Word: herzen
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...early word on "The Coast of Utopia" was daunting: a nine-hour political debate, freely adapted from Isaiah Berlin's book of essay on "Russian Thinkers." Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, Peter Chaadaev, Nicholas Ogarev: discuss their theories of social progress. Anyone? Anyone? Before seeing the plays I boned up on 19th century Russian radicals by reading the fact-packed 88-page program; by the time the lights went down Saturday morning, I felt ready to be a contestant on "Masterminds." Only with Stoppard does the theatergoer have to cram for a show...
...exaggerated. Stoppard is a superb teacher, but he's mainly a showman, a seducer, an intellectual spieler who doesn't dare lose his engaged audience for a moment. Though the play spans 35 years, six countries and a dozen or so complex political philosophies, the contours are clear. Alexander Herzen (played by Stephen Dillane with that knowing, helpless smile he put to such attentive use in the recent revival of "The Real Thing") loves the play of ideas, loves the possibility for constructive social change, loves his wife and children more. The discovery of an infidelity wounds him like...
...parlor sport. But the chat has gravity, for at issue is the question of how men shall live. Stoppard, himself a child refugee from the Soviet bloc, has embraced liberal humanism - human-ness, humaneness - in all his work. At the very end of the trilogy, when he bequeaths Herzen one final speech to rebut Marx's theory of historical inevitability, Stoppard is doubtless speaking for himself in articulating an enlightened middle way, the heroism of small graces...
...women, the women play their ace: they say, as Molly Bloom did, "Yes." This is the last word of the first and third "Utopia" plays; in each case it is spoken indulgently, as a mother would to calm a child's questing, questioning spirit. The political theories of Bakunin, Herzen and their coteries were expressions of a dream for universal betterment. As Shaw and Stoppard know, men are the dreamers, women the realists. Women are the land men return to when Utopia has faded or their ship foundered...
...Doctor of Laws degree today. Although he served as a diplomat during World War II in New York, Washington, and Moscow, Berlin has spent most of his life teaching at Oxford University. He is best known for his brilliant analytic studies of Russian thought, especially of Tolstoi and Alexander Herzen. His works argue the superficiality of both deterministic and relativistic approaches to history. His books include Karl Marx (1939; third edition 1963), Historical Inevitability (1954) and Russian Thought...