Overview
This play is one of three sequential, self-contained plays which tell
the story of some of the main actors in the drama of Russian radical
opposition in the years pivoted on the European revolutions of 1848. The
trilogy spans the early 1830s and the late 1860s, the period of
activity of Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism. Herzen's
career intersected several others of equal interest, including those of
Michael Bakunin, the progenitor of anarchism who challenged Marx for the
political souls of the masses; of the writer Ivan Turgenev; and of
Vissarion Belinsky, the brilliant, erratic young critic whose name
continued to reverberate through the Bolshevik ascendancy 70 years after
his early death.