Stoppard Pays a Visit to 'Utopia'

TVER, Central Russia -- British playwright Tom Stoppard is drinking tea in a cafe in Tver reflecting on his day spent exploring the remains of the nearby estate of Mikhail Bakunin, Russia's disowned 19th-century anarchist and revolutionary.

Stoppard is on his way back to Moscow where he has been talking to the Moscow Art Theater about staging a Russian translation of his latest plays, a trilogy about Bakunin and his contemporaries, chief among them Alexander Herzen, Russia's first self-proclaimed socialist, and Vissarion Belinksy, the young literary critic. The trilogy, "The Coast of Utopia," which premiered in London last summer, comprises three self-contained but sequential plays, spanning the development of Russia's intellectual frontier from 1833 through 1868.

Stoppard, whose most famous plays include "Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead," "Jumpers" and "Arcadia," admits he has chosen an ironic time to bring the plays to Russia. While, as an anarchist, Bakunin was persona non grata in the Soviet era, Belinsky and Herzen, "are too closely associated for Russians with the boring revolutionaries who were stuffed down their throats in their Soviet school days," Stoppard said.

However, given their major roles in Russian intellectual history, he said he was still surprised to discover upon arrival in Moscow that the streets named after his characters had reverted to their pre-revolutionary names with the collapse of the Soviet Union.

"Even Herzen's street has been renamed! I am really very displeased about this and shall be talking to Mr. Putin at the first available opportunity about getting Herzen's name back on the boulevard," Stoppard joked.

The Ulitsa Gerzena of Soviet times has reverted to its pre-revolutionary name of Bolshaya Nikitskaya. In the 1830s, No. 23 would buzz with the salons of Nikolai Ogarov, the poet and essayist, where the young men, all except Belinsky born into the gentry, would discuss Russia's stagnation and their belief that the country should look to the intellectual currents of Western Europe for its salvation. In recognition of their contribution to the revolutionary cause, the Soviets also named the streets leading off Ulitsa Gerzena after Herzen's intellectual sparring partners. Belinsky's street, Ulitsa Belinskovo, is now once again known as Nikitsky Pereulok.

"The Coast of Utopia" is an unusual work for Stoppard, who claims to be more interested in ideas than in characters. "I don't always write about real life people in real places and historical periods, and this trilogy is an exception."

But he spent most of his week in Russia this summer trying to establish a personal link with the "real-life people" of his plays, visiting the sites that most Russians now prefer to ignore. He visited Herzen's family home, at 27 Pereulok Sivtsev Vrazhek, which today is a little-visited house museum. He also went to Sparrow Hills, to the spot where Herzen and Ogarev made their pledge to dedicate their lives to the revolution, marked by a Soviet-era monument of the pair, now littered with broken beer bottles and irreverent graffiti.

But Stoppard's most important pilgrimage was to the half-ruined Premukhino estate near Tver, the setting of much of the first play of the trilogy, "Voyage." He had not visited the estate while researching the plays, and Stoppard said seeing the estate, located about 200 kilometers northwest of Moscow, was one of the most moving experiences of his professional life.

As he walked about the overgrown grounds, he stumbled across a line of trees, some of them rotten and falling away.

"These trees were planted by Alexander Bakunin, one for each of his children," Sergei Kornilov, the guardian of the estate and Stoppard's guide, explained. "The one lying down was Mikhail's."

Stoppard was stunned. "One tends to think one has invented the world of the play and it's an extraordinary feeling to stand where Mikhail Bakunin stood in the 1830s and to walk in his and Belinsky's [a frequent visitor to the estate] footsteps."

He is also moved to find himself in Tver, a place that he read much about while researching the trilogy. It was in Tver, he said, that Bakunin's father arranged for him to get a safe job in government pushing a pen. Bakunin viewed the job with contempt and instead went to Moscow to study German philosophy -- a path that ultimately led him to become the first internationally famous revolutionary and a prisoner in a Siberian labor camp, from which he managed to escape. "He turned up in London just in time to catch the first act of my third play," Stoppard, who won an Oscar in 1999 for his playful screenplay "Shakespeare in Love," quipped in typical Stoppardian fashion.

Now Stoppard has turned up in Moscow just in time to catch the last act of the Russian revolution. He said he is usually indifferent to where his plays get staged but this time it mattered.

"I have been working on 'Utopia' for four years. From the very beginning I indulged myself in the dream of seeing the plays performed in Russian, in Moscow, one day and it seems that day might be coming. I suppose I felt the work would not be complete until a Russian audience saw them."

Both Stoppard and the Moscow Art Theater, which is associated with some of Russia's most serious theater and was the first to stage the plays of Anton Chekhov, hope that a Russian audience will find something new in the trilogy. It does not treat Herzen, Belinsky and Bakunin as school portraits or established revolutionaries, but as young people who talk about philosophy, love, friendship and betrayal. They fall in love and feel grief and try to reconcile the idea of personal freedom with universal happiness.

"My interest is in trying to show how the great challenges and puzzles of the time determined the lives of these individuals," Stoppard said.