to push them to a higher level of commitment, effort and ofttimes risk. Defining adulthood in terms of self-assertion, doing one’s own thing and becoming somebody thereby, they spurn as an old person’s copout the conventional idea of maturity as consisting of forethought, patience and prudence. Instead of rejecting their parents as fools, these rebels condemn them as hypocrites, phonies and cowards. Often a significant cohort of young people within a generation will rebel in similar ways, mounting a massed assault on their elders, and therein lies the problem.
In-your-face generational rebellions of this sort have occurred many times in many ways in many countries, especially among political progressives and within progressive political movements. Progressives tend toward utopianism in any case, that is, toward seeking The Solution to all of the world’s problems in one fell swoop, and young progressives have a penchant for trying to reach even further in this quest than their elders. This frequently results in generational factionalism between younger radicals and middle-aged moderates. While factionalism is almost inevitable in any political movement, generational factionalism taken to the point of disaffection and estrangement has historically been one of the fatal flaws afflicting progressive movements.
Generational rebellions tend to occur in cycles, and the history of progressive movements in America over the course of the last century provides an example of these cycles. Within each new generation of young progressives, leading members have pushed progressive theories and practices to a new extreme. Each generation of young radicals has then invariably either flamed out in pseudo-revolutionary failure or fallen back in middle age into some sort of pragmatic reformism similar to what they had previously rejected in their elders. That was true in turn of the Populists, Socialists, Communists, and New Leftists alike. Each started as a militant tendency, ended as moderate, and became the target of the next generation of young radicals.
Populism was a political movement of the late nineteenth century made up mainly of small farmers who were seeking fair treatment from banks, railroads, and wholesale buyers, and who were demanding that the government do something to help them. It was considered a radical movement in its time. But come the early 1900’s, young Socialists, who were seeking a democratic overhaul of the whole capitalist economy, rejected their Populist elders as small-minded petty-bourgeois businessmen.
Socialists did not, however, avoid their own comeuppance. During the 1930’s, young Communists, who sought a revolutionary overthrow of the capitalist system, rejected their now aging Socialist elders as weak-kneed bourgeois petty-liberals. The extremism of the Communists’ position did not save them from their own reckoning with young radicals. Youthful anarcho-syndicalists of the self-styled New Left, ardent proponents of what was called participatory democracy, attacked their Old Left Communist elders during the 1960’s as hopelessly boring, stodgy authoritarians. Finally, in the present-day, what could be called Newer New Leftists have recently been rejecting the ways and means of the aging New Leftists, condemning them as middle-class cop-outs.[2] And, so it goes.
In condemning their predecessors as phonies and refusing to work with them, successive generations of young progressives split and weakened the progressive movement of that day. In then moving from militant self-assertion to prudent moderation as they aged, generally retaining their goals but moderating their methods and message, each generation of aging progressives opened the door for the next generational rebellion. It is a cycle that has been repeated so often it has become an example of déjà vu all over again. And this is the case not merely in America but in much of the rest of the world as well. What goes around keeps coming around, but are we getting anywhere? This is a question that underlies Tom Stoppard’s The Coast of Utopia.
1848/1968: The Past as Prologue.
The Coast of Utopia dramatizes generational rebellions among nineteenth century Russian radicals. First published and performed in 2002, it is focused around what was called the Generation of the 1840’s. The plays portray their efforts to take the progressivism of their predecessors, what could be called the Generation of the 1820’s that included the Decembrists, and carry it forward both faster and further. The plays portray, in turn, the rejection of the Generation of the 1840’s by a more radical and violent younger generation of radicals, the so-called Generation of the 1860’s that included a group of self-styled nihilists.
In addition to these generational differences, the plays highlight conflicts among the radicals of the Generation of the 1840’s that were based on their relative commitments to militancy and moderation, peaceful reform and violent revolution, education and direct action. Within the generation of the 1840’s, Herzen was the philosophical leader of those promoting the peaceful reform of Russia through education. Bakunin was the flamboyant leader of those who wanted to incite a violent revolution to overthrow the repressive Russian regime. Turgenev was a leading proponent of changing the world through education and cultivating the arts.
The focal event of the plays, and the main turning point in the lives of Herzen and the others was the European revolutions of 1848. Democratic revolutionaries across Europe in 1848 attempted to overthrow repressive monarchial regimes, most importantly in France, Germany and Italy. Herzen and his Russian comrades had high hopes that successful democratic revolutions in Western Europe would precipitate similar events in Russia. After some initial successes, the revolutions failed. The plays dramatize the hopes of the Russian radicals leading up to 1848, their disappointments thereafter, and the effects of 1848 on their political views.
The story of these Russian radicals is not merely of historical interest. It is relevant to understanding more recent historical events and present-day conflicts. The rebellious year 1968 in America and Europe, and the events surrounding that year, can be compared with 1848, and this analogy was seemingly intended by Stoppard. Although The Coast of Utopia was first published and performed in 2002, Stoppard has said that he started thinking about the plays in the late 1960’s, so that a comparison of the intergenerational and intragenerational conflicts among the rebels of the 1840’s in the plays to those of the 1960’s is pertinent.
The 1960’s were a period of rebellion in America and Europe just as the 1840’s had been. The 1970’s were a reactionary period in America and Europe just as were the 1850’s. And 1968 was a turning point just as 1848 had been. The theories and practices of 1960’s rebels can be usefully compared to those of the 1840’s. In turn, the intergenerational splits between the New Left and the Old Left during the 1960’s, the hopes of young leftists leading up to the rebellions of 1968, and their disappointments thereafter, are directly analogous to the 1840’s. Stoppard was himself among the disappointed young progressives in 1968.
And as with the 1840’s, generational splits between the New Left and Old Left during the 1960’s were compounded by ideological conflicts within the New Left over the wisdom of militancy versus moderation, violent revolution versus peaceful reform. Within the New Left in the United States there were, for example, community organizers, such as those who participated in the organizing efforts of SDS’s Economic Research and Action projects, and confrontationists, such as the so-called Weathermen who seemingly hoped to spark the overthrow of the government though random acts of violence. The latter got the publicity which tarnished the movement as a whole.
As with the progressive movement of the 1840’s, the progressive movement of the 1960’s died. And it was not because New Leftists became conservatives in the aftermath. To the contrary, most pursued careers, especially in education and the social services, that furthered their progressive values. But the movement died from a combination of right-wing backlash and self-inflicted wounds. The net result was that the right wing surged back into power in Europe and America during the 1970’s. Today, when conflict between pragmatists and ideologues, moderates and militants, utopians and realists, once again threatens to undermine the progressive movement, we can benefit from the example portrayed in The Coast of Utopia.
Historical Fiction/Fictional History: Feeling Ideas and Events.
