Some time ago, I was blessed to attend the "marathon" production of Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia
My favorite character in the plays is Vissarion Belinsky, a Russian literary critic who was a friend of Alexander Herzen and Mikhail Bakunin. In the first of the three plays, Voyage, Belinsky is vacationing at Bakunin's family estate. He's amazed by the contrast of the culture and the wealthy and the 500 serfs in service to his friend's father. Early in his stay at the estate, he's drawn out and reveals his purpose and perspective. It was a gift to receive this in the first act of the first of three plays that would stretch out all afternoon and evening. I you like what follows, I'll be posting the second monologue as soon as I get it typed up.
Mikhail Bakunin: You said we had no literature.
Vissarion Belinsky: That's what I write. We haven't. We have a small number of masterpieces, how could we not, there are so many of us, a great artist will turn up from time to time in much smaller countries than Russia. But as a nation we have no literature because what we have isn't ours, it's like a party where everyone has has to come dressed up as somebody else – Byron, Voltaire, Goethe, Schiller, Shakespeare and the rest … I am not an artist. My play was no good. I am not a poet. A poem can't be written by an act of will. When the rest of us are trying our hardest to be present, a real poet goes absent. We can watch him in the moment of creation, there he sits with the pen in his hand, not moving. When it moves, we've missed it. Where did he go in that moment? The meaning of art lies in the answer to that question. To discover it, to understand it, to now the difference between it happening and not happening, this is my whole purpose in life, and it is not a contemptible calling in our country where our liberties cannot be discussed because we have none, and science or politics can't be discussed for the same reason. A Critic does double duty here. If something true can be understood about art, something will be understood about liberty, too, and science and politics and history – because everything in the universe is unfolding together with a purpose of which mine is a part. You are right to laugh at me because I don't know German or French. But the truth of idealism would be plain to me if I had heard one sentence of Schelling shouted through my window by a man on a galloping horse. When philosophers start talking like architects, get out while you can, chaos is coming. When they start laying down rules for beauty, blood in the streets if from that moment inevitable. When reason and measurement are made authorities for the perfect society, seek sanctuary among the cannibals... Because the answer is not out there like America waiting for Columbus, the same answer fro everybody forever. The universal idea speaks through humanity itself, and differently through each nation in each stage of its history. When the inner life of a nation speaks through the unconscious creative spirit of its artists, for generation after generation – then you have a national literature. That's why we have none. Look at us! – a gigantic child with a tiny head stuffed full of idolatry for everything foreign … and a huge inert body abandoned to its own muck, a continent of vassalage and superstition, an Africa of know-nothing have-nothings without a notion of a better life, or the wit to be discontented drunk or sober, that's your Russia, held together by police informers, and fourteen ranks of uniformed flunkeys – how can we have a literature? Folk tales and foreign models, that's our lot, swooning over our imitation Racines and Walter Scotts – our literature is nothing but an elegant pastime for the upper classes, like dancing or cards. How did it happen? How did this disaster befall us? Because we were never trusted to grow up, we're treated like children and we deserve to be treated like children – flogged for impertinence, shut into cupboards for naughtiness, sent to bed without supper and not daring even to dream the of the guillotine...
Yes – I've got off my track, hell and damnation … excuse me … it's always happening to me! … I forget what I'm trying to say – I'm sorry, I'm sorry … Every work of art is the breath of a sing eternal idea. That's it. Forget the rest. Every work of art is the breath of a single eternal idea breathed by God into the inner life of the artist. That's where he went. We will have our literature. What kind of literature and what kind of life is the same question. Our external life is an insult. But we have produced Pushkin and now Gogol. Excuse me, I don't feel well.
