Shipwreck ( Coast of Utopia-2)

BELINSKY   Turgenev’s got a point.

EMMA   Georg geht es besser. [George is feeling better!]

BELINSKY   Our problem is feudalism and serfdom.

The rest of the scene now repeats itself with the difference that instead of the general babel which ensued, the conversation between Belinsky and Turgenev is now ‘protected,’ with the other conversations virtually mimed. At the point where the babel went silent before, nothing now alters.

BELINSKY   (cont.) What have these theoretical models got to do with us? We’re so big and backward!

TURGENEV   My mother’s estate is ten times the size of Fourier’s model society.

BELINSKY   I’m sick of Utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them. I’d trade the lot for one practical difference that owes nothing to anybody’s ideal society, one commonsensical action that puts right an injury to one person. Do you know what I like to do best when I’m at home?—watch them build the railway station in St Petersburg. My heart lifts to see the tracks going down. In a year or two, friends and families, lovers, letters, will be speeding to Moscow and back. Life will be altered. The poetry of practical gesture. Something unknown to literary criticism! I’m sick of everything I’ve ever done. Sick of it and from it. I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life. No woman had a more fervent or steadfast adorer. I picked up every handkerchief she let fall, lace, linen, snot rag, it made no difference. Every writer dead or alive was writing for me personally, to transport me, insult me, make me shout for joy or tear my hair out, and I wasn’t fooled often. Your Sportsman’s Sketches are the best thing since Gogol was young, and this Dostoevsky is another if he can do it twice. People are going to be amazed by Russian writers. In literature we’re a great nation before we’re ready.

TURGENEV   You’re going round again, Captain.

HERZEN   My God! We’re going to miss it! (comforting Natalie) You’re pale. Stay here. Stay with the children.

Natalie nods.

NATALIE   (to Belinsky) I won’t come to the station. Have you got everything?

BAKUNIN   It’s not too late to change your mind.

BELINSKY   I know—it’s my motto.

Natalie embraces Belinsky. Turgenev and Sazonov help Belinsky with his valise and his parcels.

HERZEN   Don’t try to talk French. Or German. Just be helpless. Don’t get on the wrong boat.

There is a general exodus, as before.

Kolya is left alone. There are sounds of the cabs departing. There is distant thunder, which Kolya ignores. Then there is a roll of thunder nearer. Kolya looks around, aware of something. Natalie enters. She kisses Kolya on the nose, enunciating his name. He watches her mouth.

NATALIE   Kolya … Kolya …

Natalie notices Belinsky’s dressing gown. She gives a cry of dismay and runs out of the room with it.

KOLYA   (absent-mindedly) Ko’ ya … Ko’ ya. (He plays with his top.)

ACT TWO

JANUARY 1849

Paris.

George has been reading to Herzen and Natalie. Natalie sits with George at her feet. Herzen lies on the couch with a silk handkerchief over his face. The book—or booklet—is The Communist Manifesto in its yellow wrapper.

NATALIE   Why have you stopped?

George closes the book and lets it fall. Natalie smoothes George’s hair.

GEORGE   I don’t see the point.

NATALIE   He’s saying that all history up to now is the history of class struggle. And by sheer luck, Marx himself, the discoverer of this fact, is living in the very place, at the very time, when, thanks to industrialisation, these centuries of class struggle, from feudal times onwards—

GEORGE   Yes, I’ve got that.

NATALIE   Well, then. It’s all now arriving at the end of history, with the final—