Travesties by Tom Stoppard

Author:Tom Stoppard
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Grove/Atlantic, Inc.
Published: 1975-09-05T16:00:00+00:00

ACT TWO

THE LIBRARY

Apart from the bookcases, etc. the Library’s furniture includes CECILY’s desk, which is perhaps more like a counter forming three sides of a square.

CECILY: To resume.

The war caught Lenin and his wife in Galicia, in Austro-Hungary. After a brief internment they got into Switzerland and settled in Berne. In 1916, needing a better library than the one in Berne, Lenin came to Zurich …

(The Library set is now lit.)

… intending to stay two weeks. But he and Nadezhda liked it here and decided to stay. They rented a room in the house of a shoe-maker named Kammerer at 14 Spiegelgasse. Zurich during the war was a magnet for refugees, exiles, spies, anarchists, artists and radicals of all kinds. Here could be seen James Joyce, reshaping the novel into the permanent form of his own monument, the book the world now knows as Ulysses! – and here, too, the Dadaists were performing nightly at the Cabaret Voltaire in the Meierei Bar at Number One Spiegelgasse, led by a dark, boyish and obscure Romanian poet…

(JOYCE is seen passing among the bookshelves; and also CARR, now monocled and wearing blazer, cream flannels, boater… and holding a large pair of scissors which he snips speculatively as he passes between the bookcases. JOYCE and CARR pass out of view.)

Every morning at nine o’clock when the library opened, Lenin would arrive.

(LENIN arrives, saying ‘Good morning’ in Russian: ‘Zdrasvuitiye’.)

He would work till the lunch hour, when the library closed, and then return and work until six, except on Thursdays when we remained closed. He was working on his book on Imperialism.

(LENIN is at work among books and papers.)

On January 22nd, 1917, at the Zurich People’s House Lenin told an audience of young people, ‘We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution.’ We all believed that that was so. But one day hardly more than a month later, a Polish comrade, Bronsky, ran into the Ulyanov house with the news that there was a revolution in Russia …

(NADYA enters as in the Prologue, and she and LENIN repeat the Russian conversation previously enacted. This time CECILY translates it for the audience, pedantically repeating each speech in English, even the simple ‘No!’ and ‘Yes!’ The LENINS leave.

NADYA says ‘Das vedanya’ to CECILY (i.e. ‘Goodbye’) as she goes.)

As Nadezhda writes in her Memories of Lenin, ‘From the moment the news of the February revolution came, Ilyich burned with eagerness to go to Russia.’ But this was easier said than done, in this landlocked country. Russia was at war with Germany. And Lenin was no friend of the Allied countries. His war policy made him a positive danger to them;

(CARR enters, very debonair in his boater and blazer, etc. CARR has come to the library as a ‘spy’, and his manner betrays this until CECILY addresses him.)

indeed it was clear that the British and the French would wish to prevent Lenin from leaving Switzerland. And that they would have him watched.

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