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COPYRIGHT 2002 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
From 1968, an interview with Tom Stoppard.
"When in doubt, speculate. Enter the picture," Tom Stoppard has said. In his ambitious trilogy about prerevolutionary intellectual life in Russia, "The Coast of Utopia" (at London's Royal National Theatre), which requires thirty actors, two hundred and seventy-one costumes, and more than nine hours, Stoppard has imagined himself into the sect of renegade mid-nineteenth-century thinkers for whom the word "intelligentsia" was coined, and whose heady debates about their homeland's moral, intellectual, and political vacuum sowed the seeds of revolution both in the Russian Empire and far beyond its borders. His saga is battened primarily to four major figures: the essayist Alexander Herzen (1812-70), whom Sir Isaiah Berlin called "a kind of Russian Voltaire," the equal of Marx and Tocqueville as a social observer but as a moralist "more interesting and original than either"; the novelist Ivan Turgenev (1818-83); the literary critic and Savonarola of his generation Vissarion Belinsky (1811-48); and the agitator Mikhail Bakunin (1814-76). From their lives and ideas, Stoppard, whose plays were at one time banned in the Soviet Union, manufactures an epic whose greatest achievement is to show history as irony on the move.
"With fearless step we march to the very limit, and go beyond it; never out of...
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