Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

Kolya remains with Herzen and sits on the floor with his top. Turgenev is with Herzen. Benoit delivers some letters to Herzen on a salver and leaves.

TURGENEV   Have you been out? It’s amazing how life settles back. The theatres are open. There’s carriages in the streets again, and ladies and gentlemen inspecting the ruins as if they were in Rome. To think it was only on Friday morning the laundress who brought my washing said, ‘It’s started!’ And then four days shut away in this awful heat, listening to the guns, knowing what must be happening and helpless to do anything … oh, that was torture.

HERZEN   But with clean laundry.

TURGENEV   I trust if we’re going to have this conversation—

HERZEN   I didn’t invite conversation. If I were you, I’d take avoiding action. These four days could make one hate for a decade.

TURGENEV   I’ll go, then. (Pause.) But allow me to express the opinion that somebody must do your laundry, too.

HERZEN   Letter from Granovsky! Just wait till he hears! (He opens the letter.) All you liberals are splashed with blood no matter how you tried to keep your distance. Yes, I have a laundress, possibly several, how would I know? The whole point of the serving class is that the rest of us, the fortunate minority, can concentrate on our higher destinies. Intellectuals must be allowed to think, poets to dream, landowners to own land, dandies to perfect their cravats. It’s a kind of cannibalism. The uninvited are necessary to the feast. I’m not a sentimental moralist. Nature, too, is merciless. So long as a man thinks it’s the natural order of things for him to be eaten and for another to eat, then who should regret the death of the old order if not we who write our stories or go to the opera while others do our laundry? But once people realise the arrangement is completely artificial, the game is up. I take comfort in this catastrophe. The dead have exposed the republican lie. It’s government by slogan for the sake of power, and if anyone objects, there’s always the police. The police are the realists in a pseudo-democracy. From one regime to the next, power passes down the system until it puts its thumbprint on every policeman’s forehead like the dab of holy oil at an emperor’s coronation. The conservatives can’t keep the smiles off their faces, now they know the whole thing was a confidence trick. The liberals wanted a republic for their own cultivated circle. Outside it they’re conservatives. They cheered on Cavaignac’s butchers while wringing their hands with their fingers crossed. Well, now we know what the reactionaries have always known: liberty, equality and fraternity are like three rotten apples in their barrel of privilege, even a pip could prove fatal—from now on it’s all or nothing, no quarter, no mercy.

TURGENEV   (mildly) You sound like Belinsky, adjusting some poet’s reputation … Do you think there’s something Russian about taking everything to extremes?

HERZEN   No doubt. Single-minded conviction is a quality of youth, and Russia is young. (pointedly) Compromise, prevarication, the ability to hold two irreconcilable beliefs, both with ironic detachment—these are ancient European arts, and a Russian who finds them irresistible is, I would say, exceptional.

TURGENEV   (disingenuously) How interesting that you should say that. Because I myself, you see—

Herzen, despite himself, laughs, and Turgenev laughs with him, but almost at once his laughter turns to anger.

TURGENEV   (cont.) Putting yourself in another’s place is a proper modesty, and yes, it takes centuries to learn it. Impatience, pig-headed stubbornness to the point of destruction—yes, these are things to be forgiven in the young, who lack the imagination to see that almost nothing in this life holds still, everything is moving and changing—

HERZEN   (with Granovsky’s letter, cries out) Who is this Moloch who eats his children?

TURGENEV   Yes, and your taste for melodramatic, rhetorical—

HERZEN   Belinsky’s dead.

TURGENEV   No, no … oh, no, no, no … No! … No more blather, please. Blather, blather, blather. Enough.

Natalie enters and goes to Herzen.

NATALIE   Alexander …?

SEPTEMBER 1847 (REPRISE)

Herzen, Natalie, Turgenev and Kolya remain, their positions corresponding to the reprised scene which now reassembles itself at the point of Natalie’s re-entrance.

GEORGE   Mir geht es besser. [I feel better.]