Stoppard has said that the substance of The Coast of Utopia is primarily based on two works by the historian E.H. Carr and on writings by the political philosopher Isaiah Berlin.[3] The books by Carr are a history of mid-nineteenth century radical Russian dissidents called The Romantic Exiles, first published in 1933, and a biography of Bakunin, first published in 1937.[4] Carr is a sympathetic but critical historian of the escapades of the Russian exiles. Berlin, who promoted a liberal pragmatic philosophy, is cited by Carr for a series of essays on Russian thinkers. I think the plays reflect Carr’s history and Berlin’s philosophy.
Carr’s history books read almost like novels. They are wonderfully written, and they plumb the depths of his subjects’ psyches. His subjects were wordy, self-dramatizing intellectuals who left behind loads of letters and memoirs for Carr to work with. From these, Carr was able to construct brilliant psychological profiles of his main subjects. The debt of Stoppard to Carr is obvious. There is almost nothing of significance that happens in The Coast of Utopia that isn’t described in Carr’s The Romantic Exiles, except for some dream sequences that Stoppard invented seemingly in order to stage conversations among people that did not actually happen.
Since Stoppard’s plays follow Carr’s history books so closely, the question arises as to what is the purpose of the plays? And how should we characterize them, as art or as history, and as historical fiction or fictional history? The lyricist Yip Harburg once described the purpose of art as enabling people to feel ideas. Thinking is intellectual, he said, and feeling is emotional. But “to feel a thought is an artistic process.”[5] This is seemingly what Stoppard was trying to achieve – to have his audience feel the ideas and events in the plays. I think he achieved his purpose, but unnecessarily did it in a way that undermines his credibility. While he seemingly considered his plays to be historical fiction, I think they are actually fictional history. The difference between the two is significant.[6]
Historical fiction is an art form that recreates factual situations but then peoples those situations with fictional main characters. These characters face real historical circumstances and make choices similar to those that were made by real historical people, but the fictional characters are also provided with thoughts, words, and deeds that are clearly the invention of the author. In historical fiction about the American Revolution, for example, actual people such as George Washington may appear in the background saying and doing factual things, but the main characters will be fictional and their thoughts, words and deeds will be clearly fictional.
Historical fiction can make a real contribution to the study and appreciation of history. While history books can explain ideas and events of the past, historical fiction can help readers to identify with people in the past, and feel what it would be like to be in a past time and place. Through recreating past ways of life, historical fiction can put readers or an audience into the picture. It can enable them to vicariously face the circumstances and choices that people in the past faced, and reflect on what they might have done in those situations.
I think it is important, however, to distinguish historical fiction from fictional history. In contrast to historical fiction, fictional history takes actual people and then has them think, say and do fictional things. The author makes up things that are then attributed to real historical figures. In fictional history, actual people such as Washington will say and do fictional things. Fictional history is very troublesome because it is essentially a lie presented in the guise of truth.
It is only since the late nineteenth century that the study of history has been established on a professional basis, and that historians have been able to reject fictions that were being justified as truth because they were ostensibly the way things should have happened or the way a historical personage would have acted. Historians could now, for example, reject the fictional story invented by Parson Weems that six-year-old George Washington had confessed to chopping down a cherry tree because he could not tell a lie. Even though this story was long known to be a fiction, it had been widely accepted as a historical truth about Washington because it was ostensibly the way he would have reacted and, therefore, was a truth about him.
While the story about Washington and the cherry tree may seem innocuous, fictional history can have an unwholesome effect on factual history. This harm is exemplified by one of the greatest plays by perhaps the world’s greatest playwright, Richard III by Shakespeare. Richard III is a spectacular play that imprinted on students of history for some three hundred years a picture of King Richard III as a mentally and physically deformed demon. The picture, however, is false. Richard was not the hunchbacked evil demon he is so chillingly pictured by Shakespeare. He was seemingly a fairly popular and fair-minded king, and he was not a hunchback. The problem with the play lay with Shakespeare’s sources. His sources were supporters of the Lancasters in the War of the Roses between the Lancasters and the Yorks, and they were politically biased against the Yorkist Richard. Shakespeare started with bad facts and then brilliantly expanded and fictionalized them into a false picture that everyone thought was true.[7]
Crossing and confusing the line between fact and fiction is a dangerous practice, especially in our times when so many people, including President Trump, regularly exaggerate and downright lie about past and present events, often for political purposes. Public opinion in the modern world has become a struggle between those trying to convince people through facts and reason, and those trying to manipulate people with lies. And the liars seem to have the edge.
The Coast of Utopia is a mix of historical fiction and fictional history. It is very effective but I think Stoppard could have accomplished his intellectual and dramatic purposes if he had stuck to historical fiction and had used fictional characters in recreating the debates among nineteenth century Russian intellectuals. He could even have created characters who resembled Herzen, Bakunin, Turgenev and the rest, but given them different names. In that way, he could have avoided lying to his audience, which is what he essentially does by having actual people do a mix of factual and fictional things.
Setting the Historical Stage: E.H. Carr’s The Romantic Exiles.
The main themes of Carr’s Romantic Exiles are highlighted in the book’s title. Almost all of the characters in the book are exiles. The main characters are from Russia, but they mix with exiles from other European countries. And, according to Carr, almost all them, male and female, Russians and the others alike, but especially the Russians, were intoxicated with romanticism. Carr describes romanticism as “a movement for the worship of Human Nature and the liberation of the individual from the yoke of moral and political absolutism.” In personal relations, the romanticism of the exiles promoted a morality founded “on the apotheosis of the feelings, or like George Sand, on the religion of love.” In political affairs, “Its supreme expression was the French Revolution,” which the romantics perennially sought to replicate, only better this time.[8]
In their personal relations, Carr’s Russians were devotees of the novelist George Sand, and they enthusiastically adopted her credo that the purpose of life is love, that true love conquers all obstacles, and that nothing should be allowed to stand in the way of true love. Nothing, not conventions such as marriage, not other moral commitments, not concern for the feelings and welfare of others, not care for children or other innocent bystanders. Carr quotes Sand as proclaiming: “Why should it be a sin to abandon oneself to one’s own heart?”[9] He pokes fun at Sand’s philosophy and the devotion of the Russian exiles to her. In turn, the love-lives of Carr’s main characters are described as a succession of melodramatic relationships, all of them doomed, and each one initially ecstatic but eventually smashed.
