Restaging the Gercen “Family Drama”: Tom Stoppard's Shipwreck and the Discourse of English “Herzenism” ⁎

The image of Alexander Herzen in the English-speaking world has been shaped by such scholars as Isaiah Berlin, E.H. Carr, and Aileen Kelly. This discourse of English “Herzenism” – in which Herzen figures as a post-war liberal in nineteenth-century clothing or, alternately, as a romantic idealist eccentric – inspired playwright Tom Stoppard to write the plays that form his Coast of Utopia trilogy (2002), which feature Herzen as their central character. Thomas Campbell's analysis of the trilogy's middle play, Shipwreck, in which Herzen's “family drama” is restaged by Stoppard, reveals how his reading of English Herzen scholars informs the play, which wittily reinforces the “message” of the English Herzen about the dangers of philosophical idealism and historicism. Herzen the exile thus serves as a double for Stoppard, who (like Berlin) found a new identity after escaping from a regime supposedly generated by historicism run amok. As Campbell argues, the play also shows how the “other shore” never reached by Herzen and his comrades – the post-ideological, neoliberal utopia achieved by present-day transatlantic society – is forced by its contradictions and intellectual poverty to rehearse the ideological conflicts that gave birth to it, and to examine them for traces of a better order.