Shipwreck (9 page)

HERZEN
   No doubt. Single-minded conviction is a quality of youth, and Russia is young. (
pointedly
) Compromise, prevarication, the ability to hold two irreconcilable beliefs, both with ironic detachment—these are ancient European arts, and a Russian who finds them irresistible is, I would say, exceptional.

TURGENEV
   (
disingenuously
) How interesting that you should say that. Because I myself, you see—

Herzen, despite himself, laughs, and Turgenev laughs with him, but almost at once his laughter turns to anger.

TURGENEV
   (
cont
.) Putting yourself in another's place is a proper modesty, and yes, it takes centuries to learn it. Impatience, pig-headed stubbornness to the point of destruction—yes, these are things to be forgiven in the young, who lack the imagination to see that almost nothing in this life holds still, everything is moving and changing—

HERZEN
   (
with Granovsky's letter, cries out
) Who is this Moloch who eats his children?

TURGENEV
   Yes, and your taste for melodramatic, rhetorical—

HERZEN
   Belinsky's dead.

TURGENEV
   No, no … oh, no, no, no … No! … No more blather, please. Blather, blather, blather. Enough.

Natalie enters and goes to Herzen.

NATALIE
   Alexander …?

S
EPTEMBER
1847 (R
EPRISE
)

Herzen, Natalie, Turgenev and Kolya remain, their positions corresponding to the reprised scene which now reassembles itself at the point of Natalie's re-entrance.

GEORGE
   
Mir geht es besser.
[I feel better.]

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
.)

J
ANUARY
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—

GEORGE
   But there's no point if, every time you want to argue back, Karl just says, ‘Well you would think that, because as a product of your class, you can't think anything else.' In my opinion, that's cheating.

NATALIE
   I agree. But then I would, wouldn't I, because—

GEORGE
   You think what you are! You say, ‘Karl, I don't agree good and evil are to be defined
entirely
by our economic relations,' and Karl replies—

NATALIE
   ‘Well, you would think that—'

GEORGE
   ‘—because you're not a member of the proletariat!'

Natalie and George delightedly clasp hands in mutual congratulation. Herzen removes the handkerchief from his face. Natalie continues to smooth George's hair
.

HERZEN
   But Marx is a bourgeois from the anus up.

NATALIE
   Alexander! I won't have that word …

HERZEN
   Sorry, middle-class.

GEORGE
   It's German genius, that's what it is.

NATALIE
   What is?

GEORGE
   That if you're a miserable exploited worker, you're playing a vital role in a historical process that'll put you on top as sure as omelettes was eggs. Everything's functioning perfectly, you see! With the French geniuses, your miserable exploited no-accountness means there's a fault in the plumbing, and they're here to fix it because you're too stupid to do it for yourself … So the workers have to hope the plumber knows what he's doing and won't cheat them. No wonder it didn't catch on.

HERZEN
   But how can Communism catch on? It asks a worker to give up his … aristocracy. A cobbler with his own last is an aristocrat compared with the worker in a factory. A minimum of control over your own life, even to make a mess of it, is something necessarily human. What do you think goes wrong with those experimental societies? It's not the mosquitoes. It's something human refusing to erase itself.

Still, at least Marx is an honest-to-God materialist. Those ‘Marseillaise'-singing orators of the left won't let go of nurse. I feel sorry for them. They're preparing for themselves a life of bewilderment and grief … because the republic they want to bring back is the last delirium of two thousand years of metaphysics … the elevation of spirit over matter … brotherhood before bread, equality by obedience, salvation through sacrifice. To save this tepid bathwater, they'll chuck out the baby and wonder where it went. Marx gets it. We didn't get it—or we didn't have the courage.

NATALIE
   George risked his life on the field of battle!

HERZEN
   So he did. You know, now that people have started recognising you clean-shaven, you should grow a beard.

NATALIE
   You're a brute. (
to George
) He's only teasing. Nobody cares about that anymore, it's all forgotten.

HERZEN
   I haven't forgotten.

NATALIE
   Stop it.

GEORGE
   I don't mind. Would you like me to grow my beard?

NATALIE
   I've got used to you without it. What does Emma say?

GEORGE
   She said I should ask you.

NATALIE
   Oh! How flattering. But it's not me who gets the tickles if you grow it back.

HERZEN
   Why doesn't Emma come with you anymore?

GEORGE
   I need to have an hour or two free from family life. What an abominable institution.

HERZEN
   I thought this was family life.

GEORGE
   Yes, but your wife is a saint. It's not Emma's fault. Her father was ruined by the dialectic of history, and he blames me. … It's very hard on Emma, losing her allowance. But what can I do? I'm a poet of revolution between revolutions.

Herzen takes up a few newly arrived letters and looks through them
.

HERZEN
   Write an ode to Prince Louis Napoleon on his election as President of the Republic. In a free vote, the French public renounced freedom.

GEORGE
   ‘Bonaparte Plumbers, a name you can trust.'

HERZEN
   How naive we were at Sokolovo that last summer in Russia, do you remember, Natalie?

NATALIE
   I remember you quarrelling with everyone.

HERZEN
   Arguing, yes. Because we were agreed that there was only one thing worth arguing about—France! France, the sleeping bride of revolution. What a joke. All she wanted was to be the kept woman of a bourgeois … Cynicism fills the air like ash and blights the leaves on the freedom trees.

Herzen gives one of the letters to Natalie
.

NATALIE
   Thank you … Oh, from Natasha! I miss her so, since she went home.

GEORGE
   One must learn to be a stoic. Look at me.

HERZEN
   You're a stoic?

GEORGE
   What does it look like?

HERZEN
   Apathy?

GEORGE
   Exactly. But apathy is misunderstood.

HERZEN
   I'm very fond of you, George.

GEORGE
   
Apatheia!
To the ancient stoics there was nothing irresolute about apathy, it required strenuous effort and concentration.

HERZEN
   
Very
fond of you.

GEORGE
   Because being a stoic didn't mean a sort of uncomplaining putting up with misfortune, that's only how it looks on the outside—inside, it's all about achieving apathy …

HERZEN
   (
laughs
) No, I love you.

GEORGE
   (
hardening
) … which
meant:
a calming of the spirit. Apathy isn't passive, it's the freedom that comes from recognising new borders, a new country called Necessity … it comes from accepting that things are what they are, and not some other thing, and can't for the moment be altered … which people find quite difficult. We've had a terrible shock. We discovered that history has no respect for intellectuals. History is more like the weather. You never know what it's going to do. God, we were busy!—bustling about under the sky, shouting directions to the winds, remonstrating with the clouds in German, Russian, French … and hailing every sunbeam as proof of the power of words, some of which rhymed and scanned. Well … would you like to share my umbrella? It's not too bad under here. Political freedom is a rather banal ambition, after all … all that can't-sit-still about voting and assembling and controlling the means of production.
Stoical
freedom is nothing but not wasting your time berating the weather when it's bucketing down on your picnic.