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COPYRIGHT 2007 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.
History as distinct from destiny: that is what the Czech-born playwright Tom Stoppard shows us near the start of "Voyage," the first play of "The Coast of Utopia," his alternately reckless, romantic, boring, and exhilarating trilogy on the Russian thinkers of the mid-nineteenth century (at Lincoln Center's Vivian Beaumont). Here, at Premukhino, an estate some hundred and fifty miles northwest of Moscow, in the years from 1833 to 1844, the Russian nobleman Alexander Bakunin (Richard Easton) lives with his wife, Varvara (Amy Irving), and their four daughters and one son, Michael (Ethan Hawke), in a kind of unrivalled splendor: with miles and miles of grounds and hours and hours in which to discuss any number of topics that concern the family, or his idea of it. Educated abroad and never obliged to work for a living, Alexander is a true aristocrat, with all that that life entails: a love of beauty, and little firsthand knowledge of the cruelty that can thwart it. As his son wrote to him some years later, "You were our teacher. You awakened in us a feeling for the good and the beautiful; a love of nature and that love which still closely and indissolubly unites all of us brothers and sisters."
Notice that Michael doesn't include his mother in his declaration of love. As E. H. Carr points out, in his valuable 1937 biography of Bakunin, whom many consider the father of modern anarchism, Michael's political awareness seems to have been forged, in part, in opposition...
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