Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

NATALIE   It was the same for me, meeting Nick, and I was expecting Sasha.

MARIA   Poor Nick. Even my having another man’s child, it was nothing to the agony he went through when he found himself caught in the middle between his wife and his best friend.

NATALIE   But we all loved each other at the beginning. Don’t you remember how we joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other?

MARIA   Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.

NATALIE   That’s not so, is it?

MARIA   Yes—it is so. I found it embarrassing … childish—

NATALIE   Even at the beginning! How sad for you, Maria … I’m sorry …

Maria, to Natalie’s complete surprise, suddenly gives in to her rage.

MARIA   Don’t you look down on me with your stuck-up charity, you’re still the simpering little fool you always were—giving away your birthright, idealising it away in your prattle of exalted feelings … You can tell Ogarev he’ll get nothing out of me, and that goes for all his friends!

The interview is evidently over. Natalie remains composed.

NATALIE   I’ll go, then. I don’t know what I said to make you angry. (She gathers herself to leave.) Your portrait, by the way, is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation … If he dips his brush here and prods it there, he’ll get this time what he got last time, and so on till you’re done. But that’s neither art nor love. You and your portrait resemble each other only in crudeness and banality. But that’s a trivial failure. Imitation isn’t art, everyone knows that. Technique by itself can’t create. So, where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry, and who are you to call it prattle? German philosophy is the first time anyone’s explained everything that can’t be explained by the rules. Why can’t your expert lover satisfy a desire to paint like Raphael or Michelangelo? That would shut me up, wouldn’t it? What’s stopping him? Why can’t he look harder and see what the rules are? Because there aren’t any. Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it’s nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can’t all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what’s our consolation, we fall short at love. (She pauses for a last look at the portrait.) I know what it is. He’s got your tits too high and your arse too small. (Natalie leaves.)

MAY 1849

Saxony. In a prison room, a lawyer (FRANZ OTTO) is seated at a table. Bakunin is in chains, sitting opposite.

OTTO   What were you doing in Dresden?

BAKUNIN   When I arrived or when I left?

OTTO   Just generally.

BAKUNIN   When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire. But after a week or two, a local revolution broke out against the King of Saxony, so I joined it.

OTTO   (Pause.) You understand who I am?

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   I am your lawyer, nominated by the Saxon authorities to present your defence.

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   You are charged with treason, for which the penalty is death. (Pause.) What brought you to Dresden? I suspect it was to visit the art gallery with its famous Sistine Madonna by Raphael. In all probability you had no knowledge of any popular insurrection brewing against the King. On May the third, when the barricades appeared, it was a complete surprise to you.

BAKUNIN   Yes.

OTTO   Ah. Good. You never planned any revolt, you had no obligation to it or connection with it, its objectives were of no interest to you.

BAKUNIN   Absolutely true! The King of Saxony is welcome to dismiss his parliament, as far as I’m concerned. I look on all such assemblies with contempt.

OTTO   There you are. At heart, you’re a monarchist.

BAKUNIN   On May the fourth I met a friend of mine in the street.

OTTO   Quite by chance.

BAKUNIN   Quite by chance.

OTTO   His name?

BAKUNIN   Wagner. He’s a music director of the Dresden opera, at least he was till we burned it down—

OTTO   Er … don’t get too far ahead.