Tom Stoppard: In the Russian Court

Tom Stoppard: In the Russian Court IRA B. NADEL A map o/ the world that does IIot include Utopia is /lot worth even glancing Of. Oscar Wilde, "The Soul of Man under Socialism" 260 Tom Stoppard doesn'Iknow Russian but that hasn't limited his fascination with the country and its writers. He devotes his trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, made up of Voyage, Shipwreck, and Salvage, to thirty-five years of nineteenrhcentury Russian history and the formidable radicals, from Herzen to Marx, associated with it. An epic trilogy, The Coast ofUtopia summarizes Stoppard's long-standing concern with social justice, moral responsibility, and personal freedom - and the inability to fully achieve them. History, as his play reveals, undennines their enactment, while exile isoften the only solution for the politicized individual. Biographically, The Coast ofUtopia might be understood as Stoppard's attempt at reconciling his own exile from a middle-European past with his English identity by exploring the struggles of a group of nineteenthcentury Russian radicals who find existence only outside of Russia. Stoppard's experience parallels that of those in his play who live in exile but think and write only of Russia; despite his absorption with English subjects and settings, his need to write abol;lt Eastern Europe and Russia persists. I The Coast of Utopia reformulates the ordeal of political activists by posing this question: is it more effective to criticize from a position of exile and survival or from within a country under the threat of reprisal and silence? This moral dilemma finds restatement in the issue of respect for the writer, as the critic Belinsky, a character in the second play, Shipwreck, makes clear. He explains why he could never write in France or England. To write in either country would mean nothing: "IIJn this din of hacks and famous names.I...] None of it seems serious. At home the public look to writers as their real leadModem Drama, 47:3 (Fall 2004) 500 Tom Stoppard: In the Russian Court 501 ers" (30-31). Challenged by this contradiction, Stoppard explores the necessity of suppression as the catalyst for liberating self-expression, acknowledging that persecution, not freedom, defines the writer. . Stoppard's identification with these issues originated in his own Czech past and concern with human rights. His support for groups like Charter 77 and the Russian refuseniks, underscored by a 1977 trip to Russia as part of Amnesty International's Year of Prisoners of Conscience, intensified his awareness. His long-standing practice of speaking out against injustice, from objecting to the imprisonment of Russian dissidents to criticizing the Jatwah against Salman Rushdie, finds its fullest dramatic and historical realization in his Russian trilogy , focused on a set of idealistic revolutionaries between 1833 and 1868. That Stoppard should write a play on this scale at this stage in his career testifies to the centrality of social conscience, courage, and desire for him. Only in a trilogy that sweeps from Russia to England, France, Germany, Italy, and Switzerland can he present the complexities of time, action. and urgency associated with a problem he still believes to be unresolved: the cost of accommodating personal freedom to universal justice. The length and scope of the plays, a source of complaint by some critics, is necessary to convey the movement and range of issues he addresses, although at times one feels that the episodic structure and the presentation of the contingent matches the writing of Belinsky: "[I]t all goes in, there's no time to have a style, it's a miracle if I have a main verb" (Voyage 81). Stoppard's interest in Russia began when he was a student - not in university (which he never attended) - but in London in the early sixties. A girlfriend at the time dragged him to a language school in Oxford Street, where the two of them became desultory pupils for several months. He has wanted to know something about the language and culture ever since, although he later admitted, in a television interview, that it may have been the young woman rather than the language that first attracted him ("Toni Stoppard"). Concern over the fate of Russian dissidents in 1973...