Читать книгу Shipwreck - Tom Stoppard - Страница 11

SUMMER 1846

The garden of Sokolovo, a gentleman’s estate fifteen miles outside Moscow.

NICHOLAS OGAREV, aged thirty-four, has been reading to NATALIE HERZEN, aged twenty-nine, from a so-called thick journal, the Contemporary. IVAN TURGENEV, aged twenty-eight, is supine, out of earshot, with his hat over his face.

NATALIE Why have you stopped?

OGAREV I can’t read any more. He’s gone mad. (He closes the book and lets it fall.)

NATALIE Well, it was boring anyway.

SASHA HERZEN, aged seven, runs across the garden followed by a NURSE pushing a baby carriage. Sasha has a fishing cane and a jar for tiddlers.

NATALIE (cont.) Sasha, not too close to the river, darling!—(to the Nurse) Don’t let him play on the bank!

The Nurse follows Sasha out.

OGAREV But … it was a fishing rod, wasn’t it?

NATALIE (calling) And where’s Kolya?—(looking aside) Oh, all right, I’ll keep an eye. (resuming) I don’t mind being bored, especially in the country, where it’s part of the attraction, but a boring book I take personally. (looking aside, amused) Far better to spend the time eating marigolds. (glancing at Turgenev) Has he gone to sleep?

OGAREV He didn’t say anything about it to me.

NATALIE Alexander and Granovsky will be back from picking mushrooms soon … Well, what should we talk about?

OGAREV Yes … by all means.

NATALIE Why does it feel as though one has been here before?

OGAREV Because you were here last year.

NATALIE But don’t you ever have the feeling that while real time goes galloping down the road in all directions, there are certain moments … situations … which keep having their turn again? … Like posting stations we change horses at …

OGAREV Have we started yet? Or is this before we start talking about something?

NATALIE Oh, don’t be sideways. Anyway, something’s wrong this year … even though it’s all the same people who were so happy together when we took the house last summer. Do you know what’s different?

OGAREV I wasn’t here last summer.

NATALIE No, it’s not that. Ketscher’s gone into a sulk … grown men squabbling over how to make coffee …

OGAREV But Alexander was right. The coffee is not good, and perhaps Ketscher’s method will improve it.

NATALIE Oh, I’m sure it’s not like Parisian coffee! … Perhaps you’re wishing you’d stayed in Paris.

OGAREV No. Not at all.

Turgenev stirs.

NATALIE Ivan …? He’s in Paris anyway, dreaming about the Opera!

OGAREV Yes, I’ll say one thing, Viardot can sing.

NATALIE But she’s so ugly.

OGAREV Anyone can love a beauty. Turgenev’s love for his opera singer is a reproach to us for batting the word about like a shuttlecock. (Pause.) When Maria wrote to introduce herself to you and Alexander after we got married, she described herself as ugly. I’m paying myself a compliment.

NATALIE She also wrote that she had no vanity and loved virtue for its own sake … She was no judge of her looks either, forgive me, Nick.

OGAREV (tolerantly) Well, if we’re talking about love … Oh, the letters one wrote … ‘Ah, but to love you is to love God and His Universe, our love negates egoism in the embrace of all mankind.’

NATALIE We all wrote that—why not?—it was true.

OGAREV I remember I wrote to Maria that our love would be a tale told down the ages, preserved in memory as a sacred thing, and now she’s in Paris living quite openly with a mediocre painter.

NATALIE That’s a different thing—one might say a normal coaching accident—but at least you had each other body and soul before the coach went into the ditch. Our friend here simply trails along in Viardot’s dust shouting brava, bravissima for favours forever withheld … not to mention her husband, the postillion.

OGAREV Are you sure you wouldn’t rather talk about highway travel?

NATALIE Would that be less painful for you?

OGAREV For me it’s the same thing.

