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.
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.