Carr’s description of Herzen’s amorous entanglements provides an example of the tangled romantic webs the exiles wove, and the burlesque melodramas they enacted. As a young man, Herzen eloped with his first wife Natalie in a whirlwind of romantic love, wooing her with the adjuration that “You are I; Alexander and Natalie do not form a WE, but only my own I. My I is full, for you have been completely swallowed up and you no longer exist.” This was seemingly a Russian version of the old English saying that “A husband and wife are one, and the husband is the one.” Natalie wholeheartedly accepted this sexist pseudo-romanticism, and was willing to subordinate herself to Herzen’s “I” until Herzen seduced a serf woman which, Carr reports, “rudely tore down the romantic halo” that had surrounded their marriage.[10]
Despite being let down by Herzen, Carr reports that Natalie continued her pursuit of true love, and she subsequently started a torrid affair with an exiled German poet named Herwegh who was at the time living with his wife in Herzen’s house. Herzen was a wealthy and extremely generous person who frequently housed and subsidized needy exiles. In what Carr characterizes as true romantic fashion, Natalie expected Herzen not merely to accept the adulterous situation in his own household, but to applaud it. She saw her affair with Herwegh as an example of true love triumphing, and she insisted that Herzen ought to recognize and honor that. Herwegh’s wife Emma, who was like Natatlie a devotee of George Sand, accepted the situation. Herzen did not.
Herzen declared that he was not willing to live in the same house with his wife’s lover. He was, however, willing to leave Natalie so she could be with Herwegh. Natalie rejected that offer. Herzen was a wealthy and well-regarded author. Herwegh was a penniless minor poet who was dependent on his wife Emma for financial support. In sum, Natalie wanted both Herzen and Herwegh. Herzen wasn’t having any of that and he insisted that Herwegh leave his house. Herwegh eventually left, but the romantic complications remained unresolved.
As a means of resolving them, Herwegh’s wife Emma offered to leave Herwegh and let Natalie have Herwegh all to herself. Natalie rejected that offer. She was not about to leave the well-to-do and well-regarded Herzen for an impoverished Herwegh. The ever-melodramatic Herwegh then offered to let Herzen kill him. Herzen refused that offer. So, Natalie then offered to have Herwegh kill her. Herwegh refused that offer. Finally, Herwegh challenged Herzen to a duel. Herzen refused that offer. Shortly thereafter, Natalie died of tuberculosis[11]
That was not, however, the end of Herzen’s romantic imbroglios. Having been the victim in a bizarre romantic entanglement, he now became a perpetrator. Not long after Natalie’s death, Herzen began an affair with Natasha the wife of his best friend Ogarev. Ogarev and Natasha were living with Herzen and Herzen’s children at the time. A devotee of George Sand, Natasha was disappointed with Ogarev. So, she seduced Herzen. Herzen took it from there and subsequently had several illegitimate children with Natasha.
Ogarev was himself no neophyte in these tangled marital matters. He had previously had a long adulterous affair with Natasha when his first wife left him for a young painter. When his estranged first wife died, Ogarev married Natasha, but she then almost immediately began her affair with Herzen. As an erstwhile disciple of George Sand, Ogarev blessed the relationship between Herzen and Natasha. He eventually established a permanent relationship with a prostitute, supporting her and her son in return for her taking care of him when he was ill.[12]
I have only briefly summarized Herzen’s amorous affairs here, and his imbroglios make up only one strand of the Russian exiles’ romantic complications as reported by Carr. As Carr describes them, Herzen and the other Russian exiles were crazy for love, and they were people for whom life was an attempt to imitate art, albeit the highly romanticized and melodramatic art of George Sand. They were way ahead of their Victorian times in sexual matters, and they can be compared in this regard with the free-loving counter-culturists of the 1960’s. All of this is dramatized in The Coast of Utopia.
Romanticism also permeated the political ideas and activities of the Russian exiles, and they can also be compared in this regard to the New Leftists of the 1960’s. Like many of the refugees from other European countries, the Russians made a cult of revolution. They were utopians who believed in the magic of revolution to bring about a once-and-for-all perfect society. Most were devotees of Rousseau, and adherents of Rousseau’s romantic philosophy that people are basically good, that they are corrupted by bad institutions, and that if only those institutions could be reformed or destroyed (depending on whether you were a reformer like Herzen or an anarchist like Bakunin), then all would be well in the world. Carr describes the Russian exiles as a “collocation of Romanticism and Revolution.”[13] Karl Marx, a German refugee, is the one character in Carr’s book who is described as a realist, and he was despised by all of the rest of the refugees as a cold-blooded ideologue. This, too, is dramatized in Stoppard’s plays.
Herzen and other members of the Russian Generation of the 1840’s derived their political impetus from the failure of the prior generation of reformers, the Generation of the 1820’s, to effectuate political change Russia. In the wake of the French revolutionary wars and the defeat of Napoleon, progressives in Russia had hoped that Czar Alexander would reform the government and liberalize society. There was much organizing among Russian liberals during the late 1810’s and early 1820’s, and they had great hopes for future reforms that would make Russia more like a Western European country. Alexander stoked those hope with gestures in favor of Westernizing Russia. But then he died.
When Czar Alexander died in 1825, his younger brother Nicholas was named Czar. Nicholas was an arch-conservative who was not going to follow through with the liberalizing reforms that Alexander had hinted at. The Decembrists were a group of aristocratic army officers who wanted to replace Nicholas with another brother, the more liberal Constantine, as Czar, and to establish a constitutional monarchy in Russia. They staged a mass demonstration in December of 1825, hence their name the Decembrists, calling on Nicholas to abide by their demands.
The putative revolt was a shambles, with demonstrators fleeing en masse upon the approach of troops loyal to Czar Nicholas. The leaders and many of the participants were either executed or exiled to Siberia. Herzen and other members of the Generation of the 1840’s vowed to avenge the Decembrists, carry their reforms to revolution, and force change on the Russian government rather than merely tamely asking for change. This was, however, easier said than done.[14]
Russian reformers had a particularly difficult task for at least two reasons. First, Russia was ruled by a totalitarian Czarist regime that forbade all dissent and even any hint of dissent. Herzen was, for example, imprisoned for merely knowing some people who had said some disrespectful things about the regime. Many other people were suppressed for similarly trivial reasons. As a result, there was very little political and intellectual space in Russia for reformers to operate. This was the reason that so many of them went into exile. Herzen went into permanent exile starting in 1847, moving with his family and friends from country to country – France, Italy, Germany, Switzerland, wherever he felt able to set up shop. Like most of his Russian comrades, he finally settled for good in England, which was the home during the nineteenth century to a host of political exiles from various European countries.
A second major difficulty facing Russian reformers was that the overwhelming majority of the Russian people were isolated and illiterate peasants. They were not prime candidates for either political education or activism. Some three quarters of the people in Russia during the mid-nineteenth century were serfs, that is, peasants who were permanently tied to the land that they cultivated, land that was owned by Russian aristocrats. Symbolic of the repressive situation, Russian landowners did not refer to their property in terms of how many acres they owned but in terms of how many peasant “souls” they owned on their land.