NATALIE I love Alexander with my whole life, but it used to be better, when one was ready to crucify a man or be crucified for him for a word, a glance, a thought … I could look at a star and think of Alexander far away in exile looking at the same star, and feel we were … you know …

OGAREV (Pause.) Triangulated.

NATALIE Foo to you, then.

OGAREV (surprised) Believe me, I …

NATALIE Now grown-upness has caught up with us … as if life were too serious for love. The wives disapprove of me, and it didn’t help that Alexander’s father died and left him quite rich. Duty and self-denial are the thing among our group.

OGAREV Duty and self-denial restrict our freedom to express our personality. I explained this to Maria—she got it at once.

NATALIE Well, she didn’t love you properly. I know I love Alexander, it’s just that we’re not the intoxicated children we were when we eloped in the dead of night and I didn’t even bring my hat … And there was that other thing, too … He told you. I know he told you.

OGAREV Oh, well, yes …

NATALIE I suppose you’re going to say it was only a servant girl.

OGAREV No, I wouldn’t say that. ‘Only a countess’ is more the line I take on these things.

NATALIE Well, it put an end to stargazing, and I’d never have known if Alexander hadn’t confessed it to me … Men can be so stupid.

OGAREV It’s funny, though, that Alexander, who goes on about personal freedom, should feel like a murderer because on a single occasion, arriving home in the small hours, he …

Turgenev stirs and raises his head.

OGAREV (cont.) (adjusting) … travelled without a ticket …

Turgenev relapses.

OGAREV (cont.) … changed horses, do I mean?—no, sorry …

Turgenev sits up, taking the creases out of himself. He is somewhat dandified in his dress.

TURGENEV Is it all right for him to eat them?

Natalie looks quickly toward Kolya but is reassured.

NATALIE (calls) Kolya! (then leaving) Oh, he’s getting so muddy! (Natalie leaves.)

TURGENEV Have I missed tea?

OGAREV No, they’re not back yet.

TURGENEV I shall go in search.

OGAREV Not that way.

TURGENEV In search of tea. Belinsky told me a good story I forgot to tell you. It seems some poor provincial schoolmaster heard there was a vacancy in one of the Moscow high schools, so he came up to town and got an interview with Count Strogonov. ‘What right have you to this post?’ Strogonov barked at him. ‘I ask for the post,’ said the young man, ‘because I heard it was vacant.’ ‘So is the ambassadorship to Constantinople,’ said Strogonov. ‘Why don’t you ask for that?’

OGAREV Very good.

TURGENEV And the young man said—

OGAREV Oh.

TURGENEV ‘I had no idea it was in Your Excellency’s gift, I would accept the post of ambassador to Constantinople with equal gratitude.’ (Turgenev laughs loudly by himself. He has a light high voice, surprising in one of his frame, and a braying laugh.) Botkin’s taken up a collection to send Belinsky to a German spa … doctor’s orders. If only my mother would die, I’d have at least twenty thousand a year. Perhaps I’ll go with him. The waters might reassure my bladder. (He picks up the Contemporary.) Have you read what Gogol’s got in here? You could wait till the book comes out …

OGAREV If you ask me, he’s gone mad.

Natalie returns, wiping soil from her hands.

NATALIE I call to him as if he can hear me. I still think one day I’ll say, ‘Kolya!’ and he’ll turn his face to me. (She wipes a tear with her wrist.) What do you think he thinks about? Can he have thoughts if he has no names to go with them?

TURGENEV He’s thinking muddiness … flowerness, yellowness, nice-smellingness, not-very-nice-tastingness … The names for things don’t come first, words stagger after, hopelessly trying to become the sensation.

NATALIE How can you say that—you, a poet?

OGAREV That’s how we know.

Turgenev turns to Ogarev, silenced and deeply affected.

TURGENEV (Pause.) I thank you. As a poet. I mean, you as a poet. I myself have started writing stories now. (Turgenev starts to leave towards the house.)

OGAREV I like him. He’s not so affected as he used to be, do you think?

Turgenev returns, a little agitated.

