The Coast of Utopia

The Coast of Utopia #1-3

by Tom Stoppard

The Coast of Utopia is Tom Stoppard's long-awaited and monumental trilogy that explores a group of friends who came of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term intelligentsia was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of politics, love, loss, and betrayal. In The Coast of Utopia , Stoppard presents an inspired examination of the struggle between romantic anarchy, utopian idealism, and practical reformation in this chronicle of romantics and revolutionaries caught up in a struggle for political freedom in an age of emperors.

Genres: Plays, Drama, Fiction, Theatre, Historical Fiction, Russia, Literature

384 pages, Paperback

First published August 5, 2002

About the author

Sir Tom Stoppard was a Czech-born British playwright and screenwriter. He has written for film, radio, stage, and television, finding prominence with plays. His work covers the themes of human rights, censorship, and political freedom, often delving into the deeper philosophical thematics of society. Stoppard has been a playwright of the National Theatre and is one of the most internationally performed dramatists of his generation. He was knighted for his contribution to theatre by Queen Elizabeth II in 1997.

Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard left as a child refugee, fleeing imminent Nazi occupation. He settled with his family in Britain after the war, in 1946, having spent the previous three years (1943–1946) in a boarding school in Darjeeling in the Indian Himalayas. After being educated at schools in Nottingham and Yorkshire, Stoppard became a journalist, a drama critic and then, in 1960, a playwright.

Stoppard's most prominent plays include Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1966), Jumpers (1972), Travesties (1974), Night and Day (1978), The Real Thing (1982), Arcadia (1993), The Invention of Love (1997), The Coast of Utopia (2002), Rock 'n' Roll (2006) and Leopoldstadt (2020). He wrote the screenplays for Brazil (1985), Empire of the Sun (1987), The Russia House (1990), Billy Bathgate (1991), Shakespeare in Love (1998), Enigma (2001), and Anna Karenina (2012), as well as the HBO limited series Parade's End (2013). He directed the film Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead (1990), an adaptation of his own 1966 play, with Gary Oldman and Tim Roth as the leads.

He has received numerous awards and honours including an Academy Award, a Laurence Olivier Award, and five Tony Awards. In 2008, The Daily Telegraph ranked him number 11 in their list of the "100 most powerful people in British culture". It was announced in June 2019 that Stoppard had written a new play, Leopoldstadt, set in the Jewish community of early 20th-century Vienna. The play premiered in January 2020 at Wyndham's Theatre. The play went on to win the Laurence Olivier Award for Best New Play and later the 2022 Tony Award for Best Play.

Reviews

[E. G. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Acknowledgements
Introduction
A Note on the Text

The Coast of Utopia
--Voyage
--Shipwreck
--Salvage

[Davide · Rating 4 out of 5]

«Quando dicevo che Parigi è una palude di ingordigia e volgarità borghesi, escludevo ovviamente la mia vestaglia.»

[J. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Turgenev : Do you think there’s something Russian about taking everything to extremes?

I love anything Stoppard. How it is that he isn’t very well known outside theater cognoscenti as a true modern master, I don’t quite understand. (The review that follows isn’t a summary, or minutely reasoned or set up like a thesis; more a collection of impressions. There are probably better technical appraisals, this is only a fan’s notes.)

In The Stoppardsphere

Even Tom Stoppard’s dull moments are pivot points, slight, welcome rests in the sweeping onslaught –and the delight-- of his comic dramas. No one writing for the theater today has his track record, his string of brilliant moments on worldwide stages. He revels in the clash of highbrow and middlebrow. He goes trippingly theoretical, but loves the final splat! of the inevitable.

There was some distracting buzz about The Coast Of Utopia, an ambitiously large-ensemble work, a trilogy of plays-- that it was obtuse, or difficult somehow. It is likely that the obscure milieu, the inner circle of émigré revolutionaries and anarchists in the long runup to the Russian Revolution—helped this impression gain ground. Not so.

Belly Of The Beast

It is one of the ground rules of Greater Stoppardia that when conceptual pontificating reaches its outermost, most vexingly complicated limit-- the winkingly vaudevillian turn or crashing pratfall is very close at hand. It is this author’s striking ability to close a philosophical argument with a belly laugh that is one of his most valuable traits. To transform deep seismic dramatic disturbances into cleverly amusing stage patter seems like a conflict of interests, but it is Stoppard’s stock in trade.

Herzen : Things are the same again! The revolution sank under its cargo of compromises it wouldn’t let go of, and the people turned out to be more interested in potatoes than freedom. The people think equality means everyone should be oppressed equally. The people love authority and are suspicious of talent. They want a government to govern for them and not against them—to govern themselves doesn’t enter their heads. The emperors did more than keep their thrones, they pushed our faces into the wreck of our belief in the revolutionary instincts of the people!
Bakunin: A minor setback!