But in the minds of Herzen and many of his comrades, serfdom could be a source of opportunity for reformers. Russian serfdom was like slavery except that serfs had some rights that slaves did not, and that was the key. In particular, Russian serfs lived in peasant villages that were organized on a communal and cooperative basis. As long as they gave the landlord his due in crops and labor, the villagers had the right to organize their work, allot plots of land on a rotating basis to each other, and distribute their remaining crops as they pleased.
Consistent with their Rousseauian romanticism, Herzen and his allies believed that the Russian village provided an ideal foundation for what they hoped would be a distinctly Russian form of socialism, a socialism that would not have to evolve out of industrial capitalism as Marx insisted. Herzen’s was the utopian dream that if only the serfs were free, they would develop a peaceful peasant socialism that he saw presaged in the serfs’ peasant villages. Toward this end, Herzen campaigned to end serfdom.
Herzen and most of the other exiles were wanted men in Russia, which persistently tried to get them back to Russia in order to silence them. They engaged in two main forms of political activism, both of which were intended to motivate the Russian masses: political propaganda and incendiary action. Most of them published revolutionary journals and tracts. Some also engaged in insurrections and attempted assassinations. The activities of the various European exiles were shaped in large part by the nature of the regimes which they opposed and the tolerance of the countries in which they resided. Stolid and solid mid-nineteenth century England was a perfect place for the exiles’ propagandizing which was done in foreign languages, addressed to foreign countries and, therefore, no threat to the stability of England.
The Russian exiles were almost all intellectuals who preened themselves on being a political force. This self-regard was not merely the pomposity that one often finds in self-styled intellectuals, but was rooted in reality. The Russian authorities treated the exiled intellectuals as dangerous and that, in and of itself, gave them attention and gave them power. A new word, “intelligentsia,” was even invented to describe this generation of Russian intellectuals. The intelligentsia was a social class of intellectuals coalesced in opposition to the existing Russian regime. Russian intellectuals were by definition revolutionaries.
Although Herzen was the most highly regarded of the Russian exiles, Bakunin was the most famous. Carr claims that “Bakunin was incomparably the greatest leader and agitator thrown up by the revolutionary movement of the nineteenth century,” and describes him as “a figure at once subhuman and superhuman.” Superhuman in his efforts and efficacy as an agitator but subhuman in his honesty and personal relations. Carr quotes Herzen as saying that Bakunin had “great ability and a worthless character.” Bakunin was almost everywhere in Europe where there was an uprising during the mid-nineteenth century, or trying to get there. He loved and lived for organizing secret societies and attempting to stir up rebellions.[15]
Bakunin was an anarchist. This meant that he did not want to overthrow one form of government to establish another. He wanted to destroy government altogether so that people could live collectively without being oppressed. Carr quotes him as proclaiming that “The passion for destruction is a creative passion,” since destroying repressive institutions frees people. He was not, however, what we would today call a libertarian. He did not believe in every person for him/herself. He was a socialist who believed in a cooperative society which operated on the principle of all for one and one for all.
When during the 1860’s, Bakunin was approached by younger radicals who considered themselves nihilists, that is, believers in nothing except rebellion for its own sake, he was initially attracted to their zest for action, but eventually pulled away. Their violence seemed pointless. He was not a nihilist but a socialist, and he deeply believed in his ideas, even if they were utopian and delusional. Carr says that when Bakunin died in 1876, he still held to “the same stubborn lifelong refusal to compromise with reality” that had carried him through his life.[16]
Herzen was a different sort of person. He was constantly trying to reconcile his ideals with reality. Carr states that for Herzen “Romanticism was his religion, liberalism his political faith, and constitutional democracy his ideal for Russia.”[17] And unlike Bakunin who remained a utopian all his life, Herzen moved from utopianism to realism, with the events of 1848 as a turning point. Still idealistic, but willing to compromise with circumstances.
In England, Herzen was a central figure among a colloquy of exiled would-be revolutionary leaders, which included Mazzini from Italy, Kossuth from Hungary, Worcell from Poland, Blanc and Ledru-Rollin from France, and occasionally Marx from Germany. All of them, as Carr tells it, were utopians who believed in the magic of revolution to resolve all problems, even including Marx who insisted his views were scientific and not utopian.
Prior to 1848, Herzen idolized Western Europe and especially the French for their democratic revolutionary tradition. He was disillusioned by the events of 1848, not so much by the failure of the revolutions and the repressions in most of Europe, but by the disappointing success of the revolution in France. Middle class and working-class French people united to overthrew their king and establish a democratic republic in the spring of 1848. But then French voters elected a majority of conservative anti-democratic members to their new legislature and eventually acquiesced in Napoleon the Third’s seizure of dictatorial power. Democracy committing suicide, Herzen mourned.
In Herzen’s eyes, both the “Proletariat and bourgeoisie were alike discredited.” At that point, he gave up on the West, and he turned away from advocating European revolution as the prelude to a Russian revolution. He veered, instead, toward the idea that the unique position of the Russian serfs made them the best bet for a better Russian society, and he began promoting the idea that the liberation of the serfs would be the first step toward a democratic socialist Russia.[18]
Czar Nicholas had died in 1855 and was succeeded by the more liberal Alexander II. In 1857, Herzen began publishing a Russian language journal called The Bell which was secretly distributed in Russia. The main purpose of the journal was to campaign against serfdom. The journal was a great success and widely read in Russia despite being illegal. It was eventually being read even by the Czar and other high government officials, and the popular success of the journal was a factor in convincing the Czar to abolish serfdom in 1861.
At that point, Herzen and his comrades were ecstatic, until they heard about the terms of the abolition. According to the Czar’s decree, the serfs were freed from bondage but they were not given any land. Instead, they were forced to enter into rental contracts with their former owners which essentially made them into sharecroppers and debt slaves to their former masters. In addition, there were new rules that undermined the role of the peasant communes, the institution upon which Herzen had based his long-range hopes for Russia.[19]
Bakunin took the disappointment with the terms of the liberation as proof that only insurrection would bring about real change. Herzen disagreed and it resulted in a final split between them. Herzen still believed in peaceful, gradual change, even if it meant going two steps forward and then one step backward. But he was jeered by the younger Generation of the 1860’s. Carr reports that “Herzen had lost the confidence of the rising generation” and that “He was a general without an army.” Herzen died in 1870 a disheartened but still determined man.[20]
The Plays: The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage.
The summary of Carr’s The Romantic Exiles that I have just provided is also a summary of the gist of The Coast of Utopia. At the core of the plays are the generational conflicts between the Russian Generations of the 1820’s (accommodationists), 1840’s (revolutionary reformers), and 1860’s (nihilists), as well as the conflicts within the Generation of the 1840’s – Herzen the reformer, Bakunin the insurrectionist, and Turgenev the artiste. Ideas, ideals, and ideologies predominate. There is no action in the plays. There is only talking. But then, these are intellectuals and talking is what intellectuals do. The chronology of the plays runs from 1833 to 1868, and the three plays are effectively one long complicated conversation among the main characters.