TURGENEV You don’t understand Gogol, if I may say so. It’s Belinsky’s fault. I love Belinsky and owe a great deal to him, for his praise of my first poem, certainly, but also for his complete indifference to all my subsequent ones—but he browbeat us into taking Gogol as a realist …

ALEXANDER HERZEN, aged thirty-four, and TIMOTHY GRANOVSKY, aged thirty-three, approach, Herzen with a basket.

NATALIE (jumps up) They’re here … Alexander!

She embraces Herzen as warmly as decorum allows her.

HERZEN My dear … but what’s this? We haven’t come from Moscow.

Granovsky goes unsmilingly towards the house.

NATALIE Have you been quarrelling?

HERZEN Disputing. He’ll get over it. The only trouble is, we were having such an interesting talk …

He turns the basket upside down, letting a single mushroom fall out.

NATALIE Oh, Alexander! I can see one from here!

She snatches the basket and runs off with it. Herzen takes her chair.

HERZEN What were you and Natalie saying about me? Well, thank you very much, anyway.

OGAREV What were you and Granovsky arguing about?

HERZEN The immortality of the soul.

OGAREV Oh, that.

NICHOLAS KETSCHER, aged forty, a thin, avuncular figure to the younger men, comes from the house carrying, with a slightly ceremonial air, a tray with a coffeepot on a small spirit lamp, and cups. In silence Herzen, Ogarev and Turgenev watch him put the tray on a garden table and pour a cup, which he brings to Herzen. Herzen sips the coffee.

HERZEN It’s the same.

KETSCHER What?

HERZEN It tastes the same.

KETSCHER So you think the coffee is no better?

HERZEN No.

The others are now nervous. Ketscher gives a short barking laugh.

KETSCHER Well, it really is extraordinary, your inability to admit you’re wrong even on such a trifling matter as a cup of coffee.

HERZEN It’s not me, it’s the coffee.

KETSCHER No, I mean it’s beyond anything, this wretched vanity of yours.

HERZEN I didn’t make the coffee, I didn’t make the coffeepot, it’s not my fault that—

KETSCHER To hell with the coffee! You’re impossible to reason with! It’s over between us. I’m going back to Moscow! (Ketscher leaves.)

OGAREV Between the coffee and the immortality of the soul, you’ll end up with no friends at all.

Ketscher returns.

KETSCHER Is that your last word?

Herzen takes another sip of coffee.

HERZEN I’m sorry.

KETSCHER Right.

Ketscher leaves again, passing Granovsky entering.

GRANOVSKY (to Ketscher) How’s the …? (Seeing Ketscher’s face, Granovsky lets the matter drop.) Aksakov’s in the house.

HERZEN Aksakov? Impossible.

GRANOVSKY (helping himself to coffee) Just as you like. (He makes a face at the taste of the coffee.) He’s ridden over from some friends of his …

HERZEN Well, why doesn’t he come out? There’s no need for old friends to fall out over …

Ketscher returns as though nothing has passed. He pours himself coffee.

KETSCHER Aksakov’s come. Where is Natalie?

HERZEN Picking mushrooms.

KETSCHER Ah … good. I must say they were excellent at breakfast. (He sips his coffee while the others watch him, and considers it.) Vile. (He puts the cup down and, in a flurry, he and Herzen are kissing each other’s cheeks and clasping each other, competing in self-blame.)

KETSCHER By the way, did I tell you, we’re all going to be in the dictionary?

HERZEN I’m already in the dictionary.

GRANOVSKY He doesn’t mean the German dictionary, in which you make a singular appearance, Herzen, and only by accident …

KETSCHER No, I’m talking about a new word altogether.

HERZEN Excuse me, Granovsky, but I wasn’t an accident, I was the child of an affair of the heart, given my surname for my mother’s German heart. Being half Russian and half German, at heart I’m Polish, of course … I often feel quite partitioned, sometimes I wake up screaming in the night that the Emperor of Austria is claiming the rest of me.

