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 …?
SEPTEMBER 1847 (REPRISE)
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.)
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—
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.