Another trademark is his sense of sound—the tone, timing, pitch of the proceedings. There are invisible measures and time signatures that have been applied to everything he writes, and the script is judged and weighted according to that sensibility. Counter-melodies are all the better for an underlayer of syncopation, and hearing them play out is a considerable pleasure.

Attention Spam, And The Unlikely Bunny

Stoppard's favorite is the drifting attention-span thing, wherein a couple of coinciding if disparate dialogues implausibly mesh; unexpectedly, with humor, and often driving home the grander scheme. He likes to stitch his lines together along the bias, where a set distance between what is said and what is meant eventually collapses into a unifying ... chaos. The chaos that resolves the confusion. In The Coast Of Utopia, as we get on towards the third play of the trilogy, the timing has slowed down enough for careful consideration; the tone is rueful, world weary, as our protagonist eulogizes yet another of the fallen :

Herzen: ... We studied copies of his newspaper, like religious texts. Yes, this is the language of free men! We’ll make the revolution in Berlin, Paris, Brussels! ... But the wave broke, and washed him up on the English shore, a refugee in the flotsam of refugees, their moment missed, their clothes shabbier by the month, their hopes shabbier too ...forever going over the past, schemers, dreamers, monomaniacs from every failed insurrection from Sicily to the Baltic, men who can’t get their shoes mended sending agents with earth-shaking instructions to Marseilles, Lisbon, Cologne ... men who walk across London to give a piano lesson redrawing the frontiers of Europe on the table-tops of cheap restaurants, toppling emperors like so many sauce bottles ... and Marx in his proud retreat in the British Museum, anathemising everyone else ... The clock has stopped in this theatre of political exile! You want to start it again at the moment when all was lost, so that you can make the same mistakes again. You reject the logic of why things went the way they did. That’s vanity and cowardice ...

And almost unnoticeably, the crowning monologue has arrived.. but without bulk, or blur, or fuss... As it unassumingly resolves the lines of the conflicting themes that went before, it is welcomed by the audience; and Stoppard has pulled another unlikely bunny from the top hat of historical obscurity.

[Conrad · Rating 5 out of 5]

In many ways a play to be studied rather than produced or merely read, The Coast of Utopia distills a century or so of scholarship about the foment that preceded the Russian revolution from the 1830s on, mostly using Alexander Herzen (a skeptical Socialist) as a lens. Like Invention of Love, Stoppard uses a few nonrealist tricks here, such as the Ginger Cat (an ominous stand-in for the impersonal, world-devouring forces of History. met by several characters at a costume party), a structure that reveals the characters' interests and concerns without regard to how events ordered themselves in time, and an imaginary dinner involving Marx, Kossuth, Louis Blanc, Mazzini, Herzen, and several other instruments of 19th century nationalism and/or Socialism. Completely gone are the information games Stoppard played in, say, The Real Thing or Hapgood, in which essential facts are left out and introduced at leisure. The Coast of Utopia is more of an ars politica, summing up in various characters a couple of different approaches to political action.

I was fortunate enough to see the first part of the trilogy here in NYC when it went up in 2006/2007 at Lincoln Center. By far the most indelible performance was Billy Crudup's as Vissarion Belinsky. He was sweaty, seedy, and committed, and channeled the real Belinsky's fervent enthusiasms and social ineptitude, combining them with a heartbreaking disappointment and hopefulness, along with the prescient clarity with which VB foresaw Russia's place in world literature. Ethan Hawke wasn't as good as Bakunin. His voice was hoarse from shouting most of his lines, but he might just have been sick or something.

The first play, Voyage, follows literary critic Belinsky and the anarchist propagandist Michael Bakunin with forays into the lives of Nicholas Stankevich (an early popularizer of Hegel) and Alexander Herzen (a Socialist publisher and, later, memoirist) as they discuss the possibility of reform in the hopelessly behind Tsarist state. For this group of people, both in the play and in history, the freedom to discuss and propose reforms was the altar upon which they sacrificed their lives and sometimes those of their families. Bakunin was forever filching money from his parents and friends to fund the agitprop that he carried out in France and Germany. His actual opinions changed almost weekly, but the remarkable quality about him (both in this play and according to primary sources) is the boundless enthusiasm and commitment that he brought to everything he did, even if it contradicted his stated goals of only a few weeks prior. Most of the play takes place on the Bakunin estate during a visit of Belinsky's which left the two angry at each other, Bakunin because he was jealous of his sisters' affection for the awkward Belinsky, and Belinsky because of the unforgivable way that Bakunin treated him while he was visiting. The play ends with Bakunin's family watching the sun set on their estate as his father announces that it is about to be confiscated by the Tsar for Michael's participation in the short-lived Second French Republic of 1848.