GRANOVSKY That’s not the Emperor of Austria, it’s Mephistopheles, and he is.

Turgenev laughs.

OGAREV What’s the new word, Ketscher?

KETSCHER You can whistle for it now. (furiously to Herzen) Why do you feel you have to make off with every conversation like a bag-snatcher?

HERZEN (protesting, to Ogarev) I don’t, do I, Nick?

GRANOVSKY Yes, you do.

KETSCHER (to Granovsky) It’s you as well!

HERZEN In the first place, I have a right to defend my good name, not to mention my mother’s. In the second place—

OGAREV Stop him, stop him!

Herzen joins in the laughter against himself.

KONSTANTIN AKSAKOV, aged twenty-nine, comes from the house. He seems to be in costume. He wears an embroidered side-fastening shirt and a velvet skullcap. His trousers are tucked into tall boots.

HERZEN Aksakov! Have some coffee!

AKSAKOV (formally) I wanted to tell you in person that relations are over between us. It’s a pity, but there is no help for it. You understand that we can no longer meet as friends. I want to shake you by the hand and say goodbye.

Herzen allows his hand to be shaken. Aksakov starts to walk back.

HERZEN What is the matter with everybody?

OGAREV Aksakov, why do you dress like that?

AKSAKOV (turning angrily) Because I am proud to be Russian!

OGAREV But people think you’re a Persian.

AKSAKOV I have nothing to say to you, Ogarev. As a matter of fact, I don’t hold it against you, compared with some of your friends who spend their time gallivanting around Europe … because I understand that in your case you’re not chasing after false gods but only after a false—

OGAREV (hotly) You be careful, sir, or you will hear from me!

HERZEN (leaping in) That’s enough of that talk!—

AKSAKOV You Westernisers apply for passports with letters from your doctors and then go off and drink the water in Paris …

Ogarev relapses, seething.

TURGENEV (mildly) Not at all, not at all. You can’t drink the water in Paris.

AKSAKOV Go to France for your cravats if you must, but why do you have to go to France for your ideas?

TURGENEV Because they’re in French. You can publish anything you like in France, it’s extraordinary.

AKSAKOV And what’s the result? Scepticism. Materialism. Triviality.

Ogarev, still furious and agitated, leaps up.

OGAREV Repeat what you said!

AKSAKOV Scepticism—materialism—

OGAREV Before!

AKSAKOV Censorship is not all bad for a writer—it teaches precision and Christian patience.

OGAREV (to Aksakov) Chasing after a false what?

AKSAKOV (ignoring) France is a moral cesspit, but you can publish anything you like, so you’re all dazzled—blinded to the fact that the Western model is a bourgeois monarchy for philistines and profiteers.

HERZEN Don’t tell me, tell them.

Ogarev goes out.

AKSAKOV (to Herzen) Oh, I’ve heard about your socialist utopianism. What use is that to us? This is Russia … (to Granovsky) We haven’t even got a bourgeoisie.

GRANOVSKY Don’t tell me, tell him.

AKSAKOV It’s all of you. Jacobins and German sentimentalists. Destroyers and dreamers. You’ve turned your back on your own people, the real Russians abandoned a hundred and fifty years ago by Peter the Great Westerniser!—but you can’t agree on the next step.

Ogarev enters.

OGAREV I demand that you finish what you were going to say!

AKSAKOV I’m afraid I can’t remember what it was.

OGAREV Yes, you can!

AKSAKOV A false beard …? No … A false passport …?

Ogarev goes out.

AKSAKOV (cont.) We have to reunite ourselves with the masses from whom we became separated when we put on silk breeches and powdered wigs. It’s not too late. From our village communes we can still develop in a Russian way, without socialism or capitalism, without a bourgeoisie, yes, and with our own culture unpolluted by the Renaissance, and our own Church unpolluted by the Popes or by the Reformation. It can even be our destiny to unite the Slav nations and lead Europe back to the true path. It will be the age of Russia.

