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“History has no culmination!” proclaims the intellectual Alexander Herzen to Karl Marx in a dream at the close of Tom Stoppard’s “Coast of Utopia.” It has no goal. “There is no libretto.”

Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

Adam Dannheisser, left, as Marx, and Ethan Hawke as Michael Bakunin in "The Coast of Utopia: Shipwreck."

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Sara Krulwich/The New York Times

In “The Coast of Utopia: Salvage,” Brian F. O’Byrne plays Alexander Herzen.

Given the sold-out houses and multiple-marathon performances of this 3-play, 70-some-role, 41-actor, 8-hour epic now at Lincoln Center, it is difficult to tell whether many other viewers felt, as I often did, that Herzen’s words applied not only to history but to Mr. Stoppard’s version of it.

No well-structured libretto. No driving, cumulative impulse. No culmination. Henry James described Tolstoy’s “War and Peace” as a loose, baggy monster, and this trilogy often seems like one too, as if its creator were intent on cramming it all in, telling the story of a generation of revolutionary Russian intellectuals from the 1830s through the 1860s, their loves and hates, their affairs and ideals, the turmoil and tragedy of their times — all with Tolstoyan sweep if not Tolstoyan realism.

Of course the titles of these plays promise something else, a focused, dialectical drama: “Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” “Salvage.” Or as the Hegelian intellectuals in these plays might have put it, Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis. But it’s a tease: There are plenty of theses tossed about but no real syntheses. Forget classical structure, focused problems, neat or even unsettling resolutions.

Mr. Stoppard is so playful and intelligent of course that this might well have been part of the point. And that at least is worth thinking about. Mr. Stoppard was not just writing about an obscure group of spoiled Russian aristocrats like Michael Bakunin and Alexander Herzen, who often lived in exile while paving the way for the revolution that was to traumatically disrupt the next century. These dreamers and agitators actually raised issues about utopia and revolution, individual freedom and social welfare, anarchy and order, that have a contemporary resonance, which is one reason why Mr. Stoppard may have found them so compelling.

Their bohemian lives and anti-bourgeois sentiments were echoed in late-20th-century counterculture. Their arguments about political reform and revolutionary fervor are paraphrased in contemporary debates. And perhaps Herzen — the sovereign intellect of the trilogy, who clearly sees the dangers of tyranny latent in utopian dreams, and who, at the peak of his career in the 1850s and 1860s, lives in London — might even bear a familial resemblance to Mr. Stoppard himself: an émigré in Britain, renowned, as Herzen was, for quicksilver dialogue, wide-ranging learning, skeptical wit and mind-shifting writings.

If Mr. Stoppard had written a more focused play, Herzen would have been at its center. A Russian friend described Herzen’s “extraordinary mind which darted from one topic to another with unbelievable swiftness, with inexhaustible wit and brilliance,” capable of “instantaneous, unexpected juxtaposition of quite dissimilar things.”

Mr. Stoppard points out that when the philosopher Isaiah Berlin stumbled across Herzen’s memoirs while researching Karl Marx’s life, it changed Berlin’s life. In his writings Berlin later called Herzen — the illegitimate son of a wealthy Russian gentleman — “a political (and consequently a moral) thinker of the first importance.”

Berlin wrote that “as an acute and prophetic observer of his times” Herzen was the equal of Marx and Tocqueville, but “as a moralist he is more interesting and original than either.”

What does Herzen represent for Berlin and Mr. Stoppard? Berlin explained that for the generations before Herzen, the French Revolution inspired both ecstatic hopes and in the Terror that followed, disastrous disillusion. One reason for the popularity of German idealists like Hegel for Herzen’s generation was that they prevented disillusion and encouraged new hopes.

Earlier revolutionaries, the arguments went, had not been sufficiently aware of history’s processes. But now the powers of reason would reveal history’s laws and disclose its evolutionary and progressive transformations. Marx went further, arguing that history was a science: revolution was a necessary development; the revolutionary was history’s servant.

At the beginning of Mr. Stoppard’s trilogy, the young Bakunin spouts Hegel’s formulas like a fountain; his faith in imminent salvation is almost religious. Marx ultimately becomes Bakunin’s dour rival. In Mr. Stoppard’s portrayal Bakunin treats revolution as a game; Bakunin, the anarchist, prefers to see himself, not history, as the prime mover.

For Mr. Stoppard as for Berlin, Herzen is the dissenter who gradually sees through the ecstasies and hopes of his friends. He refuses to accept that reason can discern history’s laws, or that history is intrinsically progressive, leading to a grand revolution that would set things right. History has no libretto (as Herzen said in his writings as well as in the play). If it did, he writes, “it would lose all interest,” becoming “boring” and “ludicrous.”

What history offers instead is an arena through which humans stumble about, seeking grand revolutions when they should be satisfied with what he calls “progress by peaceful steps.” Herzen rejects what he calls, in the play, the “utopia of the ant heap,” the notion that for the collective good of future generations, current generations can be trod upon.

Herzen was tireless in his crusade for freeing Russia’s serfs and reforming Russian society. But he enshrined the idea of individual liberty above sweeping visions of social utopia; he is also the prophet who anticipates tyrannical storms in the promises of a world far better than the one we are given.

I think Mr. Stoppard wanted Herzen’s culminating vision of human frailty and compromise to grow out of the tragedies of his personal life: the death of a beloved son, the betrayal in his wife’s love affair with a good friend, the impossibility of ever returning to his native land. All of Mr. Stoppard’s utopian intellectuals are tossed about by passions, betrayals, imperfections and confusions. But they dream of their brave new worlds, while for Herzen life’s problems are not awaiting resolution: they are intrinsically beyond solution.

Yet watching “The Coast of Utopia” I never felt Herzen’s personal experience turn into political insight. Perhaps that would have meant violating Herzen’s principles and providing a dramatic world less loose and baggy, in which there is unity, purpose, culmination. But at least you can feel even in the tumult of these plays, how great the temptation is to give in to the impulse that some culmination is possible to history’s meanderings.

It is tempting to move from notions of imperfect reform to dreams of religious apocalypse, from notions of charitable enterprise to ideas of expendable human material: individuals or classes readily sacrificed for the sake of a brave new world.

Herzen, in the play and in his writings, refers to the strident revolutionaries of the 1860s as the sickened descendants of his generation, “the syphilis of our revolutionary passions.” Could he really have had any idea of what was to come in Russia, let alone how powerful those temptations remain?

// posted by Alice @ Monday, February 26, 2007