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.