The Coast of Utopia: Voyage, Shipwreck, Salvage
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Manufacturer: Grove Press
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Average Customer Rating:  
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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 822
EAN: 9780802143402
ISBN: 0802143407
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 304
Publication Date: 2007-11-06
Publisher: Grove Press
Studio: Grove Press
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Editorial Reviews:
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Tom Stoppard’s magnificent trilogy, The Coast of Utopia, was the most keenly awaited and successful drama of 2007. Now “Stoppard’s crowning achievement” (David Cote, Time Out New York) has been collected in one volume, with an introduction by the author, and includes the definitive text used during Lincoln Center’s recent celebrated run. The Coast of Utopia comprises three sequential plays that chronicle the story of a group of friends who come of age under the Tsarist autocracy of Nicholas I, and for whom the term “intelligentsia” was coined. Among them are the anarchist Michael Bakunin, who was to challenge Marx for the soul of the masses; Ivan Turgenev, author of some of the most enduring works in Russian literature; the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky; and Alexander Herzen, a nobleman's son and the first self-proclaimed socialist in Russia, who becomes the main focus of this drama of politics, love, loss, and betrayal. In The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard presents an inspired examination of the struggle between romantic anarchy, utopian idealism, and practical reformation in what The New York Times calls “brilliant, sprawling . . . a rich pageant.”
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Spotlight customer reviews:
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Customer Rating:
Summary: challenging and enthralling
Comment: This is what a play should be. Coast is challenging, engaging and demanding but in a way that leaves you wanting more. Stoppard has the highest respect for his audiences, a good thing, in this day of pandering to the lowest common denominator. Although he's been accused of didacticism, Stoppard leavens the heaviness with good doses of humor, not unlike G.B. Shaw. If you didn't get a chance to see the play performed, read it at the very least.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The Coast of Myopia
Comment: Tom Stoppard's three play series "The Coast of Utopia" was mounted at the Lincoln Center where I was privileged to see the dramas on separate nights. The plays about early nineteenth century Russia were brilliantly staged; the scenic effects were breath-taking; the acting was superb; and the thrust stage was used in novel ways with fast-paced exits and entrances; and the revolving stage, elevators and trap doors were integrated successfully with the action.
Here in this three volume set, we have the texts in which Stoppard tries to dramatize philosophical and ideological conceits. He writes in English, but unfortunately much of it turns out to be unfathomable gibberish. A brilliant turn of phrase becomes merely bombast. His sense of humor is sharp, but his sense of the dramatic is blunted.
We have anarchists, anti-Czarists, nihilists and serfs, landowners, sparkling women, and would-be bomb throwers who are content with editing polemical magazines. Stoppard's abstractions, high level generalizations, obtuse theories, obfuscations, and cloudy reasoning swirl in and around the theatergoers' heads. Although in the theater the lines go by with dizzying speed, the armchair reader will have time to parse and reflect.
Years ago I saw a marathon nine hour "Nicholas Nickleby" adapted from the Dickens novel on stage. It was magnificently acted and staged. It was dramatic and emphatically lucid. Dickens wanted to be a playwright and an actor, and it shows in his theatrical novels. Stoppard apparently wanted to be a philosopher, and it shows in his erudite plays. When one attempts to dramatize ideas, one runs the risk of creating cotton candy: fluffy, gauzy, and nebulous.
Some of the characters are based upon real personages of the period like Turgenev, and the views they spout come from their writings. Stoppard had the great good fortune to have first-class actors saying his lines. Readers who have the time and patience will find these play scripts well worth reading, and if they have the good fortune to see them in live performances, they will be doubly rewarded.
The Daemon in Our Dreams
Nine Lives Too Many
Nicholas Nickleby
The Rice Queen Spy
Clawed Back from the Dead
Customer Rating:
Summary: Fun Reading
Comment: I was delighted to finally be able to read these plays after reading so much about them. I don't live anywhere near New York and it would be impossible to see these plays either in a 'marathon' performance or separately. But reading and imagining (aided by the production photos in the TCG magazine) made it a good, though vicarious experience.
