In the very heart of Moscow sits the 72-year old Russian Academic Youth Theater, the current home of Tom Stoppard’s trilogy “Coast of Utopia.” Since October 2007, the curtain has gone up on a production of the play, penned by the author of “Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead,” and focused on several 19^th century Russian intellectual heavy-weights. The play’s direction is consistent; it follows the thinkers’ thoughts and movements forward. The intellectual and physical journey of Stoppard’s own work though has been a bit more convoluted.

Opening at London’s Royal National Theatre in 2002, the play next headed west to New York’s Lincoln Center before returning farther east to Moscow, and the play’s historical origins. Garbed in a new Russian translation, the trilogy also had to be reoriented culturally for an audience with a completely different relationship to the play’s subject and characters. Stoppard’s work follows the lives of three 19^th century thinkers: Alexander Herzen, Mikhail Bakunin, and Vissarion Belinsky. Though the play takes place in the years between 1833 and1866, the Moscow audience members are more familiar with the thinkers’ Soviet canonized portraits. Alexander Herzen, for one, is nicknamed the “Father of Russian Socialism,” and, his collective circle ideologically paved the way for Russia’s 1917 revolution and everything that followed.

While Herzen statues, plaques, and an apartment museum dot Moscow’s landscape, the pride taken in these memorials to Russian history is unique.. Much of the city stands testament to a failed revolution. Stoppard admits that he always hoped that “Coast of Utopia” would one day perform in Russia, and while recently the playwright claims to have staked his work in apolitical territory, it seems probable that Stoppard hoped that a Russian “Coast of Utopia” would take on a greater significance than other productions. Born in Czechoslovakia, Stoppard has a history of taking up the cause of Eastern European political dissidents, and contemporary Russia is a tempting stage for anyone with such inclinations. Though “Coast of Utopia” is a story of Russia’s 19^th century intellectuals, much of the play’s context can be superimposed upon Russia’s current political situation. There exist the same frustrations at autocracy and censorship; the same frustrated hopes at unrealized democracy. Linking together the present day with both the 19^th century and the Soviet era, Moscow’s “Coast of Utopia” represents much more than the play’s intellectual homecoming; it offers post-1991 Russia the chance of a cohesive national narrative.

After the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, what followed was a rapid and successive dissolution of the remaining Soviet strongholds. Lithuania proclaimed its independence in December 1989, and six months following Boris Yeltsin’s June 1991 election as president, Yeltsin and former president Mikhail Gorbachev agreed to officially disband the USSR. Yeltsin remained in power for the following eight years, a regime, which, like Russia’s current one, is notable for its mixed record. The years of Yeltsin’s presidency are most often associated with economic turmoil, oligarchic corruption, and the war in Chechnya. Yet as evidenced by the 20,000 people who waited in line at Yeltsin’s April 2007 funeral, Yeltsin also represented the spirit of Russia’s burgeoning democracy. As chaotic as Russia was in the 1990s, the period also captured a particular spirit of excitement, which, in contemporary Russia, seems largely effervescent.

In spite of Russia’s unpopular involvement in the Chechen War, which dragged on for nearly two years, Yeltsin did little to curtail the press’ rampant criticism. Chechnya, a Russian republic, declared its independence in 1994, and Russia spent the following 20 months fighting a war that the Defense Minister famously proclaimed he could win in “two hours.” At the close of the First Chechen War, the Russians retreated to a populace whose negative opinion of the war was largely shaped by the candid television news coverage.

The hands-off attitude that Yeltsin showed towards corrupted oligarchs combined with the burgeoning free media, left Russia in 2000 as a country still coming to terms with the recent arrival of a free economy, and the noticeable absence of an ideology carefully nurtured for over 70 years. The 19^th century Russian anarchist, Peter Kropotkin, argued that all a politically active Russian student needed to survive was tea, bread, a little slice of meat, and “lively conversations about the future socialist government.” During Russia’s 1998 financial crisis, Russian food prices rose nearly 100%, and Yeltsin’s presidency did not offer Russian students the consolation of future political vision.

In the eight years since the end of Yeltsin’s presidency, his successor President Vladimir Putin has had fewer problems in the realms of economic and political stability. Aided by rising oil prices and Russia’s rich natural gas supply, Putin was a man in the right place, at the right time. He has had more success than his predecessor in Chechnya, recapturing the republic’s capital in 2000 during the Second Chechen War. While guerilla insurgency still continues in the region, public support for the Second Chechen War has been remarkably positive—a statistic that’s consistent with Putin’s current 80% approval ratings.

