BRITISH IMPORT.(The Talk of the Town)

Life is short, art long, and Russian art longer. Or so it seems. A couple of weeks ago, the Czech-born, Britain-residing, world-conquering playwright Tom Stoppard left behind a stack of largely rave reviews for the New York production of "Voyage," the first part of a trilogy called "The Coast of Utopia," about the pioneering Russian intellectuals of the nineteenth century, and set out for Moscow to look in on rehearsals for the play there. It would be unfair to say that the Russian production is coming along at the pace of a Five-Year Plan, but, as Stoppard took time out from rehearsals at the Moscow Academic Youth Theatre, he could not help being gently surprised at the meandering, Chekhovian pace of things.

"A few weeks ago, I received the impression that 'The Coast of Utopia' might open in Moscow next April," he said over tea and cookies one afternoon in a book-crammed back office at the theatre. "The American actors were quite amused by the idea that one may begin rehearsing a play with a view to opening it possibly fifteen months later. Now I have to tell them that it will not be fifteen months--it probably will be twenty months!" He went on, "I am genuinely bemused and charmed by the absence of pressure on the artists here. In London, we rehearsed for twelve weeks, and all three plays were suddenly onstage."

Stoppard has had plays performed in Russia before, but he had particularly hoped, while writing "The Coast of Utopia," which is populated by Alexander Herzen, Vissarion Belinsky, Mikhail Bakunin, and Nicholas Ogarev, among others, that this one might be produced there. And yet when he first sent the script to a company in St. Petersburg, Stoppard said, he "discovered something that was a big surprise to me. There was resistance to the idea of Russians going into the theatre to get more Herzen and Belinsky. They were sick of having Herzen and Belinsky shoved down their throats in high school."

Herzen was lionized during the Communist era as an ideological forerunner of the Bolsheviks. The Soviets named streets, libraries, and colleges after him, along with Bakunin and Belinsky. Every Soviet kid had to study ...