Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

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.