Exhilarating ride in Russian history

NEW YORK -- In case you've missed the claps of thunder, there's been a storm crackling on the stage of Lincoln Center Theater this season. Passionate Russians debating the future of their country, its enslaved masses, its relationship to the West, the merits of free love, the infinite varieties of socialism. Yes, yes, we know how it all turns out, but don't say it too loudly. The year is still 1833, and the history of the 20th century has not yet been written.

Or so we begin when the curtain goes up on "The Coast of Utopia," Tom Stoppard's sweeping trilogy about a generation of brilliant Russian intellectuals, philosophers, anarchists, poets, novelists, and critics, their lives, their families, their tumultuous romances, and their fumbling through the darkness as the utopian future they're sure is around the corner shows its face far too slowly, and the present in which they live is one of failed revolution abroad and brutal dictatorship at home.

Lincoln Center Theater, in a laudably bold venture, has devoted most of its current season to staging the American premiere of "The Coast of Utopia." Directed by Jack O'Brien, the trilogy is vast in scale (roughly nine hours), in historical terrain covered (more than three decades), and in its technical demands (requiring a cast of more than 40 actors in over 70 roles). Performances of Part I ("Voyage") and Part II ("Shipwreck") have been in repertory, while Part III ("Salvage") opens next Sunday, and the first of nine day long performances of the entire trilogy will take place on Feb. 24.

I have seen Parts I and II so far, and they have been, by and large, an exhilarating ride. These plays course with an intellectual vigor not often found in Broadway theater, and they manage, through Stoppard's particular brand of alchemy, and O'Brien's fluid direction, to turn the stuff of intellectual history seminars into a vibrant theater of ideas, to take the words and arguments of these men and women seriously, but at the same time, to wonder if any of their cultivated banter or their fusillades of political insight made one iota of difference as the gears of history ground forward.

But beyond that, "Utopia" does not entirely forget to be a human drama, and there is a deep poignancy to the plight of its genial, broad-spirited central character, the writer and theorist of revolution Alexander Herzen (played superbly by Brian O'Byrne) . Herzen is a fascinating if largely forgotten figure in Russian history, but there is an abiding resonance to his guiding ideas, his relentless optimism, and the generosity of his stance toward a broken world he was trying so desperately to fix.

It all adds up to a theatrical experience with more relevance than you might otherwise expect from 19th-century Russian history, and a sense that the stories of these figures, the contours of their unrealized visions, are worth recalling, if only for a few hours in the darkened theater. Or maybe, as was the case for me in Parts I and II, you'll find a particular line lingering in the mind long after the house lights have come up. And then there's always a chance that, despite the loud chorus of critical raves, you'll be part of the small but vocal minority for whom this play seems like one tediously long string of chatter without the trappings of a vital drama, a view voiced recently by Charles Isherwood in the New York Times.

Admittedly, Part I of the trilogy is a slow start. We meet our cast of characters ripped from the pages of the history books, and they are in the garrulous throes of their youth. Besides Herzen, there is the rambunctious future anarchist Mikhail Bakunin (Ethan Hawke ), the impassioned literary critic Vissarion Belinksy (Billy Crudup), the soft-spoken aspiring novelist Ivan Turgenev (Jason Butler Harner), the amiable poet Nicholas Ogarev (Josh Hamilton), and many others. Several fall under the heady sway of German idealist philosophy. But the play takes time to gather momentum amid the many subplots around Bakunin's sisters' marriages, and portions of Part I feel like a shrilly delivered Great Books course with men shouting sound-bite reductions of Hegel's philosophy of history.

But the glimpses of momentum and intellectual excitement in "Voyage," become a full-fledged torrent in "Shipwreck." Our main characters reconvene in exile in Paris just in time for the Revolutions of 1848. As the July Monarchy crumbles and chaos descends in the streets, O'Brien's production team does an extraordinary job conveying the flush of excitement, the exhilarated sense that perhaps the tides of history were changing before their eyes. But the Revolutions of 1848 ultimately failed ; they were later dubbed by one historian "the turning-point at which modern history failed to turn." The exiles grow disillusioned. Herzen withdraws inward and wrestles with personal tragedy .

Part III, "Salvage," opens in London, where the aging Herzen and his colleagues in exile began publishing "The Bell," a fiercely effective Russian journal of political opposition. Their goals seem momentarily closer as Tsar Nicholas dies and, in 1861, Alexander II emancipates the serfs. But none of this transforms Russian society as quickly as expected, and the elder Herzen is confronted by a younger generation of radical nihilist revolutionaries who view his political gradualism and his love of high culture with contempt. It is this more militant generation that eventually spawned the Bolshevik party.

Herzen is sometimes labeled the father of Russian socialism, or , as his biographer Martin Malia called him more precisely, the creator of "that ultimate in democratic pathos -- revolutionary populism," based on the model of the peasant commune. But unlike the utopian figures who dominated the 20th-century stage, Herzen had the insight and the self-awareness never to make his utopias complete, his visions totalizing, his commitment to abstract ideas more important than the liberties of actual human beings, living in the present. His life and work were both overshadowed and tainted by the tragedy of the Soviet Union, whose Stalinist excesses were utterly inimical to what he believed in. But if his sometimes naive theories were later rebuffed by history, there is still a vigor and radiance in his humanism that shines through his impassioned prose, often lifted verbatim into the pages of Stoppard's play. One might see Herzen's writing as a forgotten branch in a modern genealogy of hope.

Stoppard arrived at Herzen indirectly, through Isaiah Berlin. The celebrated Oxford don, himself a Latvian-Jewish émigré, discovered Herzen's writing in the London Library in the 1930s. It had been all but forgotten in the West and Berlin fell head over heels for Herzen, calling his memoirs "My Past and Thoughts," "a literary masterpiece worthy to be placed by the side of the novels of his contemporaries and countrymen, Tolstoy, Turgenev, Dostoevsky." Berlin's writing on Herzen, part of it collected in "Russian Thinkers" is a breathtaking feat of intellectual empathy. Stoppard read these essays, and they inspired him to bring Herzen and his peers to life on stage. It is Berlin's lyrical spirit that hovers palpably over the play's warm embrace of its heroes.

But a second ghost also looms, less benevolently, over the trilogy, and that of course is the 20th century, the knowledge of all that separates now and then, including two world wars and the rise and fall of the Soviet Union. We watch the intellectual fireworks exploding on stage while knowing that they will not make much difference. At one point in Part II, Stoppard powerfully transports us inside the head of Herzen's deaf son, Kolya, and all the heated debate going on around him is reduced to silence.

At the same time, our knowing distance from these events also colors the action with a certain avant-le-deluge wistfulness , and one is left with an appreciation for the passion of these outmoded dreams and unrealized yearnings. Most appealing of all is Herzen's ability to hold in productive tension a visionary hopefulness and a deeply critical skepticism, realizing that to bow to one without the other is to worship a false and potentially dangerous god.

In the trilogy's final pages, an aging Herzen dreams of meeting Marx, who is predicting the revolution and the culmination of history. "But history has no culmination!" Herzen protests. Or as he writes elsewhere: "History is the autobiography of a madman." There is no orderly forward march of progress toward some distant goal.

Distant goals, he suggested, are often delusions used to justify the sacrifice or the suffering of real people in the present. For Herzen, as Berlin and Stoppard make clear, the highest good was individual liberty for actual people in the here and now, and this liberty was what he thought a just society should be designed to protect. Until that society arrives, well, there were pleasures to be found in life's more basic rewards. He once listed them, with his typical poetic flair, as "art, and the summer lighting of individual happiness."

Jeremy Eichler can be reached at jeichler@globe.com.