Bringing home the revolution

摘要

Sir Tom Stoppard admits to a feeling of "enormous presumption" at the transfer to Moscow of "The Coast of Utopia", his trilogy about 19th-century Russian intellectuals. But perhaps only a foreign writer could have resurrected its heroes so compassionately: some, such as Alexander Herzen, suffered death-by-canonisation during the Soviet era and are quite unloved in their homeland. If in London, where the plays premiered in 2002, overcoming the characters' obscurity was a challenge, in Moscow the issue will be prejudice.