Customer Rating:
Summary: A Monumental Work
Comment: Stoppard's Coast of Utopia is marvelous, and reading the plays before you see them enhances the experience. For his canvas, Stoppard uses Russia in the mid 19th century, a period of tremendous turmoil that saw the Decembrist uprising of 1825, the death of Nicholas I, the emancipation of the serfs, and growing revolutionary sentiment in that huge and backward land. The other backdrop for Coast of Utopia is the political and social unrest in Europe, including the various revolutions of 1848, and the development of socialist/communist political theory.
For his story, Stoppard traces the lives of various of the young Russian intellectuals (for whom the term intelligentsia was coined) who saw their country's backwardness, oppression and poverty and dreamed and dared that it could be different. The central characters in The Coast of Utopia are Alexander Herzen, Michael Bakunin, Nicholas Ogarev, Ivan Turgenev and Vissarion Belinsky, but other historical figures also play roles.
The Russian intellectuals who sought change in Russia were hampered by many obstacles; harsh censorship, which made open political dialogue a crime punishable by exile or worse, an utter absence of democratic institutions, a huge peasant class that was largely ignorant of and oblivious to their efforts, and the Tsar and a coterie of landowners, bureaucrats and priests who were largely satisfied with the status quo.
In The Coast of Utopia, Stoppard adroitly mixes social themes with political theory and history. As one might imagine, as these Russians groped for ideas about how their country should be reformed, there were differences of opinion. Initially, the reformers, such as Herzen, favored gradual reform, led by the Tsar; as the 19th century progressed, more radical thought, influenced by Marx, came to predominate, and more moderate voices, such as Herzen's, were drowned out by the increasing call for violent revolution. Stoppard does a fabulous job in showing the various intellectual currents that ran among the exiles by having them argue out their theories on stage in the course of the play.
All this might sound talky and dull, but it's not, for two reasons. One is Stoppard's genius at showing how real people discuss these ideas. One minute we have two characters debating Hegel; the next minute they're attending their children, just the way real life interrupts all sorts of activities. And the lives of the main characters were sometimes untidy, and for that reason interesting; we see their joys, their sorrows, their love affairs and their occasional melancholy on being separated from Russia for so long.
The second is the staging of the plays; I could go on and on, but I was utterly wowed by the Lincoln Center production, it is magnificent and at times transcendent.
But ultimately what makes Coast of Utopia so interesting is that it's a series of plays about ideas, what is the best way to modernize and democratize a backward society. Of course, we see this play through the lens of history, after the revolution in Russia and after communism has been justifiably relegated to the dustbin of history. So we know how disastrous the actual revolution proved to be. But one of the strengths of Stoppard's work is that he doesn't fall prey to easy triumphalism about the later result. Instead he shows these men, mostly in a sympathetic light, trying to imagine a better society for Russia, and then taking the first steps toward making that better Russia come to pass. Without a doubt, Stoppard sees Herzen as his hero, and Herzen, with remarkable prescience, clearly saw the risks of the absolutism to come. But despite his sympathy for Herzen's humanistic views, Stoppard also gives fair voice to the radicals, so that a balanced picture of the political thought of the era emerges.
Stoppard has acknowledged his debt to Isaiah Berlin's Russian Thinkers in writing The Coast of Utopia. If you are interested in the ideas in The Coast of Utopia or the history of 19th century Russia, Russian Thinkers is well worth reading.
Customer Rating:
Summary: The most important theatrical event of the past 60 years
Comment: Stoppard's eloquence and wit are only the beginning. The subject is monumental and speaks to our times. Wisdom emerges at the perfect pace. Catharsis at the end. I have seen the trilogy and will see it twice more in marathon experiences. Reading the text beforehand enhances the understanding of the contest and of what takes place. If you don't recognize the importance of The Decembrists, please review some history before seeing and/or reading the trilogy. If you don't know at least a bit about Tsar Alexander, please look at wikipedia and go from there. Very timely and relevant and ominous.
And if you read the inspiring text either before or after the experience, the catharsis will be even more powerful. If you havent't seen the epic, this is a must-read.
Thank you, Tom Stoppard (and ensemble) for a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
"Rock & Roll" goes further.
IMO, this is a transformational work which materially enhances Stoppard's prospects for already likely Nobel Prize.
What next? What a genius.
Unforgettable lessons to be learned dramatically.
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