So, how does Stoppard take Carr’s engaging history and make it into a trilogy of plays in which the audience can feel the ideas? For one thing, he makes his audience sit through three long plays so that they become immersed in the society and the company of his characters. You come to feel that you know them personally, and you miss them when they are gone.
He does it, also, through techniques that lead the audience to experience the events as real. The scenes proceed in roughly chronological order, but there are overlapping scenes, and flashbacks to former scenes that are then developed from a slightly different angle. There are also fallbacks to previous times that start the clock over again with different people and places. And there are false starts that lead you to think a scene is going in one direction but then leads to somewhere else. Thoreau once said that time was just a stream in which he went fishing. The plays run along like a stream of conversation out of which pieces of meaning are pulled, some are thrown back in, and somehow some overall messages are felt.
The feel of the characters’ ideas is also created by their ways of conversing and interacting. Their talking is often confused and confusing, much like a Robert Altman movie with several conversations going on at once, some people talking over one another, and other people misunderstanding what is being said. Their interactions are peripatetic, as they wander about from place to place. We the audience struggle to make sense of what is being said and done just as the characters do.
The scenes are kaleidoscopic, rapidly changing, with lots of very short scenes – some consisting of only a couple of spoken sentences or a single gesture – mixed in with very long scenes that seem to go on forever. When scenes overlap, there can be lengthy periods of time between them, but the characters will appear in the later scene in the same place and continuing the same conversation as in the earlier scene. Characters who have not seen each other for long periods of time will continue, without missing a beat, conversations that began years ago. The spasmodic nature of the scenes seems to reflect the way in which the characters experience them and we feel the disjuncture with them.
There two main subjects of conversation in the plays: love and revolution. The characters feel very strongly about both, and we feel along with them. We feel Herzen’s agony as he tries to work his way through his romantic entanglements and work out a plausible scheme for effecting change in Russia. We experience Bakunin’s ecstasy as he imagines and plots one insurrectionist scheme after another. We share Turgenev’s personal empathy and political apathy as he observes the personal and political affairs of his colleagues, and writes about them in his novels.
The characters frequently posture and speechify, as though they were actors in a melodrama with themselves as the stars. In their view, art creates models for life, and then life models itself on art. In the end, each of them, the male primary characters and the female secondary characters, is trying to find a way to live with himself or herself. They have constructed self-images out of models provided by George Sand and Rousseau, they struggle to fulfill those self-images, and most often they don’t succeed.
Since the plays essentially follow the historical narrative in Carr’s The Romantic Exiles, what follows are short summaries of the events and snippets of the conversations that Stoppard has created for the characters. It isn’t what they actually said but what Stoppard thinks they would have said. It’s a sort of truth without being actually factual. Like the story of Washington and the cherry tree, but with Carr’s book to support the historical plausibility of Stoppard’s creations. The conversational highlights below are intended to indicate the drift of the characters’ arguments and the evolution of their ideas. The goal is to try to provide some feel for the plays.
Part I: Voyage.
Voyage runs chronologically from the years 1833 to 1844. It dramatizes the attempts of Bakunin, Herzen and other Russian intellectuals to find a perfect philosophy that expresses their ideals. The play is a voyage of self and social discovery that results in their becoming dissidents and voyaging into exile. Bakunin as a young adult is the main character. The play opens and closes with Bakunin’s father, a man of the Generation of 1820’s, complaining about Bakunin. Herzen, Turgenev and various others weave in and out of what is essentially Bakunin’s story.
Act One takes place between 1833 and 1841 on the verandah and in the garden of the large estate owned by Bakunin’s wealthy father in rural Russia. Act One covers Bakunin’s young adulthood. It is essentially an eight-year conversation centered around Bakunin as he moves from extolling one German philosophy of the self to the next, and repeatedly interferes in the love-lives of his four sisters. The location stays the same throughout, and scenes often overlap, with the next scene starting as though the last had never ended despite time having passed, and with characters picking up on discussion in succeeding years as though no time had passed.
Bakunin comes across as a chronic adolescent. He is the male heir of the family name and estate, and he is spoiled by his parents and especially by his four sisters who idolize him. His father is a cultured man who considers himself something of a liberal, albeit he defends the monarchy as necessary for social stability, and serfdom as being in the best interests of the peasants who benefit from security in their bondage. He expects Bakunin to study agriculture so as to take over management and modernization of the estate.
Bakunin rebels against his father’s expectations, but initially in an apolitical pursuit of philosophy. He essentially takes his father’s pretense to culture and ups the ante in wanting to make a profession of philosophy rather than farming. He is a socially maladjusted dilletante who continually says the wrong thing and offends people, and pretends to the role of a bohemian but lives as a rich aristocrat. He playacts the romanticism of George Sand and pontificates about a succession of German romantic philosophers, each one of whom he proclaims as the best.
Bakunin begins his philosophical journey extolling Schelling, and lauding “the great discovery of the age! The life of the Spirit is the only real life: our material existence stands between us and our transcendence to the Universal Idea where we become one with the Absolute!” He moves on to Fichte. “I got led astray by Schelling,” he proclaims, “He tried to make the Self just another part of the world – but now Fichte shows that the world doesn’t exist except where I meet it – there is nothing but self.” He finishes the act with Hegel. “I was on the wrong track with Fichte, I admit it – Fichte was trying to get rid of objective reality, but Hegel shows that reality can’t be ignored.”[21] He measures each of these philosophies as to how well they aggrandize the self, and his self in particular. Bakunin wants his father to pay his way to study philosophy in Germany, but his father doesn’t go for it, and the first act ends with a breach between Bakunin and his father.
Act Two takes place between 1834 and 1844 in various locations in Moscow except for the last short concluding scene which is set back on the veranda of Bakunin’s father’s estate. Act Two runs parallel to and overlaps with Act One, especially as to the ideas and antics of Bakunin. We see Bakunin saying and doing similar things as in Act One but in a different context. Act Two essentially complements Act One.
In Act One, Bakunin is primarily contrasted with his father and sisters. In Act Two, he is contrasted with Herzen, Belinsky (a literary critic) and Turgenev. In both Acts, Bakunin comes across as an egoistic ass. Herzen comes across as a reasonable man and a man of reason. Belinsky looks like a decent guy with idealistic literary ideas. Tugenev is an outside observer.