The second play, Shipwreck, is slightly more linear; it follows Herzen and his circle of friends (which included the German poet Herwegh and his wife, Emma; the Marxes; Bakunin, as always; and his own growing family.) They participate in the uprisings that led to the Second Republic, each in his or her own way. (George Herwegh, hilariously, has a servant pack him and his wife some sandwiches and pies for the picket. Reminds me of a couple Sarah Lawrence students I used to know...) What collapses the salon-like atmosphere of the Herzen household is Herwegh's seduction of Natalie Herzen using radical openheartedness as a pretext. This development alongside the failure of the Second Republic show Herzen (if no one else) how easily people give their own personal sovreignty to the vanguard in exchange for attention. He forgives his wife, but soon thereafter, there's an exchange that reminds one strongly of Hannah's speech about the afterlife in Arcadia:

HERZEN Natalie died, three months ago . . . We lost Kolya. He was drowned at sea, my mother with him, and a young man who was teaching Kolya to speak. None of them was ever found. It finished my Natalie.

BAKUNIN My poor friend.

HERZEN Oh, Michael, you should have heard Kolya talk! He had such a funny, charming way . . . and he understood everything you said, you'd swear he was listening! The thing I can't bear . . . (he almost breaks down) . . . I just wish it hadn't happened at night. He couldn't hear in the dark. He couldn't see your lips.

BAKUNIN Little Kolya, his life cut so short! Who is this Moloch . . . ?

HERZEN No, not at all! Kolya's life was what it was. Because children grow up, we think a child's purpose is to grow up. But a child's purpose is to be a child. Nature doesn't disdain what lives only for a day. It pours the whole of itself into each moment. We don't value the lily less for not being flint and built to last. Life's bounty is in its flow, later is too late. Where is the song when it's been sung? The dance when it's been danced? It's only we humans who want to own the future, too. We persuade outselves that the universe is modestly employed in unfolding out destination. We note the haphazard chaos of history by the day, by the hour, but we think there is something wrong with this picture. Where is the unity, the meaning, of nature's highest creation? Surely those millions of little streams of accident and willfulness have their correction in the vast underground river which, without a doubt, is carrying us to the place where we're expected! But there is no such place, that's why it's called utopia. The death of a child has no more meaning than the deah of armies, of nations. Was the child happy while he lived? that is a proper question. If we can't arrange our own happiness, it's a conceit beyond vulgarity to arrange the happiness of those who come after us...

The final play, Salvage, concerns itself with the reordering of the Herzen household following the death of Natalie and Kolya, but juxtaposes against this tragedy Herzen's work on his seminal newspaper, The Bell, and the eventual emancipation of the serfs, due in no small part to his agitation from London. His children grow up. It's the weakest of the three plays, in my opinion because a lot of the spark of life here is between and amongst Bakunin, Belinsky, and Herzen, their sniping at each other, their arguments, and their ideological shifts. Once Belinsky is dead and Bakunin imprisoned, the play deflates a little as Herzen reconciles himself to the realities of political change and the practical matters of having to ally himself with people he doesn't entirely sympathize with (Marx, for one, who he finds insufferable here - who knows what the historical Herzen thought.)

Explaining why I love this trilogy despite its warts is a little difficult. I feel like America's situation, in politics and culture, is analogous in some ways to Russia's in the 1850s, paralyzed as we are by oligarchy, stubborn bureaucracies, a sometimes authoritarian government, and divisive internal conflicts over what our indigenous values really are. What I love most about 19th century Russian thinkers, and what I think differentiates them from English and French writers of the same period, as well as (probably) us, is that lacking what they understood as a Russian sense of identity was kind of an advantage - they had a more plastic idea of what they COULD be than maybe anyone else. Belinsky notes in TCOU that no one respects a writer like a Russian, because Russians needed their writers to tell them what they were. Russian litterateurs wrote as if there was something at stake, because Tsarist oppression and censorship meant that telling the truth was far more dangerous than lying.

[مسعود حسینی · Rating 4 out of 5]

اولا منبع من نسخه نشر ماهی‌ست که حال ن��اشتم رکورد تازه براش درست کنم.
ثانیا هنوز جلد سوم یعنی نجات رو نخوندم.
به زودی خواهم خواند البته.
من خیلی لذت بردم از این نمایشنامه‌ها:از یک طرف، غرق دوره ای از تاریخ میشدم که به‌شدت بهش علاقه دارم یعنی روسیه‌ی قرن نوزده، و از طرف دیگه مدام حرف از ایدئالیست های آلمانی مثل فیشته و شلینگ و هگل به میان می‌آد که خب جای خود دارند (البته دومی بیشتر در جلد اول). حال و هوای انقلاب در اروپا، روحیه پرشور، آرمان‌خواه و تب‌آلود نویسندگان و متفکران روس مثل بلینسکی و باکونین و هرتسن و تورگنیف و غیره و در کنار این‌ها، روحیه سودایی زنان روس که بولهوسی هوس‌انگیزی در رفتار و گفتارشان هست، و البته جزئیاتی بعضا تاریخی و بعضا تخیلی درباره زندگی خصوصی اشخاص سرشناسی چون بلینسکی و باکونین، همه و همه باعث میشن که بگم این نمایشنامه شاهکاره. نباید از ترجمه خوب مترجمان هم غافل شد. متنی‌ست روان و ادبی متناسب با موضوع سخن.