Yet as oppositional leader and former chess champion Gary Kasparov pointed out in a Sept. 2007 New Yorker article, it is significantly easier to attain such high ratings if all the country’s media is state-controlled. Gazprom, the Kremlin-connected oil conglomerate seized control of the television station NTV in April 2001, and now owns three major networks along with the newspaper Izvestia. Putin receives similar criticism from the West for Russia’s autocratic elections and the Kremlin’s increasingly anti-Western sentiment.

During Putin’s reign, Yeltsin’s volatile Russia has settled into a relatively fixed nation state. Politically and economically, Putin’s presidency is everything that Yeltsin’s was not, yet the nation’s rapid yo-yoing from 1991 to the Yeltsin period to Russia today has left the country trapped between several opposing ideological states.

Perhaps there is no better place to witness Russia’s recent period of transition, than the first Russian stop-off on the journey from the West into Moscow’s city center. Sheremetyevo, the city’s main airport, offers a portrait of a country straddled between culturally different yet thematically similar eras. A Russian political science professor of mine once deified the airport as “borderline Western,” yet the building seems more aptly described as a temporal no man’s land. A bizarre byproduct of Soviet architecture, and timeless Russian bureaucracy, the Sheremetyevo airport seems just at home in the USSR’s kitschy 1970s, as it would in an absurdist and bureaucratic-ridden 19^th century Gogol short story. It is a place that demands two security lines between the airport entrance and the airline check-in desks, and where airport employees dump out—and subsequently repack—the contents of every piece of outbound luggage. It is a place where female airport employees totter around in boxy Soviet-looking uniforms, blue eye shadow and four inch heels, and passengers bound westward still wrap their suitcases with masking tape and Saran-wrap.

The road into Moscow center is no less striking. With sparsely pared out, unidentifiable Soviet office buildings, the highway is occasionally dotted with more obvious relics to Russia’s past 16 years of development: the chain mall complex Mega; the Scandinavia-imported IKEA; and Ashan, a place only describable as the Soviet, madhouse version of a Costco grocery store.

I traveled to see “Coast of Utopia” in Moscow this past November, taking the journey past Ashan that Stoppard himself has made frequently over the past year. Though Stoppard was a stranger to Russia’s 1860s intellectuals before reading Isaiah Berlin’s Russian Thinkers, the trilogy’s move to Moscow has offered the Czech’s play plenty of exposure in a city whose intellectual life is still defined, in part, by their ideas. The playwright made it a point to attend rehearsals for “Coast of Utopia,” and even managed to give the actors feedback in spite of the language barrier presented by his work’s translation.

Even outside the walls of the Russian Academic Youth Theater, Stoppard has engaged in a variety of outreach events largely oriented at Russia’s student population. Inside the theater lobby, photo displays evidence both Stoppard’s lecture to Moscow State University students at Herzen’s beloved Sparrow Hills, and the award show for a “Coast of Utopia”-related student essay contest. In the Russian blogosphere, ten bloggers were selected to personally meet Stoppard for a small Q&A session. One of the ten reported that all the bloggers present regarded Stoppard as a modern-day Shakespeare, a sentiment surprisingly representative of the Stoppard-fawning Russian blogosphere.

While journalists worried aloud that Stoppard’s outsider status would hurt “Coast of Utopia’s” Russian reception, the playwright’s involvement has had nearly the opposite effect. In an interview with the radio station Ekho Moskvy, “Coast of Utopia’s” Russian translator commented that a play such as “Coast of Utopia” could not have been written in Moscow due to Russians’ close relationship towards the trilogy’s subject matter. Russian reviews are largely complementary of the play’s Stoppardian ironic touches, and grateful that a playwright could portray the country’s sacredly canonized thinkers with such levity.

Though “Coast of Utopia” features wider-known characters such as Karl Marx and the novelist Ivan Turgenev, its three central figures are Alexander Herzen, the Westward-leaning socialist; Mikhail Bakunin, the buffoonish pan-Slavist revolutionary; and Vissarion Belinsky, Russia’s first real literary critic. Neatly divided into three plays–“Voyage,” “Shipwreck,” and “Salvage”—the trilogy traces its heroes’ journey across three equally neat ideological stages: their intellectual beginnings at the Bakunin family estate; their forays into revolution and sexual emancipation in 1840s-50s Paris; and their final ideological defense in London, against personal disappointment and Europe’s burgeoning 1860s radicals.