KETSCHER You’ve left out our own astronomy unpolluted by Copernicus.

HERZEN Why don’t you wear a peasant’s shirt and bast shoes if you want to advertise the real Russia, instead of dressing it up like you in your costume? Russia before Peter had no culture. Life was ugly, poor and savage. Our only tradition was submitting ourselves to invaders. The history of other nations is the history of their emancipation. The history of Russia goes the opposite way, to serfdom and obscurantism. The Church of your infatuated iconpainter’s imagination is a conspiracy of pot-house priests and anointed courtiers in trade with the police. A country like this will never see the light if we turn our backs to it, and the light is over there. (He points.) West. (He points the other way.) There is none there.

AKSAKOV Then you that way, we this way. Farewell.

Leaving, Aksakov meets Ogarev storming in.

AKSAKOV (cont.) We lost Pushkin—(He ‘shoots’ with his finger.)—we lost Lermontov. (He ‘shoots’ again.) We cannot lose Ogarev. I ask your forgiveness.

He bows to Ogarev and leaves. Herzen puts his arm around Ogarev.

HERZEN He’s right, Nick.

GRANOVSKY It’s not the only thing he’s right about.

HERZEN Granovsky … let’s not be quarrelling when Natalie comes back.

GRANOVSKY I’m not quarrelling. He’s right about us having no ideas of our own, that’s all.

HERZEN Where would they come from when we have no history of thought, when nothing has been handed on because nothing can be written or read or discussed? No wonder Europe regards us as a barbarian horde at the gates. This huge country, so vast it takes in fur-trappers, camelherders, pearl-fishers … and yet not a single original philosopher, not one contribution to political discourse …

KETSCHER Yes—one! The intelligentsia!

GRANOVSKY What’s that?

KETSCHER It’s the new word I was telling you about.

OGAREV Well, it’s a horrible word.

KETSCHER I agree, but it’s our own, Russia’s debut in the lexicon.

HERZEN What does it mean?

KETSCHER It means us. A uniquely Russian phenomenon, the intellectual opposition considered as a social force.

GRANOVSKY Well … !

HERZEN The … intelligentsia! …

OGAREV Including Aksakov?

KETSCHER That’s the subtlety of it, we don’t have to agree with each other.

GRANOVSKY The Slavophiles are not entirely wrong about the West, you know.

HERZEN I’m sure they’re entirely right.

GRANOVSKY Materialism …

HERZEN Triviality.

GRANOVSKY Scepticism above all.

HERZEN Above all. I’m not arguing with you.

GRANOVSKY But—don’t you see?—it doesn’t follow that our own bourgeoisie has to adopt the same values as in the West.

HERZEN No. Yes.

GRANOVSKY How would you know, anyway?

HERZEN I wouldn’t. It’s you and Turgenev who’ve been there. I still can’t get a passport. I’ve applied again.

KETSCHER For your health?

HERZEN (laughs) It’s for little Kolya … Natalie and I want to consult the best doctors …

OGAREV (looking) Where is Kolya …?

KETSCHER I’m a doctor. He’s deaf. (Shrugs.) I’m sorry.

Ogarev, unheeded, leaves to look for Kolya.

TURGENEV It’s not all philistines, either. The only thing that’ll save Russia is Western culture transmitted by … people like us.

KETSCHER No, it’s the Spirit of History, the ceaseless March of Progress …

HERZEN (venting his anger) Oh, a curse on your capital letters! We’re asking people to spill their blood—at least spare them your conceit that they’re acting out the biography of an abstract noun!

KETSCHER Oh, it’s my conceit? (to the others) There was nothing wrong with that coffee, either.

