Coast of Utopia

This week I’ve reread Tom Stoppard’s trilogy play The Coast of Utopia. This nine-hour play won a Tony award in 2007 for best drama, but it’s a very complicated play. There are over seventy characters, most with Russian names, so it’s very hard keeping everyone straight. Without a doubt, this play is the most challenging reading my students do all semester. It’s so tough that only a few make it through the plays.

However, upon rereading the plays, I’m recognizing more and more the power of these individuals and the message. The play focuses on real-life Russian intellectuals from 1830-1870. These well-educated, aristocratic, incredibly wealthy philosophers and doers rejected their privileged lives of czarist Russia to fight for political and economic freedom of enslaved serfs. Some of the characters came from families that owned 4,000 male serfs, but they gave it all up to fight these freedoms.

Most of these characters were imprisoned in work camps simply for speaking or writing against the czar. Because of their views, their writing weren’t allowed to be published, or if they did get published, they were banned. All of the characters in the play are exiled and find themselves still fighting for these freedoms in Germany, France, Italy, and England. From these hidings, they continued to write and influence both the landed class and laborers which eventually won freedom for the serfs in 1861 under Czar Alexander I.

Despite the noble intentions of these characters seeking the betterment of others, their own personal lives continued to spiral out of control. As they were seeking for others’ freedom, they did not found their own actions in personal morality—they used liberty as an excuse for any type of personal restraint. Their personal relationships were fluid and unhappy. They always were searching, but they failed to have a strong moral foundation.

They are trying to sail to an ideal, utopian existence, but because they don't have the moral direction, they just don't seem to reach happiness and peace.

Again and again, I’m reminded that through commandments and doing what’s right do we really find freedom and liberty and happiness.

So we need to keep doing the work that we’re doing and remember who we are. Our Heavenly Father has a great work for us, and we are preparing for that.