From the outset of the first play, “Voyage,” the youthful Bakunin crew strives to materialize and define the nature of Russian culture and nationalism. Torn between competing Western and Slavophile desires, the thinkers in the end anoint Western-imported ideas of socialism and utopia as the means to such political manifestation.

Philosophically, they gaze outwards so as to look inwards, and they physically move farther westward in the process.

Of the three protagonists, Herzen is the work’s central figure. It is his westward journey that determines the direction of the play’s narrative, and his personal tragedies challenge the ideals initially espoused by the play’s characters. More importantly for the Czechoslovakian Stoppard, however, Herzen is also someone who spent most of his adult life in Western exile. Indeed, even Isaiah Berlin, the author of Russian Thinkers and another influence for Stoppard, was himself a Russian émigré.

Berlin, Herzen and Stoppard each spent most of their lives as outsiders, yet in Stoppard’s case, the playwright was an outsider to his own material as well. Though the Russian publisher may be correct in asserting that only an outsider could present Russia with this particular narrative of its history, there is something decidedly disconcerting about a Westerner presenting Russia with its own narrative; especially when the narrative is specifically about Russia’s struggle to define itself.

Though “Coast of Utopia” received positive reviews in London, and even more so in New York, the plays’ reception is, perhaps, more indicative of Stoppard’s pre-existing reputation in the West than it is of the plays’ actual resonation in Western communities. Most of Stoppard’s characters are unknown to Western audiences, and the New York Times so far as to suggest a recommended reading list to supplement the viewing of Stoppard’s plays. However, while readings can contextualize the thinkers’ names and events, they inevitably give less insight into the ways in which this time period was both gesturing toward and seeking to define the history that was to follow it.

Herzen and the others look towards an end-point, socialist utopia quite different from the reality of the 20^th century Soviet Union. Yet their ideas inherently birthed everything from Leninism to Stalinism to the Terror of 1937—a fact that the Soviet government was also quick to remember. The many Herzen relics around the city are evidence to his and the others’ rapid 20^th century deification, for as Berlin explains in “Coast of Utopia’s” inspiration, Russian Thinkers: “The singular irony of history was that Herzen—who wanted individual liberty more than happiness, or efficiency or justice, and denounced organised planning, economic centralisation and governmental authority—was canonised by the Soviet government.”

At “Coast of Utopia” in Moscow, most of Stoppard’s audience members are also an educated product of this canonization. In contrast to the Western productions, the majority of Moscow’s audience is Soviet-educated—a fact that makes them very familiar with Stoppard’s characters, but through a specific ideological lens. In this sense, “Coast” in Moscow is also inextricably tied to Russia’s Soviet past as well.

At the opening of a recent Moscow exhibit dedicated to the tragedy of Stalin’s 1937 Terror, a federal cultural minister was quoted as explicitly highlighting this connection, saying: “Today it’s very difficult for us to associate ourselves with the Russian thoughts, writers and political activists of the 19th century that predetermined the events of 1917, 1937 and 1949. But we need to remember that it was a great utopia…great thoughts, great ideals…”

The difficulty for the Russian viewer is that not only do Herzen et al. metonymically represent the entire Soviet period, they also are a striking reminder that their utopian revolution ultimately failed. In Putin’s contemporary Moscow, this failure is especially flagrant in the neighborhood of Red Square, just blocks away from “Coast of Utopia’s” theater. In the Soviet days, Red Square was the site of highly orchestrated military parades, but nowadays the Square’s only remaining Soviet relic is the line formed to see Lenin’s wax corpse. GUM, the former “State Universal Store” located in Red Square, has been renamed “Main Universal Store,” and now showcases boutiques such as Louis Vuitton and Dior. On one side of the Square is the 16^th century, onion domed St. Basil’s, but on the other sits Tverskaya Street, home to imports such as McDonalds, the Four Seasons and Coffee Bean.

During my visit in late November, it was just two weeks before Russia’s parliamentary election. The city was dotted with various political advertisements but most were sponsored by President Putin’s affiliated-party, Edinaya Rossiya. Flags and posters crowded all the streets, but the biggest advertisement was on the Red Square billboard, the largest in the city. The last time I had been in Moscow, the billboard featured a Rolex ad. This time it proclaimed: “MOSCOW VOTES FOR PUTIN!” though of course Putin himself was not running for parliament.