Herzen is the hero of the plays and generally articulates the main points of the plays. At the opening of Act Two, he effectively summarizes the position of Russian intellectuals and the consequences of the repressiveness of the Czarist regime, saying that “Words are become deeds. Thoughts are deeds. They are punished more severely than ordinary crimes. We are revolutionaries.” The Czarist regime has defined intellectuals as revolutionaries and, thereby, forced intellectuals to act as revolutionaries if they are to remain intellectuals. This, in turn, gives Russian intellectuals influence over the rest of the restive Russian population. The Czarist regime has essentially created its own opposition.[22]
Shortly thereafter, when Herzen criticizes and dismisses an older reformer of the past generation as being too timid and out-of-date with the needs of the progressive movement, the old man warns Herzen that “it will happen to you one day…some young man with a smile on his face, telling you ‘Get out of the way, you’re behind the times!’” At which point, the old man leaves the stage and the play, but leaves behind a prescient prophecy.[23]
Bakunin weaves in and out of Act Two, each time extolling a new German philosopher as he did in Act I, before finally settling on Hegel. “You must read Hegel,” he insists, “Hegel is the man!” Hegel, Bakunin claims, tells us how history shapes events and how events are the dialectical fulfillment of history. Herzen, having just returned from six years’ exile in Siberia, gives Bakunin money to go to Berlin to study philosophy. But Herzen opines that Hegel has the dialectic upside down. “People don’t storm the Bastille because history proceeds by zigzags. History zigzags because when people have had enough, they storm the Bastille.” That is, people make history, history doesn’t make people.[24]
As Act Two closes, one of Bakunin’s sisters reports that he has finally found his true calling in Germany. Bakunin “has discovered Revolution,” she says, “Now he knows where he was going wrong.” The play ends with Bakunin’s aged and blind father, a remnant of the prior generation, sitting on his veranda bemoaning that his son has become a revolutionary. As night symbolically falls on the old man, he claims that, blind though he is, he has seen the sunset.[25]
Part II: Shipwreck.
Shipwreck runs chronologically from 1846 to 1852, with flashbacks at the end of each act. It takes place in several places in Russia and Europe. The play portrays the failure of the exiles’ hopes for the revolutions of 1848 and the failure of most of their romantic relationships.
Herzen takes center stage in this play, with Bakunin and Turgenev weaving in and out of the action. Herzen regularly quarrels with his friends about politics, religion and love, and breaks with them, only to welcome them back shortly thereafter. He is wealthy and he is very generous toward his friends. Herzen’s family-life is wrecked during this play, as his wife Natalie has an affair with the poet Herwegh, and his mother and son are drowned at sea in a shipwreck.
While Turgenev holds to his idealistic views of art, Herzen’s romantic ideals of love and his utopian political hopes are wrecked. Bakunin retains his utopian dreams.
Act One runs chronologically from 1846 to 1848. It opens with Herzen’s best friend Ogarev bemoaning that he had thought he would love his wife Maria for eternity and that their marriage would be eternal bliss, but she has just run off with a second-rate painter. So much for George Sand’s idealism of love.
Herzen and Turgenev have a political argument that exemplifies their respective positions throughout the three plays. Turgenev dismisses Herzen’s hopes for political reform based on popular uprising. The Russian people, he claims, are too ignorant and ill-behaved. “The only thing that will save Russia is Western culture transmitted by people like us,” he proclaims, which is a long-term, top-down process of reform. Herzen replies that “You judge the common people after they have been brutalized. But people are good, by nature. I have faith in them.” And he continues to hope for bottom-up political reform.[26]
Herzen and Bakunin have a political discussion in which Bakunin announces the political philosophy that will guide him for the rest of his life. Essentially renouncing his youthful search for the perfect German philosophy, he claims that “The mistake is to put ideas before action. Act first. The ideas will follow. Start by destroying everything.” When everything is destroyed, he insists, then the people will be free to live in peace and harmony. “Destruction is a creative passion!” he proclaims. Herzen thinks this is madness.[27]
The revolutions of 1848 come and go. All the exiles are deeply disappointed by their outcome, and despair of using the West as a model and inspiration for social change in Russia. In the aftermath of 1848, the literary critic Belinsky speaks for all of them when he tells Turgenev that “I’m sick of utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them.” And then he dies.[28]
Act Two runs chronologically from 1849 to 1852. The act centers around Herzen’s wife Natalie, including her romantic views of love derived from George Sand; her love affair with Herwegh; her devastation at the death of two of her children; and, finally, her own death. At the end of the act, Herzen proposes a pragmatic political philosophy and a hope for reform in Russia based on the existing peasant communes.
Act Two opens with Herwegh reading Marx’s The Communist Manifesto to a skeptical Natalie. Herzen states his support for socialism but opposition to communism because it suppresses individuality. “Freedom,” he proclaims, “is what we give each other, not what we take from each other like a fought-over loaf. We balance what we give up against our need for the cooperation of other people – who are each making the same balance for themselves.” His is a pragmatic cooperative philosophy based on mutual caring and commitment.[29]
Natalie counters with her own romantic philosophy of life as a work of art, an ecstatic rather than pragmatic vision. “The world we make for ourselves is the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us,” she says. And she pursues this ideal through a burgeoning love affair with Herwegh. The affair turns ugly, however, with all of the twists and turns described by Carr in The Romantic Exiles. Through the homicidal threats and suicidal counterthreats, Natalie insists that “All my actions spring from the divine spirit of love.” In the midst of this imbroglio, Herzen’s mother and son are drowned. And shortly thereafter, Natalie dies.[30]
Toward the end of the act, Herzen has a dream sequence in which he and Bakunin debate their respective political positions. Bakunin has been in jail in Germany for trying to stir up a rebellion there. Herzen has repeatedly sent money and other aid to Bakunin as a friend even though Herzen opposes Bakunin’s methods. Bakunin continues to insist on his strategy of maximum destruction of the old order. Herzen announces a pragmatic strategy of using aspects of the old order to build the new, in particular the peasant communes.
“Life’s bounty is in its flow, later is too late,” Herzen tells Bakunin. It’s the movement and not the end that counts. We think that life “is carrying us to the place we’re expected! But there is no such place, that’s why it is called utopia.” Russia can be different, he insists, if the intellectuals can reach the peasants. “The village commune can be the foundation of true populism,” by which he means “Russian socialism.” But “There is no map,” Herzen cautions. It is a voyage with only a moral compass, and there is no end, no utopia. “Socialism, too, will reach its own extremes,” he warns, and then socialism will itself have to be changed.[31]
Part III: Salvage.
Salvage runs chronologically from 1853 to 1866, and takes place in England. The play focuses on Herzen picking up the pieces of his personal and political lives, and making something of them, albeit not all that he had hoped. His family life with Natalie having been shattered by her death, he begins a new family with Natasha, his best friend’s wife. His hopes for a Russian revolution based on European models having been shattered by the failure of the revolutions of 1848, he begins publishing The Bell, a journal, secretly distributed in Russia, that calls for the abolition of serfdom.
