Intelligentsia at Play

As a playwright who loves to travel through time, Tom Stoppard is unstoppable. There seem few boundaries to the daring theatrical voyages he takes, and little limit, either, to his imaginative configurations of historical events and characters.

Take Travesties (1974), for example, the play in which he united three thinkers who were all living in Zurich during World War I but who never actually met--James Joyce, Tristan Tzara and Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Then there is Arcadia (1993), which he set simultaneously in 1809 and 1993 in the drawing room of Sidley Park, Derbyshire, while treating the topics of landscape architecture, iterative algorithms, the second law of thermodynamics, computer science, Lord Byron--oh, and don't forget sex--all in the same play. Most recently, there is The Invention of Love (1997), where he ferried the British poet A.E. Housman back and forth in time and space between Oxford University and Hell, via Charon's boat across the River Styx.

Now Sir Tom takes us on another time-traveling journey--perhaps his bravest and certainly his longest--covering a territoryof Russian history that many of us detoured on our way to what we thought was "the destination" (i.e., the Russian Revolution), and introducing us to an extraordinary group of people in the early nineteenth century, all of whom remind us of Sir Tom himself in their passionate and unswerving devotion to ideas.

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