[Melissa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Plays are tough to read, no more so than this play cycle which has an enormous cast of historical figures plus many scene changes. How does this work onstage when one doesn't have the notes as a guide to the year or setting? I did like this, but would understand more if I could dig up a recording

[Andrew Morin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Liked it a lot (though it does not surpass Arcadia for me). I think Voyage is definitely the strongest and I appreciated its structure choices more than the others. The characters were strong as was the dialogue, though some could have been fleshed out more. I imagine this is less consequential in a version that is actually staged (and where the length no longer allows additions).

Interesting themes and well executed.

[pierlapo quimby · Rating 4 out of 5]

La ricca stagione dell'ottocento russo, tra letteratura e rivoluzione, cene in campagna e dissertazioni di filosofia, è messa in scena da Tom Stoppard, con attori di prim'ordine come Bakunin, Turgenev e Belinskij.
Non so se sia l'humour inglese a dare sapore alla disgraziata follia russa o piuttosto il contrario.

[Kelly]

Given to me as a birthday present. It was meant to be a Christmas present, only the first round they had in stock sold out too fast. I'm excited to finally have this.

[Sasha · Rating 4 out of 5]

Хваталась за сердце и причитала: "Но ведь прошло почти 200 лет!".

[Bruce · Rating 4 out of 5]

Sometimes you read books out of order. In my case, I read the following only after reading through the playscript to Rock and Roll, when clearly it would have been preferable to have done so beforehand:

“As a way of writing a story, choosing to strip it down to dialogue and a few stage directions would be like inventing the octagonal wheel. But a play is a deceptive kind of book. It is not exactly an eccentric way of writing a story, but rather the transcription of a concrete event in advance of the event. Theatre happens in the wrong order:… The writer imagines the event and writes it out. Later the event happens, and it is likely to turn out slightly, or more than slightly, different from the one he imagined.” (from the “Introduction,” p. xi) This passage is Stoppard’s own explanation of why he made changes to his Coast of Utopia trilogy following performances in London. (Stoppard says the other reason was that he had Ethan Hawke playing one of the leads, who did so so sympathetically that Stoppard really wanted Hawke’s character to get the better end of an argument for once.)

The thing is, I suspect Stoppard’s plays here work far better as a collected book than they do as, say, three separate evenings at the theater each two or more weeks apart, which is how they were originally presented. It’s sort of the subscriber’s HBO miniseries (and absolutely necessary for continuity for plays like these and “Angels in America”) the narratives of which would otherwise appear incomplete. I don’t know I could muster the patience to manage seeing these together on stage (to say nothing of working out details with the babysitter), but I’m glad I don’t have to.

This was a fabulous read. Here we have the principal philosophies of the original intelligentsia (chiefly Mikhail Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, with Belinsky, Turgenev, and a bit of Marx thrown in for comic relief) triangulated longitudinally by 30 years of historical context and attitudinally by an unvarnished look at the domestic lives of their proponents. The result is thought-provoking, unsettling, and entertaining. Our erring prophets are eternal grad. students abroad, reliant upon yet oblivious to the ever-present liveried servants all the while capable of ranting endlessly about how unfair it all seems to be back at home and forced forever to be disappointed by the next mid-19th century revolution, each one crushingly devoid of working class enfranchisement, empowerment, and enlightenment.

There is plenty of the mature Stoppard here (that’s the one who cares about the emotional lives and romantic relationships of his characters which begins around Arcadia), though this aspect would have been necessary in any case to show up the follies of his principal characters. In fact, this trilogy could probably be described as Stoppard’s Follies, if Follies had no music and occupied itself with the hearts and minds of post-Napoleonic revolutionary Europe. Sondheim’s characters must awaken from their nostalgia for a time that never was. Stoppard’s must come to terms with their nostalgia for a time that never will be. In this, he’s willing to poke fun at his own creation, having a child observe, “I like her sometimes, when she’s not historical. When she gets historical, the only thing that calms her down is intimate relations.” (p. 314) That’s plot and theme of Utopia in a nutshell.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

1. When I first heard that Tom Stoppard had written a 9 hour play about 19th Century Russian intellectuals, my first thought was, "Yeah, that pretty much had to happen."