Herzen’s new family life is modestly successful and he has children with Natasha. His journal is politically very successful and is a factor in convincing the Czar to abolish serfdom. But the abolition of serfdom is done in a way that undermines Herzen’s hopes for a Russian socialism based on peasant communes. His disappointment is compounded when he finds himself scorned and rejected by a younger generation of Russian rebels. The play ends with Herzen’s resignation to going forward as best he and his comrades can, even if it is in cycles of forward and then backward before going forward again.
Act One runs chronologically from 1853 to 1857. It deals mainly with the domestic affairs of Herzen and his entourage and ends with new complications in his life and the lives of his family and friends. In between, Herzen and Bakunin further hammer out their political philosophies.
The act opens with a dream of Herzen’s in which there is a gathering at Herzen’s house in London of the leading exiled revolutionaries from all over Europe. The gathering includes the Italian Mazzini, the Germans Marx and Ruge, the French Blanc and Ledru-Rollin, the Hungarian Kossuth, the Pole Worcell. All of them are erstwhile opponents of the authoritarian regimes in their respective countries, and all of them are vainly plotting revolutions in their homelands.
The exiles in Herzen’s dream call themselves “The International Committee for Friendship and Cooperation between Democrats in Exile,” a pompous name for an impotent group. No sooner does the meeting begin than Marx leaves in a huff. The participants and their ideas are too bourgeois and not sufficiently radical for him. Shortly thereafter, Herzen excoriates the other exiles for the opposite reason, as being too extreme. He berates them as a bunch of “schemers, dreamers, monomaniacs from every failed insurrection from Sicily to the Baltic.” He complains that they have not learned anything from the failure of the revolutions of 1848. “You want to start it again at the moment when all was lost, so that you can make the same mistakes again.”[32]
Later in the act, Bakunin continues to insist to Herzen that “How can we make a new Golden Age and set men free again? By destroying order.” But he then reveals the irreconcilable contradiction in his revolutionary position when he says “Left to themselves people are noble, generous, uncorrupted, they’d create a completely new kind of society if only people weren’t so blind, stupid, selfish.” So, which is it? Are the people uncorrupted and noble or are they stupid and selfish?[33]
The act ends with the death of the arch-conservative Czar Nicholas and the ascension of a more liberal Czar Alexander II. Alexander II has apparently been a reader of Herzen’s journal and has been talking about abolishing serfdom. Herzen has high hopes for the end of serfdom and for the possibilities of Russian socialism. “Russian socialism is not utopian,” he insists. The existing communes provide a realistic framework for it. The act ends with Herzen kissing Natasha, his best friend Ogarev’s wife. This will be the beginning of a long affair.[34]
Act Two runs from 1859 to 1866. It deals with the abolition of serfdom by Czar Alexander II and its disappointing aftermath. Herzen, Turgenev and Bakunin have their final disagreements. Herzen and the Generation of the 1840’s are mocked and rejected by younger radicals, the so-called Generation of the 1860’s. The play closes with Herzen pragmatically resigned to doing what he can as best he can.
The act opens with Herzen rejoicing in the success of his journal in reaching tens of thousands of Russians, and in influencing the Czar who has just announced his intention to abolish serfdom. Flushed with success, Herzen regales the members of his household with the names of the various political thinkers from whom he derived his own philosophy. They include Proudhon, from whom he got his antipathy to authority; Rousseau, from whom he derived the nobility of natural man; Fourier, from whom he got the ideal of the harmonious community; Blanc from whom he learned the important role of workers; and, Saint-Simon, from whom he learned about the development of the whole man. He is very full of himself.[35]
Turgenev throws cold water on Herzen, belittling him and Ogarev for thinking that the liberation of the serfs will lead to socialism. “Personally,” he proclaims, “I only denounce you as sentimental fantasists.” Turgenev also informs Herzen that the new generation of young radicals scorn Herzen and his liberal followers. “The word ‘liberal’ has now entered the scatological vocabulary like ‘halfwit’ or ‘hypocrite’…It means anyone who supports peaceful reform over violent revolution – like you and The Bell [Herzen’s journal]”[36]
Herzen is later confronted by a young radical, Nikoley Chernyshevsky, who berates Herzen as being out of date and out of time. “Your generation were the romantics of the cause,” Chernyshevsky says, “And now I find that I cannot read you anymore.” “Above all,” he declares, “I won’t listen to babbling about reform in The Bell. Only the axe will do.” And the goal of the revolution, Chernyshevsky concludes, is “Not communal socialism, but communistic socialism” in which all people will be and do the same.[37] Herzen denounces Chernyshevsky’s ideal of communism as “the utopia of the antheap,” and bemoans that he never thought the progressive movement could be so dramatically split.[38]
In 1861, the Czar abolishes serfdom and Herzen is ecstatic. “We won,” Herzen exclaims. “Progress by peaceful steps. You have conquered,” Ogarev says. But then Natasha pours cold water on the celebrating: She reads that the peasants have been are told they are free but they have to pay for the land that they till. They are effectively debt slaves. Peasants have rioted all over Russia and the army has massacred them. Herzen moans that “Chernyshevsky must be laughing into his whiskers.” Peaceful reform has succeeded in form but failed in substance.[39]
In the wake of their disappointments with the liberation of the serfs, Bakunin is back and ready for more secret societies and insurrections. But the contradictions in his position are revealed once again in a tirade he directs against Herzen. First he proclaims that “true freedom is spontaneity…All discipline is vicious. Our first task is to destroy authority. There is no second task.” But then claims that this will be done by “a dedicated group of revolutionaries under iron discipline, answerable to my absolute authority.” So, first Bakunin says that all discipline is vicious and the revolution will rid humanity of discipline, and then he says that the revolution will be achieved through iron discipline. Which is it? And does he think you can make freedom through dictatorship? In this sequence, Stoppard seems to be taking a swipe at the Bolsheviks who eventually did make a revolution in Russia. In any case, Bakunin is still the self-centered adolescent who began the first play. He has not grown.[40]
But Herzen has and that seems to be the point of the three plays. When some young radicals attempt to assassinate the Tzar, Herzen condemns it. He is then accosted by a young nihilist who condemns Herzen. The nihilist says that “The young generation has understood you, and we have turned away in disgust.” Fulfilling the prediction made by the old reformer whom Herzen had himself dismissed as being over the hill in the first play, the young radical snarls at Herzen: “Get out of the way, you’re behind the times. Forget that you’re a great man. What you are is a dead man.” What goes around comes around, and Herzen is now on the receiving end.[41]
Thereafter, Herzen pronounces his final philosophy and what seems to be the moral of The Coast of Utopia. The new generation of radicals, Herzen says, are “let down by the ancient dream of a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name.” We must stop killing each other, he insists, for an impossible perfection. “Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other.” Our goal must be “To open men’s eyes and not tear them out.” What is to be done, he concludes, is “To go on, and to know there is no landfall of the paradisal shore, and still to go on.”[42]
Commenting specifically on the weather but implicitly on the political future, Natasha has the last words in the plays: “There’s going to be a storm.”
