Tom Stoppard: reality effect

THE COAST OF UTOPIA By Tom Stoppard,
Faber, £18.90

This is an epic of a play that is divided into three parts — Voyage, Salvage and Shipwreck. Its main characters are members of the 19th century Russian intelligentsia who were obsessed with the idea of reforming Russian society and building an ideal society. Tom Stoppard’s play is based on history and he draws extensively on the essays of Isaiah Berlin published in The Russian Thinkers, and E.H. Carr’s now practically forgotten minor classic, The Romantic Exiles.

To appreciate the play, it is necessary to understand the word intelligentsia and to distinguish it from the notion of intellectuals. Intelligentsia is a Russian word invented in the 19th century to describe a group of people united by something more than interest in the world of ideas. Members of the Russian intelligentsia saw themselves as members of a dedicated order committed to propagating a specific attitude to life.

At the centre of the play, perhaps because he was arguably the most powerful writer of the intelligentsia, is the mercurial character of Alexander Herzen. He makes a small appearance in the first part of the play that focuses on Michael Bakunin, the great friend of and rival of Herzen. But both parts two and three are about Herzen, while other important characters — Bakunin, the novelist Turgenev, Karl Marx, the Chartist leader Ernest Jones, the French revolutionary Louis Blanc and others — flit in and out of the stage.

Important members of the Russian intelligentsia could not of course survive under the Tsarist autocracy with its strict censorship. Those who could, like Herzen, lived in self-exile in Europe. The drama thus takes place in Paris, Switzerland and of course, London. The journey out from Russia was the great voyage.

There is a marvellous scene where Stoppard successfully captures the debate, the excitement and the disappointment of the revolutionaries in Paris during the 1848 revolution, the year that made and unmade the hopes of so many of them. This is a play full of words and these constitute the drama, rather than any action. It is apt of course that a play about the intelligentsia should be short of action. The over-dependence on words in no way takes away from the speed of the play and its attractiveness. The strength of Stoppard is that he makes the characters appear real. They do not become set cardboard pieces, as often happens with plays and novels that deal with actual historical figures.

Herzen did not stop his quest for a different and just society at the political and economic level. He brought his ideals into his personal life and into his home. He helped every single revolutionary cause in Europe and any revolutionary who came to him for help with money and hospitality. His home was an open house throughout the year. Herzen also became the lover of his best friend’s wife. It led to anguish and suffering as the three of them continued to live together in their search for an idealized selfless love. Stoppard’s play captures these travails of Herzen’s life with some poignancy and also a dash of humour. The third part of the play, showing that period when so many of Herzen’s dreams seem to be coming apart, is perhaps the most moving.

Herzen once wrote, “in general modern man has no solutions”. Following this, Stoppard’s great play has no conventional denouement or a climax. It ends, as life often does, on a fade out.