It is on this political stage that Western journalists have pinned their hopes on Stoppard’s work. Given today’s autocratic political atmosphere in Russia, and the democratic frustration of Russia’s intellectual elite, it is easy to find aspects of the present reminiscent of the “Coast of Utopia” period. A Wall Street Journal write-up about the plays quoted an audience member remarking on the resonation she felt with a speech Belinsky made on Russia versus the west, as well as on Russia’s constant battle against bureaucracy and popular passivity. One of the actors quoted in the article remarked on the play echoing “our sad experience of unrealized democracy.”

In recent months, there have been a series of unsettling developments in Russia’s intellectual and cultural communities. This February, authorities shut down St. Petersburg’s European University under the pretense of fire code violations, and in August, liberal newspaper Novaya Gazeta had its computers confiscated until after the December parliamentary elections. (The former paper of murdered journalist Anna Politkovskaya was said to be using illegal software). In spite of this, however, “Coast of Utopia” is thriving, perhaps due to its contemporary relevance. At the heart of “Coast of Utopia” lies an ideology of hope in spite of the oppression that is a timeless presence in Russian intellectual movements and Russian literature. The fact that “Coast of Utopia” has generated so much interest implies that either regardless or because of Putin’s 80% approval ratings, the conversations of “Coast of Utopia” are ones some Russians would still like to have.

My last morning in Moscow, I wandered around the city trying to make sense of this, heading down Tverskaya Street back towards the theater and Red Square. I had been staying two blocks away from Herzen’s former apartment, in the city’s Arbat region. Consisting primarily of two forking roads, the Arbat offers another glimpse into Russia’s increasingly binary culture. “Old Arbat” is a pedestrian sidewalk where street vendors and souvenir store sell Russia’s best kitsch: Lenin t-shirts, the Matryoshka painted stacking dolls, and Soviet military hats. “New Arbat” consists primarily of recently constructed Russian nightclubs.

Wandering down Tverskaya, I stumbled upon a rally for the political opposition group “Yabloko.” This political party, born in Yeltsin’s 1990s, is pro-West and socially liberal. Built as an acronym of its leaders’ names, Yabloko literally means “apple” in Russian. Its symbol resembles both the fruit, and Eli Lissitzky’s 1919 pro-Bolshevik poster, “Beat the Whites with the Red Wedge.”

The group was holding fort outside the metro stop Pushkinskaya, across the street from both a statue of the nation’s most famous poet Pushkin, and a large advertisement for Volvo. The mottos for this particular meeting were “Defend Our Home and Yard” and “Power under the Citizen’s Control,” and the party’s agenda was preserving land and park space from further demolition and mass constructions. There was also talk of the election.

The socially liberal Yabloko is one Russia’s main opposition groups. It opposes authoritarianism and outside involvement in Chechnya, and advocates for Russia’s entry into the E.U. Yet, at one of Moscow’s busiest public squares, in a city of more than 10 million, only a couple hundred people stopped to attend the protest.

It is tempting to imbue the arrival of a play such as “Coast of Utopia” in Russia with a significance transcendent of the art and theater world. It is even tempting to buy into the belief that after seeing such a play, Russians would zealously take to the streets in political protest. Such expectations might be idealized and unrealistic, but that isn’t to say that the play won’t realize less political aspects of its potential. Regardless of whether Stoppard wrote the play with specific political intentions in mind, in Moscow, “Coast of Utopia” has taken on meanings that not even Stoppard could have foreseen.

Playing for a more economically and socially diverse audience in Moscow than in New York or London, “Coast of Utopia” is also able to reach a new level of appreciation in its reception. In one of “Voyage’s” initial scenes, a new character enters the stage, but before long trips, and flails around like a mad man. A moment later, Bakunin shouts out: “Belinsky!” As a graduate student friend of mine pointed out, the Moscow audience—unlike the New York one—laughs not because the man falls—but because the man that falls is Vissarion Belinsky.

Stoppard’s personal characterization of Herzen, Bakunin, and Belinsky, may seem a petty gift for Russians compared with other ones, such as the inspiration for great democratic change. Yet by turning these historical figures into three-dimensional characters, Stoppard is still doing something important; he’s encouraging a new attitude towards a historical period that most Russians can’t help but view anachronistically, in light of everything that followed it. One hundred fifty years after Russia’s first socialist movements, and sixteen years after the fall of the Soviet Union, “Coast of Utopia” brings light to the question Russia is still struggling to answer: How do you maintain a coherent national identity and take pride in your history after a failed revolution?

Download “Utopia in Moscow” as a PDF.