A Socialist Candide?
“Let dreamers dream what worlds they please
Those Edens can’t be found
The sweetest flowers
The fairest trees
Are grown in solid ground.”
Candide. Leonard Bernstein & Richard Wilbur
So, what are we to make of The Coast of Utopia? Like Stoppard’s other plays, these plays raise more questions than they provide answers. In his final peroration, Herzen sounds a lot like Candide in Voltaire’s novel and Leonard Bernstein’s musical of that name. At the end of Candide’s long travails in search of a perfect society, he settles down on a small patch of land with his comrades. And when the philosopher Pangloss begins a long discourse on the nature of perfection in the universe, Voltaire’s Candide stops him. “That is very well put, said Candide, but we must go and work our garden.” Bernstein’s musical likewise ends with Candide saying: “We’re neither pure, not wise, nor good. We’ll do the best we know. We’ll build our house and chop our wood. And make our garden grow.” The ending of Candide is frequently taken as a pragmatic but anti-social avowal of individualism. Herzen’s pledge to go on as best he and his comrades can seems instead, like a pragmatic avowal to go on as socialists, step by step and not in one big revolutionary leap. But Herzen does not have the last word of the play. Natasha has the last word in predicting a storm.
And a storm did come to Russia. Although Herzen is the sympathetic hero in the plays, Bakunin could be seen in retrospect to have had the better of the argument. It did take a violent revolution by a group of conspirators, the Russian Revolution of 1917 led by the Bolsheviks, to bring about significant changes to Russian society. But were the consequences of that revolution good or bad? By the 1930’s, Stalin had essentially made himself the Communist Czar of the Soviet Union, and ruled over a regime at least as oppressive as that in nineteenth century Russia. So, from the vantage point of the 1960’s when Stoppard first started thinking about writing the plays, maybe Bakunin could be said to have been right about what it took to make a change in Russia, albeit wrong about what would be the outcome.
But then starting in November of 1989 in Stoppard’s birthplace of Czechoslovakia and continuing for the next two years, Communist regimes fell from power all over Eastern Europe and in the Soviet Union. In Czechoslovakia, it was called the Velvet Revolution because it was completely peaceful and was led by intellectuals such as Vaclav Havel. The other revolutions were also essentially peaceful and were disproportionately led by intellectuals. In the wake of the downfall of Communism, liberal democratic regimes were established in Russia and the countries of Eastern Europe. From the vantage point of 2002 when The Coast of Utopia was first published and performed, things looked very hopeful for these countries. So, maybe from the perspective of 2002, Herzen looked right and Bakunin looked wrong.
But we are now almost twenty years down the road since The Coast of Utopia was first published and performed, and things do not look good any longer in Russia and most of Eastern Europe. The liberal democracies are long gone from Russia and most Eastern European countries, and repressive authoritarian regimes have taken power. So, from our vantage point today, it looks like both Herzen and Bakunin were wrong, and maybe it was Turgenev who was right. Turgenev kept saying that you cannot make democracy through a political revolution, and that it takes hundreds of years of cultural development before people will be willing and able to live democratically. If that is the case, the denouement of democracy in Russia and Eastern Europe is no surprise, and we have a long wait until the educational efforts of intellectuals like Turgenev take root there.
It isn’t clear who was right in these matters – Herzen, Bakunin or Turgenev. But there is one thing upon which all three agreed, even if they did not always practice what they preached in this regard, and which I think we can take away from The Coast of Utopia. Ideological and generational factionalism that splits progressives into rival camps paves the way for right-wingers and reactionaries to take and keep power. That is a lesson we need to heed in the present-day.
BW 6/20
Postscript Note on the Title of the Play: In A Winter’s Tale, Shakespeare refers to the land-locked country of Bohemia as having a coast. This has generally been considered a blunder by Shakespeare, albeit Bohemia may have in the past actually controlled some coast land. In any case, in 1893, William Dean Howells, the dean of American letters at that time, albeit all but forgotten today, published a novel called The Coast of Bohemia. The novel satirized the artistic dithering of a crowd of wealthy New York dilettantes, a bunch of would-be bohemians striving for a revolutionary cultural status that they could never really attain. In naming his play The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard seemed to be playing on the title of Howells’ novel as he portrayed a bunch of would-be social revolutionaries, most of whom were nothing more than dilettante radicals, who could never attain their impossible utopian goal.
BW 7/21
Footnotes.
[1] Eric Erickson. Identity: Youth and Crisis. New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 1968.
[2] “An Open Letter to the New New Left From the Old New Left.” Signed by 81 Former Leaders of the Students for a Democratic Society. The Nation 4/16/20.
[3] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. P.IX.
[4] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Michael Bakunin. New York: Vintage Books, 1961.
[5] Yip Harburg. Quoted in Brian Greene. Until the End of Time. Alfred Knopf: New York, 2020. P.241.
[6] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. P. XII.
[7] See the wonderful historical fiction detective story The Daughter of Time about Richard III by Josephine Tey.
[8] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. P.25
[9] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. P. 57.
[10] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.20, 22.
[11] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997 1997. Pp.78-79, 84-85, 89.
[12] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.170, 175-177.
[13] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. P.25.
[14] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. P.14.
[15] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.10, 30, 200, 320 See also E.H. Carr Michael Bakunin. New York: Vintage Books, 1961. P.25. Bakunin’s personality “left its mark on half of nineteenth century Europe.”
[16] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.29, 320.
[17] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. P.228 See also Isaiah Berlin: Introduction to Alexander Herzen’s From the Other Shore. London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson1956. Pp.XXI-XXII. Herzen was “a revolutionary without fanaticism,” a pragmatic problem solver who thought “that all genuine questions are of necessity specific, intelligible only in specific contexts.”
[18] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.13, 183.
[19] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.179,186, 189
[20] E.H. Carr The Romantic Exiles. London: Serif, 1997. Pp.198, 228, 231, 233
[21] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.14, 33, 51.
[22] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. P.64.
[23] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. P.64.
[24] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.100, 108-109, 110.
[25] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.114, 119.
[26] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.142, 143.
[27] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.160-161.
[28] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.162, 180.
[29] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007.Pp.183, 188.
[30] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.192, 199, 208.
[31] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.223, 225.
[32] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.241-242, 248-249.
[33]Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.268, 269.
[34] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.281, 282, 289.
[35] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.290, 292-293.
[36] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.297-298.
[37] Chernyshevsky actually wrote a revolutionary tract titled What is to be done? that later influenced Lenin who wrote a Bolshevik tract with the same title.
[38] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.306, 308, 311.
[39] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. P.320.
[40] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.343.
[41] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.338.
[42] Tom Stoppard. The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage. New York: Grove Press, 2007. Pp.346-347.
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