by Tom Stoppard
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.
HERZEN George … George … (to Natalie) He’s the only real Russian left in Paris. Bakunin’s in Saxony under a false name—he wrote and told me! Turgenev is guess where, and Sazonov has disappeared into an aviary of Polish conspirators who are planning a demonstration. We should go to live in … Italy, perhaps, or Switzerland. The best school for Kolya is in Zurich. When he’s a little older, my mother’s going to move there to be with him.
NATALIE (to George) They’ve got a new system. Put your hands on my face.
GEORGE Like that?
George touches her face lightly. Natalie stammers M’s and pops P’s.
NATALIE Can you feel? That’s how you learn if you’re doing it right. Mama … Papa … Baby … Ball … George … George …
Herzen jumps up with his letter.
HERZEN Ogarev’s engaged to Natasha!
Natalie cries out and opens her letter. They both read.
GEORGE My wife is in an interesting condition, did I tell you?
HERZEN Good for Nick!
NATALIE It all started before Christmas!
GEORGE Well, it’s not very interesting. In fact, it’s the least interesting condition she’s ever in.
NATALIE I’m going to write to her this minute!
GEORGE (vaguely) Oh … all right.
NATALIE Let me see what he says.
Natalie, delighted, takes Herzen’s letter and gives him hers. She hurries out.
GEORGE There was always something that appealed to me about Ogarev. I don’t know what it was … He’s such a vague, lazy, hopeless sort of person. (Pause.) I thought he had a wife. He had a wife when I knew him in Paris.
HERZEN Maria.
GEORGE Maria! She kept company with a painter, to speak loosely. Well, he applied paint to canvas and was said to have a large brush. Did she die?
HERZEN No, she’s alive and kicking.
GEORGE What’s to be done about marriage? We should have a programme, like Proudhon. ‘Property is theft, except for wives.’
HERZEN Proudhon’s programme of shackles from altar to coffin is an absurdity. Passions are facts. Making cages for them is the vanity of Utopians, preachers, lawgivers … Still, passions running free, owing nothing to yesterday or tomorrow, isn’t what you’d call a programme either. Ogarev is my programme. He’s the only man I know who lives true to his beliefs. Fidelity is admirable, but proprietorship disgusting. But Maria was vain, flighty, I worried for Nick. She was not like my Natalie. But with Ogarev, love doesn’t turn out to be pride. It’s love like on the label, and he suffered it. You think that’s weakness? No, it’s strength.
Natalie enters wearing a hat and adjusts it, pleased, in an imaginary mirror.
MARIA OGAREV, aged thirty-six, poses nude for an unseen painter.
HERZEN (cont.) He’s a free man because he gives away freely. I’m beginning to understand the trick of freedom. Freedom can’t be a residue of what was unfreely given up, divided up like a fought-over loaf. Every giving up has to be self-willed, freely chosen, unenforceable. Each of us must forgo only what we choose to forgo, balancing our personal freedom of action against our need for the cooperation of other people—who are each making the same balance for themselves. What is the largest number of individuals who can pull this trick off? I would say it’s smaller than a nation, smaller than the ideal communities of Cabet or Fourier. I would say the largest number is smaller than three. Two is possible, if there is love, but two is not a guarantee.
APRIL 1849
Natalie looks around. She reacts to an (imaginary) painting. Maria enters, robing herself.
MARIA I’ve already written to Nick … I told him I had no intention of marrying again, and so had no need of a divorce.
NATALIE No … the need is Nick’s.
MARIA Exactly. Mine is to protect my position as his wife.
NATALIE Your position? But Maria, you haven’t been his wife for years now, except in name.
MARIA That’s a large exception, and while it’s so, there’s three hundred thousand roubles in the six-per-cents, secured against his property. Where would it leave me if I were divorced? Worse still when there’s a new wife with her own ideas about her position. You know what a child Nicholas is about money. Anyone can get round him. He had four thousand souls when his father died, and almost the first thing he did was hand over the largest property to his serfs. He’s simply not someone you can depend on. And now he sends you to plead for him and his eager bride. Do you know her?
NATALIE (nods) The Tuchkovs went home last year. Nick knew her before, but it was only when she returned from abroad … well, you know … and anybody would fall in love with Natasha, I fell in love with her myself!
MARIA Really? Really in love?
NATALIE Yes!—really, utterly, transported by love, I’ve never loved anyone as I loved Natasha, she brought me back to life.
MARIA You were lovers?
NATALIE (in confusion) No. What do you mean?
MARIA Oh. Utterly, transportedly, but not really. Why won’t you look at my picture?
NATALIE Your …? Well … it seems rude to …
MARIA You’ve always idealised love, and you think—surely this can’t be it? (She laughs.) Painted from life, one afternoon when we lived in the Rue de Seine over the hat shop, do you know it? I’ll take you there, we’ll find something that suits you. Go on, have a good look.