2. It's wonderfully ambitious.

3. You never forget that it's a Tom Stoppard play, which is both a strength and a weakness.

4. I can't help but love the portrayal of Turgenev. If he wasn't this cool in real life, I don't want to know about it.

[Holly · Rating 2 out of 5]

What happens if you do a lot of research on late 19th Century Russia and then try to put it all into a few plays. I was torn between wondering if it would have been better on stage and thinking I was really glad I was reading it so I could skim.

[Alec Fletcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

This play was directly written for my interests and taste. It breathes into life all the clashes that have drawn me over the years toward nineteenth century Russian literature and social thought. The great themes of the time — top-down reform through writing to influence those with power in the system versus bottom-up violent revolution, the choice between Westernizing versus a deeper embrace of Russian values embodied in the Russian muzhik, the classic clash between anarchists who deny the state entirely versus communists who wish the proletariat to become the state itself, the shift of generations as the artless nihilists come to criticize the writers they used to idolize — are all imbued into living characters. Politics and philosophies are interesting of their own accord, but I have always been drawn to fiction that depicts the interaction of abstract ideas with daily lives. What does it mean for interpersonal relations when people truly believe in German Idealism’s description of Universal Love? How can these educated writers seek to speak for the ‘People’ when they don’t really know them, when they still enjoy wealth built from aristocracy and serfdom?

At times it can almost feel like the ‘Greatest Hits’ of leftist thought and Russian literature, with quick references that border on ‘Remember that?’, such as in the dramatized inception of Turgenev’s Bazarov. But the focus continually goes returns to the ‘real life’ that is happening amid history, to the joy that occurs even among arguments between good friends, to the household women who are often ignored. Starry-eyed views of famous thinkers are largely avoided.

As the play’s focus tends toward Alexander Herzen, a wealthy expatriate who seeks to achieve real reform, through the Tsar if need be, through writings that reach both the Russian elite and the masses, the playwright’s view on the intellectual turmoil clarifies. And it’s not as simple as choosing reform over revolution, democracy over anarchy or state organization. At the end of the day, Herzen’s most constant call is to reject any philosophy that promises Utopia, a logical solution to historical strife. And in using the form of fiction to explore these inquiries, Stoppard firmly places himself on the side of this distrust of philosophic formulas.

Art should never claim a solution. Plays are acted in ephemeral time frames, which do not follow logical steps. Political philosophies are useful to explain the world and to direct action, but they are tools, not ends in themselves. There will always be conflict, work will always remain. Life is lived in moments—it is much more than just the sum.

[Bonnie Roach · Rating 2 out of 5]

Yawn not the best of the Bowie books by a long shot. A trilogy of plays pretentious and well pretentious

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

TURGENEV: You’re talking to a man who’s made a literary reputation out of the Russian peasantry, and they’re no different from Italian, French or German peasants. Conservatives to the marrow. Give them time and they’ll be a match for any Frenchman when it comes to bourgeois aspirations and middle-class mediocrity. We are Europeans, we are just late, that’s all. Would you mind if I emptied my bladder into your laurels?

HERZEN: Isn’t that’s what you just did?

[Christopherseelie · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is an interesting read, partly because it is not a very good play. There is drastic shifts in emotion that fail to conceal the two-dimensionality of the characters, much of the dialog is expository or pedantic, and the main character only comes into focus in the second of the three plays. It reads like a play that is meant to be read, not seen.

My explanation for Stoppard's unusual departure is that he wanted to write a biography and a history of the social circle of Russians in the 19th century for whom the term Intelligensia was coined; but he is a playwright and sometimes-screenwriter and so this is the form his ambition has taken. To be sure, there is a great deal to learn about the private lives, philosophies, and geopolitical perspective of these men and women. In a way, we get to see the awkward turns of thought that forged out of the German Idealist critique of the (predominately French) so-called Age of Reason, and we can appreciate the humanity of these thinkers who share wealth, sorrow, house, family, and lovers with one another in full view of their own contradictory natures. Bakunin is a sponge on his friends. Turgenev is dispassionate about everything except hunting, opera, and his reviews. Belinsky is a boorish fanatic. Ogarev is an alcoholic. The men get so involved in their arguments and theories that it is left to the women to recall the genders of their newborns. Idealists commit adultery; Pragmatists waste their wealth; Rationalists dream. It's life and history and the enigma of what history is really about.

Tom Stoppard is well known for his wit and somewhat notorious for his ambivalence towards leftist politics. As a Czech refugee raised in England, he has been regularly criticized for his skeptical attitude regarding political activism as expressed by characters in his plays. To me, this is a sign of how Czech he remains, but The Coast of Utopia is likely his apologia. For one thing, Turgenev is regularly trotted out to answer for his bad reviews where the left and right wings accuse him of writing on behalf of the other side. His response is always that he writes to write, to show every side and some that are ignored. It does him no good, but this refrain may well be Stoppard's own defense of his work.

