ABSTRACT
There is somewhere in Tolstoy—or so the author was led to believe by a passage which he had, long ago, in a burst of utopian enthusiasm, scribbled into an old notebook—the story of a green stick buried by the road at the edge of a ravine in the Zakaz Forest. Yet the human longing for universal welfare has always been characterized by the double metaphor, and by the one-eyed utopian has recovered a fuller sight. It must be taken as one of the great lazy lapses of the human imagination that a utopian vision of a futureman, at last erect and godlike, should be reduced to a hunched-over peering at Russian floorboards, African verandas, and the sandy fields of Mark Brandenburg. The essential utopian text has very little in common with that mythologized version of a sterile, changeless perfectionism, a monolithic harmony, a tranquil, permanent paradise.
