The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage
Page 9
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.
Natalie runs across.
NATALIE (offstage) Mummy thought she’d lost you! Come on, let’s wash you in the stream. (receding) Alexander! … Here! …
Ogarev still has Sasha’s fishing cane and jam jar. Distantly, the men are heard shouting to each other, calling off the search. A final distant sound of thunder.
OGAREV Life, life … (to Sasha) I got to know your papa because of a man nearly drowning … in the river at Luzhniki.
SASHA (interested) Really?
OGAREV Yes, really! A Cossack who was grazing his horse on the Sparrow Hills came running down into the water and saved him, a real hero! Your father was playing by the river and saw it all, and he told his papa, who wrote to the Cossack’s commanding officer about it. The man who was saved came to your house to thank your grandpa for doing that, and so he became friends with your family. And where do I come in? Well, the man in the water later became my tutor, and one day when I was about twelve years old, he took me to meet a boy he’d come to know because of being nearly drowned, and that’s how I met your daddy, and we became best friends.
SASHA No, you’re not, I don’t know you.
OGAREV Why, I patted your behind before you were born! It was the happiest day of my life, that day. We knelt down together, holding hands, your mother and father and my wife and I, and … But you’re right, later I went travelling. (Pause.) No, my happiest day was another day, before that, up on the Sparrow Hills, just where the Cossack had come running down, and your daddy and I … we climbed up to the top where the sun was setting on Moscow spread out below us, and we made a promise to … to be revolutionaries together. I was thirteen then. (He gives a little laugh and looks up.) The storm has missed us.
HERZEN (offstage) Nick … !
Herzen enters with the letter from Orlov.
OGAREV Tell Sasha who I am.
HERZEN Look … from Count Orlov.
He gives the letter to Ogarev, who starts to read it.
HERZEN (cont.) (to Sasha) Nick? Nick is my best friend.
Ogarev returns the letter to Herzen.
OGAREV (to Sasha) See?
Ogarev embraces Herzen in joyous congratulation.
Natalie enters.
A slow fade begins.
Servants enter to clear up the coffee tray, etc.
Ogarev, Herzen, Natalie and Sasha stroll away towards the house, taking the basket of mushrooms.