At the end of the third play, all the leading voices are gathered in Switzerland for a reunion (including Marx and Turgenev by way of Herzen's dream). When Marx gives a gloss of his theory of history, Herzen responds, "Who is this Moloch who promises that everything will be beautiful after we're dead? History has no purpose! History knocks at a thousand gates at every moment, and the gatekeeper is chance. It takes wit and courage to make our way while our way is making us, with no consolation to count on but art and the summer lightning of personal happiness..."

I take this to be Stoppard speaking through a mask for his own conviction against Dialectical Materialism and other explanations of how we chase destiny. His final judgment on the early architects of socialism, anarchism, marxism, communism, is spoken by Herzen after awakening from his dream:

"To go on, and to know that there is no landfall on the paradisal shore, and still to go on. To open men's eyes and not tear them out. To bring what's good along with them. The people won't forgive when the future custodian of a broken statue, a stripped wall, a desecrated grave, tells everyone who passes by 'Yes--yes, all this was destroyed by the revolution.' The destroyers wear nihilism like a cockade--they think they destroy because they are radicals. But they destroy because they are disappointed conservatives--let down by the ancient dream of a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way towards it, we won't be grown up as human beings. Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other."

Reverberations of Samuel Beckett, Sophocles and Plato, ring down from this conclusion set in 1868 but aimed distinctly at an audience post-1968.

[Kim Savage · Rating 4 out of 5]

A play. Pre-Russian revolution. My favorite line is said by Alexander Herzen. Herzen is a would-be revolutionary who fights his battles with the pen by writing informative and encouraging pamphlets for Russia while living abroad. He strongly encourages peaceful reform over violent revolution. Although this play takes place in the 1830's, I think we are wise to consider these thoughts.
"What shall we say to them now?"
"To go on, and to know there is no landfall on the paradisal shore, and still to go on. To open men's eyes and not tear them out. To bring what's good along with them. The people won't forgive when the future custodian of a broken statue, a stripped wall, a desecrated grave, tells everyone who passes by, 'Yes--yes, all this was destroyed by the revolution.' The destroyers wear nihilism like a cockade--they think they destroy because they're radicals. But they destroy because they are disappointed conservatives--let down by the ancient dream of a perfect society where circles are squared and conflict is cancelled out. But there is no such place and Utopia is its name. So until we stop killing our way towards it, we won't be grown up as human beings. Our meaning is in how we live in an imperfect world, in our time. We have no other."

[James F · Rating 3 out of 5]

A trilogy of stage plays, Voyage, Shipwreck and Salvage, about the lives of nineteenth century Russian exiles, primarily Alexander Herzen but also treating the anarchist Mikhail Bakunin, the radical critic Vissarion Belinski, and the author Ivan Turgenev, among others, these are frankly not among Stoppard's best plays, although they might be better performed than in print. Various German, French, and Polish radicals such as the poet George Herwegh also appear in small roles. Marx is present in one or two dream scenes, and every mention of him attributes to him ideas he never held (as I've learned to expect.)

The plays, especially the second and third, contain a lot of political discussion, mainly taken from actual writings of the people involved, but it's too fragmented to really make sense, and the characters' ideas are not taken seriously enough, or discussed in enough depth, even if that was Stoppard's intent. The radical characters frequently seem like unserious charlatans, which for all their errors none of them were; Bakunin in particular is caricatured. (Apparently he is following Berlin here.)

If there is any real theme to be taken from the plays, it is that Utopian thought is necessary to humanity but usually ends in disaster. Much of the action in the plays actually seems like domestic drama modeled after Chekhov -- Stoppard wrote the first play at the same time he was writing his translation of The Seagull, and says somewhere that it was originally an attempt to write in Chekhov's style; if one didn't know who Bakunin was, one would think the first play was about his sisters and their love affairs, with Mikhail making short appearances to confuse things. If the plays are about politics, they're far too domestic, while if they're about domestic relations they're far too filled with political speeches. There is not enough humor to balance the rhetoric, unlike many of his other plays.

[Akemi · Rating 2 out of 5]

Voyage:
The beginning of this play was strangely atypical of Stoppard. Not only is it based on Russian life in the 19th century, it READ like something written by a 19th century Russian. It became more Stoppard-like once people start philosophizing about art and beauty, but even then, there is none of the normal Stoppard humor. I guess it's most similar to Arcadia, but even that is more absurd than this. The only humor here feels like Chekhov, i.e. people running out of rooms crying and then falling down the stairs.