NATALIE (looking) He’s got the porcelain quite well … What do you do with it when just anybody comes, your … companion’s friends, the landlord, strangers …? Do you cover it up?
MARIA No … it’s art.
NATALIE And you don’t mind?
Maria shakes her hea
d.
MARIA (confidentially) I’m in the paint!
NATALIE What do you … (mean)?
MARIA Mixed in.
NATALIE (Pause.) I’ve only been sketched in pencil.
MARIA Naked?
NATALIE (laughs shyly) Alexander doesn’t draw.
MARIA If an artist asks you, don’t hesitate. You feel like a woman.
NATALIE But I do feel like a woman, Maria. I think our sex is ennobled by idealising love. You say it as if it meant denying love in some way, but it’s you who’s denying it its … greatness … which comes from being a universal idea, like a thought in nature, without which there’d be no lovers, or artists either, because they’re the same thing only happening differently, and neither is any good if they deny the joined-upness of everything … oh dear, we should speak German for this …
MARIA No … I could follow it, being in much the same state when I met Nicholas Ogarev at the Governor’s Ball in Penza. A poet in exile, what could be more romantic? We sat out and talked twaddle at each other, and knew that this was love. We had no idea we were in fashion, that people who didn’t know any better were falling in love quite adequately without dragging in the mind of the Universe as dreamt up by some German professor who left out the irritating details. There was also talk of the angels in heaven singing hosannas. So the next time I fell in love, it stank of turpentine, tobacco smoke, laundry baskets … the musk of love! To arouse and satisfy desire is nature making its point about the sexes, everything else is convention.
NATALIE (timidly) But our animal nature is not our whole nature … and when the babies start coming …
MARIA I had a child, too … born dead. Yes, you know, of course you know—what wouldn’t Nicholas tell your husband? … Being taken to meet Alexander for the first time was like being auditioned for my own marriage.
NATALIE It was the same for me, meeting Nick, and I was expecting Sasha.
MARIA Poor Nick. Even my having another man’s child, it was nothing to the agony he went through when he found himself caught in the middle between his wife and his best friend.
NATALIE But we all loved each other at the beginning. Don’t you remember how we joined hands and knelt and thanked God for each other?
MARIA Well, I didn’t want to be the only one standing up.
NATALIE That’s not so, is it?
MARIA Yes—it is so. I found it embarrassing … childish—
NATALIE Even at the beginning! How sad for you, Maria … I’m sorry …
Maria, to Natalie’s complete surprise, suddenly gives in to her rage.
MARIA Don’t you look down on me with your stuck-up charity, you’re still the simpering little fool you always were—giving away your birthright, idealising it away in your prattle of exalted feelings … You can tell Ogarev he’ll get nothing out of me, and that goes for all his friends!
The interview is evidently over. Natalie remains composed.
NATALIE I’ll go, then. I don’t know what I said to make you angry. (She gathers herself to leave.) Your portrait, by the way, is a failure, no doubt because your friend thinks he can produce the desired effect on canvas in the same way he produces it on you, by calculation … If he dips his brush here and prods it there, he’ll get this time what he got last time, and so on till you’re done. But that’s neither art nor love. You and your portrait resemble each other only in crudeness and banality. But that’s a trivial failure. Imitation isn’t art, everyone knows that. Technique by itself can’t create. So, where do you think is the rest of the work of art if not in exalted feeling translated into paint or music or poetry, and who are you to call it prattle? German philosophy is the first time anyone’s explained everything that can’t be explained by the rules. Why can’t your expert lover satisfy a desire to paint like Raphael or Michelangelo? That would shut me up, wouldn’t it? What’s stopping him? Why can’t he look harder and see what the rules are? Because there aren’t any. Genius isn’t a matter of matching art to nature better than he can do it, it’s nature itself—revealing itself through the exalted feeling of the artist, because the world isn’t a collection of different things, mountains and rain and people, which have somehow landed up together, it’s all one thing, like the ultimate work of art trying to reach its perfection through us, its most conscious part, and we fall short most of the time. We can’t all be artists, of course, so the rest of us do the best we can at what’s our consolation, we fall short at love. (She pauses for a last look at the portrait.) I know what it is. He’s got your tits too high and your arse too small. (Natalie leaves.)
MAY 1849
Saxony. In a prison room, a lawyer (FRANZ OTTO) is seated at a table. Bakunin is in chains, sitting opposite.
OTTO What were you doing in Dresden?
BAKUNIN When I arrived or when I left?
OTTO Just generally.
BAKUNIN When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire. But after a week or two, a local revolution broke out against the King of Saxony, so I joined it.
