Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

BAKUNIN   Our own revolution, Herzen! Not a bourgeois revolution like in Europe—they let us down very badly, the Germans and the French, they were all for getting rid of aristocratic privilege, but they closed ranks to defend their property.

HERZEN   What did you expect?

BAKUNIN   Well, why didn’t you tell me?

HERZEN   You never listened.

BAKUNIN   Why should I listen? There were more poor people with the vote than rich people … How could it turn out the way it did?

HERZEN   It’s as Proudhon said, universal suffrage is counterrevolutionary.

BAKUNIN   He kept coming out with those, Pierre-Joseph, didn’t he? I taught him Hegel. His wife would serve supper by the fire, go to bed, get up, and serve breakfast, and we’d still be sat there over the embers, going through the categories … Great days, Herzen!

HERZEN   Oh … Bakunin!

BAKUNIN   We were there for the February revolution. It was the happiest time of my life.

HERZEN   I was in Italy. Ten days after I got back to Paris, I knew the revolution was dead … and now the Republic is dead, too. Vive la mort! Did you know? President Louis-Napoleon turned himself into Emperor Louis-Napoleon with only a few thousand arrests. People didn’t care. It was one way out of a Republic which was ashamed of itself. The Second Empire arrived just in time to finish the year off nicely. Expect important changes in furniture and ladies’ fashions. You’re right. It’s over with us Russians and the Western model. Civilisation passed us by, we belonged to geography, not history, so we escaped. We can now get on without being distracted. The West has nothing to teach us. It’s sinking under its weight of precious cargo which it won’t jettison—all those shackles for the mind. With us it’s all ballast. Over the side with it! We’re too oppressed to make do with half-liberty. We’re free to act because we have nothing.

BAKUNIN   I couldn’t wait to get to the West! Twenty Cossacks couldn’t have held me back in my yearning for the other shore. But the answer was behind me all the time. A peasant revolution, Herzen! Marx bamboozled us. He’s such a townie, to him peasants are hardly people, they’re agriculture, like cows and turnips. Well, he doesn’t know the Russian peasant! There’s a history of rebellion there, and we forgot it.

HERZEN   Stop—Stop.

BAKUNIN   I don’t mean your hand-kissing, priest-fearing greybeards—the Slavophiles can have those. I mean men and women who are ready to burn everything in sight and string up the landlord!—with policemen’s heads on their pitchforks!

HERZEN   Stop!—’Destruction is a creative passion!’ You’re such a … child! We have to go to the people, bring them with us, step by step. But Russia has a chance. The village commune can be the foundation of true populism, not Aksakov’s sentimental paternalism, and not the iron bureaucracy of a socialist elite, but self-government from the ground up. Russian socialism! After the farce of 1848, I was in despair. My life meant nothing. Russia saved me … and then fate had another trick up its sleeve … Are you there, Michael?

BAKUNIN   Oh, yes. If it goes your way, I’ll be there for years. (Bakunin leaves.)

HERZEN   Nobody’s got the map. In the West, socialism may win next time, but it’s not history’s destination. Socialism, too, will reach its own extremes and absurdities, and once more Europe will burst at the seams. Borders will change, nationalities break up, cities burn … the collapse of law, education, manufacture, fields left to rot—military rule and money in flight to England, America … And then a new war will begin between the barefoot and the shod. It will be bloody, swift and unjust, and leave Europe like Bohemia after the Hussites. Are you sorry for civilisation? I am sorry for it, too.

Natalie’s voice—from the past—is heard distantly calling repeatedly for Kolya. Distant thunder.

HERZEN   (cont.) He can’t hear you. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry, Natalie.

SUMMER 1846

Sokolovo as before: a continuation. Distant thunder. Sasha continues putting the fallen mushrooms into the basket. Natalie’s voice is still calling for Kolya. Sasha stops to look and listen. Men’s voices can be heard yet more distantly, calling to each other—i.e., Herzen and his friends directing each other in the search. Ogarev enters, calling to Natalie.

OGAREV   Kolya’s here! He’s with me.

NATALIE   (entering) Oh, thank God … thank God!

OGAREV   No panic, no panic … he followed the ditch, he’s filthy.