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reassembles itself at the point of Natalie’s re-entrance.
    GEORGE    
Mir geht es besser.
[I feel better.]
    BELINSKY    Turgenev’s got a point.
    EMMA    
Georg geht es besser.
[George is feeling better!]
    BELINSKY    Our problem is feudalism and serfdom.
    The rest of the scene now repeats itself with the difference that instead of the general babel which ensued, the conversation between Belinsky and Turgenev is now ‘protected,’ with the other conversations virtually mimed. At the point where the babel went silent before, nothing now alters.
    BELINSKY    (
cont.
) What have these theoretical models got to do with us? We’re so big and backward!
    TURGENEV    My mother’s estate is ten times the size of Fourier’s model society.
    BELINSKY    I’m sick of Utopias. I’m tired of hearing about them. I’d trade the lot for one practical difference that owes nothing to anybody’s ideal society, one commonsensical action that puts right an injury to one person. Do you know what I liketo do best when I’m at home?—watch them build the railway station in St Petersburg. My heart lifts to see the tracks going down. In a year or two, friends and families, lovers, letters, will be speeding to Moscow and back. Life will be altered. The poetry of practical gesture. Something unknown to literary criticism! I’m sick of everything I’ve ever done. Sick of it and from it. I fell in love with literature and stayed lovesick all my life. No woman had a more fervent or steadfast adorer. I picked up every handkerchief she let fall, lace, linen, snot rag, it made no difference. Every writer dead or alive was writing for me personally, to transport me, insult me, make me shout for joy or tear my hair out, and I wasn’t fooled often. Your
Sportsman’s Sketches
are the best thing since Gogol was young, and this Dostoevsky is another if he can do it twice. People are going to be amazed by Russian writers. In literature we’re a great nation before we’re ready.
    TURGENEV    You’re going round again, Captain.
    HERZEN    My God! We’re going to miss it! (
comforting Natalie
) You’re pale. Stay here. Stay with the children.
    Natalie nods.
    NATALIE    (
to Belinsky
) I won’t come to the station. Have you got everything?
    BAKUNIN    It’s not too late to change your mind.
    BELINSKY    I know—it’s my motto.
    Natalie embraces Belinsky. Turgenev and Sazonov help Belinsky with his valise and his parcels.
    HERZEN    Don’t try to talk French. Or German. Just be helpless. Don’t get on the wrong boat.
    There is a general exodus, as before.
    Kolya is left alone. There are sounds of the cabs departing. There is distant thunder, which Kolya ignores. Then there is a roll of thunder nearer. Kolya looks around, aware of something. Natalie enters. She kisses Kolya on the nose, enunciating his name. He watches her mouth.
    NATALIE    Kolya … Kolya …
    Natalie notices Belinsky’s dressing gown. She gives a cry of dismay and runs out of the room with it.
    KOLYA    (
absent-mindedly
) Ko’ ya … Ko’ ya. (
He plays with his top
.)

ACT TWO
    J ANUARY 1849
    Paris
.
    George has been reading to Herzen and Natalie. Natalie sits with George at her feet. Herzen lies on the couch with a silk handkerchief over his face. The book—or booklet—is
The Communist Manifesto
in its yellow wrapper.
    NATALIE    Why have you stopped?
    George closes the book and lets it fall. Natalie smoothes George’s hair
.
    GEORGE    I don’t see the point.
    NATALIE    He’s saying that all history up to now is the history of class struggle. And by sheer luck, Marx himself, the discoverer of this fact, is living in the very place, at the very time, when, thanks to industrialisation, these