OTTO (Pause.) You understand who I am?
BAKUNIN Yes.
OTTO I am your lawyer, nominated by the Saxon authorities to present your defence.
BAKUNIN Yes.
OTTO You are charged with treason, for which the penalty is death. (Pause.) What brought you to Dresden? I suspect it was to visit the art gallery with its famous Sistine Madonna by Raphael. In all probability you had no knowledge of any popular insurrection brewing against the King. On May the third, when the barricades appeared, it was a complete surprise to you.
BAKUNIN Yes.
OTTO Ah. Good. You never planned any revolt, you had no obligation to it or connection with it, its objectives were of no interest to you.
BAKUNIN Absolutely true! The King of Saxony is welcome to dismiss his parliament, as far as I’m concerned. I look on all such assemblies with contempt.
OTTO There you are. At heart, you’re a monarchist.
BAKUNIN On May the fourth I met a friend of mine in the street.
OTTO Quite by chance.
BAKUNIN Quite by chance.
OTTO His name?
BAKUNIN Wagner. He’s a music director of the Dresden opera, at least he was till we burned it down—
OTTO Er … don’t get too far ahead.
BAKUNIN Oh, he was delighted—he despised the taste of the management. Anyway, Wagner said he was on his way to the Town Hall to see what was going on. So I went with him. The provisional government had just been proclaimed. They were out of their depth. The poor things hadn’t the faintest idea how to conduct a revolution, so I took charge—
OTTO Just—just a moment—
BAKUNIN The King’s troops were waiting for reinforcements sent by Prussia, and there was no time to be lost. I had them tear up the railway tracks, showed them where to place the cannons—
OTTO Stop, stop—
BAKUNIN (laughs) There’s a story that I suggested hanging the Sistine Madonna on the barricades on the theory that Prussians would be too cultured to open fire on a Raphael …
Otto jumps to his feet and sits again.
OTTO You know who I am?
BAKUNIN Yes.
OTTO What brought you to Dresden? Before you answer, I should tell you, both the Austrian and the Russian Emperors have asked for you to be handed over to them.
BAKUNIN (Pause.) When I arrived, I was using Dresden as my base while plotting the destruction of the Austrian Empire, which I consider a necessary first step to put Europe in flames and thus set off a revolution in Russia. But after a week or two, to my amazement, a revolution broke out against the King of Saxony …
JUNE 1849
[From Herzen’s essays, From the Other Shore: ‘Of all the suburbs of Paris I like Montmorency best. There is nothing remarkable there, no carefully trimmed parks as at St Cloud, no boudoirs of trees as at Trianon … In Montmorency nature is extremely simple … There is a large grove there, situated high up, and q
uiet … I do not know why but this grove always reminds me of our Russian woods … one thinks that in a minute a whiff of smoke will drift across from the byres … The road cuts through a clearing, and I then feel sad because instead of Zvenigorod, I see Paris … A small cottage with no more than three windows … is Rousseau’s house …’]
‘Déjeuner sur l’herbe’ … There is a tableau which anticipates—by fourteen years—the painting by Manet. Natalie is the undressed woman sitting on the grass in the company of two fully clothed men, George and Herzen. Emma, stooping to pick a flower, is the woman in the background. The broader composition includes Turgenev, who is at first glance sketching Natalie but in fact is sketching Emma. The tableau, however, is an overlapping of two locations, Natalie and George being in one, while Herzen, Emma and Turgenev are together elsewhere. Emma is heavily pregnant. There is a small basket near Natalie.
HERZEN I let Sazonov talk me into joining his march. A few hours in custody have left me with no desire to be locked up in the Conciergerie with hundreds of prisoners and a slop bucket. I’ve borrowed a Wallachian passport. What we should do is take a house together, our two families across the frontier …
GEORGE Can I open?
NATALIE Not yet.
TURGENEV The police aren’t interested in stopping you.
HERZEN I’m not going to stay to find out like Bakunin in Saxony.
TURGENEV But this is a republic.
HERZEN The Crimson Cockatoo has already left for Geneva.
NATALIE Are you peeping?
GEORGE No—tight shut. What are you doing?
HERZEN Can I look?
TURGENEV If you want.
NATALIE All right, then—you can open now.
HERZEN (looking over Turgenev’s shoulder) Ah …
GEORGE Oh, my God!
EMMA I have to move—I’m sorry—!
GEORGE Natalie …
TURGENEV Of course! Move!
NATALIE Sssh …
TURGENEV I’m so sorry—
GEORGE My dear …
TURGENEV I don’t need you anymore.
EMMA Terrible words! …
GEORGE But suppose somebody …
NATALIE Sssh …
HERZEN He’s doing clouds. I wonder what Russian modern art would be like.