The three plays tell the story of the Russian radical opposition in the years before and after the European revolutions of 1848. The trilogy spans the early 1830s and the late 1860s and features Alexander Herzen, the founder of Russian populism and many of his contemporaries, including Michael Bakunin, the progenitor of anarchism, the writer Ivan Turgenev and the brilliant, erratic young critic Vissarion Belinsky. The Coast of Utopia, with more than fifty characters and with the action moving from the Bakunin country estate to Moscow, St Petersburg, Paris and London has an epic for its subject but one which is experienced largely through the private lives of 'the Romantic Exiles.'