Regardless, I liked it a lot! This is the first play I've read since taking Modern Drama, and it's nice to realize that I remember some things from Arcadia and The Cherry Orchard. Also, as I've been picking up more and more philosophy lately, I like the parts about trying to identify what makes us human, why we value art, why we think things are beautiful vs. rationality.

Shipwreck:
Still interesting, some intriguing soliloquies, but not as enjoyable as Voyage. It focused a lot more on grand movements of history rather than the more intimate details of domestic life. Plus, I got confused a lot by all the characters that were either new or barely introduced in the first play. For one, there are many of them, but also, they just weren't very distinct, and I feel like that lines up with the trend towards the historical rather than the personal. The characters just became mouthpieces for historical events rather than entities unto themselves. The only emotions that seemed real occurred towards the end, concerning Kolya's death. Maybe it's just less convincing on paper than on the stage.

Salvage:
Similar to Shipwreck- way too wrapped up in historical details for me to follow. Uh..so much so that I don't remember much to comment on, even a week after finishing. D'oh.

[Kyle Callahan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There are many lessons in The Coast of Utopia, Tom Stoppard’s trilogy of plays about the early Russian intelligentsia, but perhaps the most important lesson for developing writers is a conflation of revolutionary principles and the artistic process.

One lesson is to ignore the plot of one’s work, the backwards and forwards of its motion, its timeline, and instead, focus on the details that make a story come to life, to describe “the summer lightning,” and to allow the reader to experience its flash for herself.

But Stoppard reminds the writer, “A poem can’t be written by an act of will. … Every work of art is the breath of a single eternal idea breathed by God into the inner life of the artist” (Voyage 38-39). The summer lightning, its lovely moment, this is not the creation of an artist; rather, it is the expression of an omnipresent force, “nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist…the ultimate work of art trying to express its perfection through us, its most conscious part…” (Shipwreck 70).

But what about those moments when the writer is inside and summer has faded to winter and all that is known of lightning is memory and mathematics? Where then would Stoppard have the writer turn? “Literature can replace, can actually become… It can be greater and more real than external reality. It only has to be true. Art is true or false. Everything else is up to the artist, but on that we’re in the emperor’s seat” (Voyage 80).

Stoppard would have us become better writers and better revolutionaries by focusing our attention on the small moments. It implores us to become the poetic expression of the omnipresent and omnipotent force that reveals itself in a flash of lightning.

In short, it's a damn fine book.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard's sparkling trilogy of plays gives the reader a lot to ponder over the course of the lives of these Russian intelligentsia. We see their birth in the Cherry Orchard-like opening, as the moment of change from aristocracy to middle class leftist is pointed in a frozen moment of family joyfully trotting around its land. As the story moves forward, the political becomes personal and the personal becomes political again, as Alexander Herzen steps forward as the leader of his friends and of the intelligentsia, and the women in his life suffer from both the dying of the old world and the creation of a new one.

Stoppard has a way with double-casting and a way with time. Everything in his writing is refractive. People view each other through the parents or sister who raised them, and so does the reader or audience member, because the characters are being played by the same sister and brother or parents and brother. Everything repeats itself, usually a comforting motif in his work, as the circular nature of life's beginnings and endings allow for multiple chances to make good. However, in Coast of Utopia, the casting is haunting, granting Herzen constant reminders of another life, pointing out that one's democratic and intellectual life gives little fulfillment if one is not simply not free to feel happiness.

And of course, per usual, the language is beautiful, reflexive and remarkable. Of particular interest to the reader are verbal giants Bakunin and Belinsky, a man who can stop a train with his literary sentiments, but can't handle cleaning up the wreck afterwards.

[Ethan · Rating 3 out of 5]

There's just too much going on. The only reason why these people are the subject of a play is because of their ideas, their writing, but we only get little snippets of what their thoughts were. So while I care about them as historical figures, I don't get invested in them in the context of the play. And that may be intentional -- we're really getting a glimpse of a set of highly unusual and complicated domestic lives and friendships. But if we don't really care about them as thinkers, why not choose some purely fictional characters from the same period and let them try out open relationships, etc., without being interrupted by couriers to radical cells abroad, appeals for funds, etc.

Maybe reading the play I've lost too much of the comedy that would be at least somewhat physical (people storming off, then immediately returning with apologies and embracing, for example -- that doesn't read terribly funny, but could be quite funny to watch if done well).

In his introduction Stoppard says that if his intention was to inform it would be madness to write a play. That's fair. Yet he does not feel the need to explain why these people in particular, people who required extensive research on his part, are the ones whose lives need dramatizing.
For those who are interested in a fictionalized account of a great 19th century writer and thinker I would recommend "Summer in Baden-Baden."
Still, it's Tom Stoppard, of course it's worth reading.

