Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

HERZEN   Why don’t you wear a peasant’s shirt and bast shoes if you want to advertise the real Russia, instead of dressing it up like you in your costume? Russia before Peter had no culture. Life was ugly, poor and savage. Our only tradition was submitting ourselves to invaders. The history of other nations is the history of their emancipation. The history of Russia goes the opposite way, to serfdom and obscurantism. The Church of your infatuated iconpainter’s imagination is a conspiracy of pot-house priests and anointed courtiers in trade with the police. A country like this will never see the light if we turn our backs to it, and the light is over there. (He points.) West. (He points the other way.) There is none there.

AKSAKOV   Then you that way, we this way. Farewell.

Leaving, Aksakov meets Ogarev storming in.

AKSAKOV   (cont.) We lost Pushkin—(He ‘shoots’ with his finger.)—we lost Lermontov. (He ‘shoots’ again.) We cannot lose Ogarev. I ask your forgiveness.

He bows to Ogarev and leaves. Herzen puts his arm around Ogarev.

HERZEN   He’s right, Nick.

GRANOVSKY   It’s not the only thing he’s right about.

HERZEN   Granovsky … let’s not be quarrelling when Natalie comes back.

GRANOVSKY   I’m not quarrelling. He’s right about us having no ideas of our own, that’s all.

HERZEN   Where would they come from when we have no history of thought, when nothing has been handed on because nothing can be written or read or discussed? No wonder Europe regards us as a barbarian horde at the gates. This huge country, so vast it takes in fur-trappers, camelherders, pearl-fishers … and yet not a single original philosopher, not one contribution to political discourse …

KETSCHER   Yes—one! The intelligentsia!

GRANOVSKY   What’s that?

KETSCHER   It’s the new word I was telling you about.

OGAREV   Well, it’s a horrible word.

KETSCHER   I agree, but it’s our own, Russia’s debut in the lexicon.

HERZEN   What does it mean?

KETSCHER   It means us. A uniquely Russian phenomenon, the intellectual opposition considered as a social force.

GRANOVSKY   Well … !

HERZEN   The … intelligentsia! …

OGAREV   Including Aksakov?

KETSCHER   That’s the subtlety of it, we don’t have to agree with each other.

GRANOVSKY   The Slavophiles are not entirely wrong about the West, you know.

HERZEN   I’m sure they’re entirely right.

GRANOVSKY   Materialism …

HERZEN   Triviality.

GRANOVSKY   Scepticism above all.

HERZEN   Above all. I’m not arguing with you.

GRANOVSKY   But—don’t you see?—it doesn’t follow that our own bourgeoisie has to adopt the same values as in the West.

HERZEN   No. Yes.

GRANOVSKY   How would you know, anyway?

HERZEN   I wouldn’t. It’s you and Turgenev who’ve been there. I still can’t get a passport. I’ve applied again.

KETSCHER   For your health?

HERZEN   (laughs) It’s for little Kolya … Natalie and I want to consult the best doctors …

OGAREV   (looking) Where is Kolya …?

KETSCHER   I’m a doctor. He’s deaf. (Shrugs.) I’m sorry.

Ogarev, unheeded, leaves to look for Kolya.

TURGENEV   It’s not all philistines, either. The only thing that’ll save Russia is Western culture transmitted by … people like us.

KETSCHER   No, it’s the Spirit of History, the ceaseless March of Progress …

HERZEN   (venting his anger) Oh, a curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood—at least spare them your conceit that they’re acting out the biography of an abstract noun!

KETSCHER   Oh, it’s my conceit? (to the others) There was nothing wrong with that coffee, either.

HERZEN   (to Granovsky, conciliatory) I’m not starry-eyed about France. To sit in a café with Louis Blanc, Leroux, Ledru-Rollin … to buy La Réforme with the ink still wet, and walk in the Place de la Concorde … the thought excites me like a child, I admit that, but Aksakov is right—I don’t know the next step. Where are we off to? Who’s got the map? We study the ideal societies … power to the experts, to the workers, to the philosophers … property rights, property sanctions, the evil of competition, the evil of monopoly … central planning, free housing, free love … limited to eight hundred families or unconstrained by national frontiers … and all of them uniquely harmonious, just and efficient. But Proudhon is the only one who understands what the question is: why should anyone obey anyone else?

GRANOVSKY   Because that’s what society means. You might as well ask, why should an orchestra play together? And yet it can play together without being socialist.