HERZEN (to Granovsky, conciliatory) I’m not starry-eyed about France. To sit in a café with Louis Blanc, Leroux, Ledru-Rollin … to buy La Réforme with the ink still wet, and walk in the Place de la Concorde … the thought excites me like a child, I admit that, but Aksakov is right—I don’t know the next step. Where are we off to? Who’s got the map? We study the ideal societies … power to the experts, to the workers, to the philosophers … property rights, property sanctions, the evil of competition, the evil of monopoly … central planning, free housing, free love … limited to eight hundred families or unconstrained by national frontiers … and all of them uniquely harmonious, just and efficient. But Proudhon is the only one who understands what the question is: why should anyone obey anyone else?

GRANOVSKY Because that’s what society means. You might as well ask, why should an orchestra play together? And yet it can play together without being socialist.

TURGENEV That’s true!—my mother keeps an orchestra at Spasskoye. What I find even harder to grasp, however, is that she also owns the nightingales.

HERZEN Bringing in Russia always seems to confuse things. I’m not saying socialism is history’s secret plan, it just looks like the rational step.

GRANOVSKY To whom?

HERZEN To me. Not just me. The future is being scrawled on the factory walls of Paris.

GRANOVSKY Why? Why necessarily? We have no factory districts. Why should we wait to be inundated from within by our very own industrialised Goths? Everything you hold dear in civilisation will be smashed on the altar of equality … the equality of the barracks.

HERZEN You judge the common people after they’ve been brutalised. But people are good, by nature. I have faith in them.

GRANOVSKY Without faith in something higher, human nature is animal nature.

HERZEN Without superstition, you mean.

GRANOVSKY Superstition? Did you say superstition?

Herzen forgets to keep his temper, and Granovsky starts to respond in kind until they are rowing.

HERZEN Superstition! The pious and pitiful belief that there’s something outside or up there, or God knows where, without which men can’t find their nobility.

GRANOVSKY Without ‘up there,’ as you call it, scores have to be settled down here—that’s the whole truth about materialism.

HERZEN How can you—how dare you—throw away your dignity as a human being? You can choose well or badly without deference to a ghost!—you’re a free man, Granovsky, there’s no other kind.

Natalie arrives hurriedly and frightened. Her distress is at first misinterpreted. She runs to Alexander and hugs him, unable to speak. There are some mushrooms in her basket.

NATALIE Alexander …

HERZEN (apologetically to Natalie) It’s only a little argument …

GRANOVSKY (to Natalie) It grieves me deeply to have to absent myself from a household in which I have always received a kind welcome. (Granovsky starts to leave.)

NATALIE There’s a policeman come to the house—I saw him from the field.

HERZEN A policeman?

A Servant comes from the house, overtaken by a uniformed

POLICEMAN.

HERZEN (cont.) Oh God, not again … Natalie, Natalie …

POLICEMAN Is one of you Herzen?

HERZEN I am.

POLICEMAN You’re to read this. From Count Orlov.

The Policeman gives Herzen a letter. Herzen tears it open.

NATALIE (to the Policeman) I want to go with him.

POLICEMAN I wasn’t told …

Herzen hugs Natalie.

HERZEN It’s all right. (announces) After twelve years of police surveillance in and out of exile, Count Orlov has graciously let it be known, I can now apply to travel abroad … !

The others gather round him in relief and congratulation. The Policeman hesitates. Natalie snatches the letter.

KETSCHER You’ll see Sazonov again.

GRANOVSKY He’s changed.

TURGENEV And Bakunin …

GRANOVSKY He hasn’t, I’m afraid.

NATALIE ‘… to travel abroad to seek medical assistance in respect of your son Nikolai Alexandrovich …’

HERZEN (lifting her up) Paris, Natalie!

Her basket of mushrooms falls and spills.

NATALIE (weeping with joy) … Kolya! … (Natalie runs off.)

HERZEN Where’s Nick?

POLICEMAN Good news, then.

Herzen takes the hint and tips him. The Policeman leaves.

NATALIE (returning) Where’s Kolya?

HERZEN Kolya? I don’t know. Why?

NATALIE Where is he?

Natalie runs out, calling the name.