[Tom · Rating 2 out of 5]

The first play, VOYAGE, and Act I of the second play are fine and engaging plays, interesting historic drama on a grand scale. And then something happens: in the Act II of the second play in this trilogy, Stoppard decides to focus on a single character, one Alexander Herzen, and the play just DIES as Herzen talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks and talks. I have experienced no more excruciating evening in the theatre than Act II of the aptly entitled SHIPWRECK.

And it doesn't get better with the third play, the ill-named SALVAGE. Ceaseless senseless oral diarrhea of historical data, more characters introduced for a few minutes and then never heard from again, and less and less of actual interest. Herzen keeps on gabbling on, and the play finally finally finally ends, with some ultimate gibberish from Herzen about how the important thing is to do the best you can in the period you’re in, and a really insulting final line: “There’s a storm coming.” Get it boys and girls? The storm of THE REVOLUTION!!!!!

Too many characters don't register as clearly as they have in the earlier segments, at least partly because Stoppard is so busy trying to cram so much history into the play that the characters never come alive as anything other than names to be heard about once or twice and then forgotten about.

[Dale Boyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

Since I never could actually see a production of this trilogy of plays, I've always wanted to read them. Even recognizing that reading a play is a kind of bare bones experience, this is an exceptionally difficult experience. It's very nuanced, there are tons of characters, and things that I'm sure may have a "moment" onstage are, at best, just guessed at by reading the script. Still, there's great writing throughout, and it's consistently interesting. Some of my favorite lines:

"When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets is from that moment inevitable."

"I'm beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom is what we give each other, not what we take from each other like a fought-over loaf of bread."

Stankevich: Then what is the shadow on the wall of the cave?
Belinsky: That's philosophy.

And this, echoing remark, much later on: "…society will find its own form, which will be the shadow thrown by the inner nature of the people."

[Emily · Rating 4 out of 5]

This series of three plays was fascinating. Again, I read quite a bit but not all. This is a perfect example of New Historicism. It's based on the lives of several philosopher/revolutionaries in Russia in the 1800s: Bakunin, Belinsky, and Herzen mostly. Belinsky was my favorite character--the literary critic. I wrote an article on his ambition for my class. We also discussed the fact that these plays are an amazing way to sneak some unknown history and philosophy into its readers and watchers. It can be enjoyed in a surface reading, and devoured as a wealth of human nature, Russian and Marxist history, deep mastery of conflicting philosophical theories, and literary form. Even though it is a Voyage doomed to end in Shipwreck, perhaps the Salvage of the facts, theories, and people can give something very worthwhile to the reader. I believe it can.

[Dominic · Rating 4 out of 5]

I certainly don't recommend this play to everyone. When Coast of Utopia made its Broadway debut it was described as ,"the ultimate snob ticket" which should give audiences clues on the context. I will say it was an easy read in comparison to Stoppard's other works, which still doesn't say a whole lot. I describe the writing as fast paced Chekhov with importance. Chekhov's writing dwells on personal triumph where Stoppard looks at the characters relationship to a collapsing society This sucker was jam packed with love triangles, family values, and wide debates over anarchy and it's relationship to the revolutions spreading across Europe in 1848. While some scenes teeter on the pedantic side, there is still character motivations that can relate to contemporary issues.

[Brett · Rating 4 out of 5]

I just finished this for the second time. I still love the first play - Shipwreck. The second two lost a bit of their impact during the 2nd reading. Thus, I'm reducing my original 5 star rating to 4 star.

Ironically, the first play follows the early life of Michael Bakunin, and serves primarily as a prologue to the second two plays which focus on Alexander Herzen. Shipwreck provides an introduction to the romantic ideals that were being discussed and debated prior during the early years of European revolution. The second two plays follow Herzen in his pursuit of promoting democratic socialism.

[Lekan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard writes another masterpiece. His flawless intertwining of political revolution with personal and psychological revolution is stunning. This reminds me a lot of the Hugo's Les Misérables, with the weaving of the Revolution, the personal lives of the many, many characters, and the many exquisite intercalary chapters that offer nuggets of well-placed wisdom.

Like most of his great plays, I am sure this will only get better with the second or third readings as I pick up more on the historical allusions and symbolism littered like still life through the play.

Can't wait to catch a production of this on stage.

[Maddsurgeon · Rating 4 out of 5]

Tom Stoppard's ambitious trilogy about several overlapping circles of Russian artists, agitators and thinkers is a joy to read. As with much of his history work, his devotion to larger-than-life ideas doesn't overshadow the very human struggles of the characters. The historical figures really come to life on the page: his Bakunin is a playfully destructive cad, his Turgenev a dry wit with penetrating insight into human nature, his Herzen a stubborn dreamer who is, beyond all hope, vindicated by history again and again. Recommended for passionate freedom-seekers who wonder what became of all those long-ago revolutions.