Men in Prison (32 page)
Authors: Victor Serge
Victor Serge (1929)
FICTION
Men in Prison (Les hommes dans la prison,
1930). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1969; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1970; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2014. A searing personal experience transformed into a literary creation of general import.
Birth of Our Power (Naissance de notre force,
1931). Translated by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1967; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1968; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1970; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2015. From Barcelona to Petersburg, the conflagration of World War I ignites the spark of revolution, and poses a new problem for the revolutionaries’ power.
Conquered City (Ville conquise,
1932). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. Idealistic revolutionaries cope with the poison of power as the Red Terror and the White struggle for control of Petrograd during the Civil War.
Midnight in the Century (S’il est minuit dans le siècle,
1939). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1981. On the eve of the great Purges, convicted anti-Stalin oppositionists in deportation attempt to survive, resist the GPU, debate political solutions, ponder their fates, and fall in love.
The Long Dusk
(Les derniers temps,
1946). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Dial Press, 1946. The fall of Paris (1940), the exodus of the refugees to the Free Zone, the beginnings of the French Resistance.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev (L
’Affaire Toulaèv,
1951). Translated by Willard Trask. Introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007. A panorama of the USSR (and Republican Spain) during the Purges, with a cast of sharply etched characters from provincial policemen to Old Bolsheviks and the Chief himself.
Unforgiving Years
(Les années sans pardon,
Posthumous, 1973). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2010. Tormented Russian revolutionaries in Paris on the eve of World War I, Leningrad under siege, the last days of Berlin, and Mexico.
POETRY
Resistance: Poems by Victor Serge
(Résistance,
1938). Translated by James Brook. Introduction by Richard Greeman. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972. Most of these poems were composed in deportation in Orenburg (1933–36), confiscated by the GPU, and reconstructed from memory in France.
NONFICTION
Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921
.
Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. Serge’s early reports from Russia were designed to win over his French anarchist comrades to the cause of the Soviets.
Witness to the German Revolution
(1923). Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. A collection of the articles Serge wrote in Berlin in 1923 under the pseudonym R. Albert.
What Every Militant Should Know about Repression (L
es Coulisses d’une Sûreté Générale: Ce que tout révolutionnaire doit savoir sur la répression,
1925). Popular pamphlet reprinted in a dozen languages. Serge unmasks the secrets he discovered working in the archives the Czarist Secret Police, then explains how police provocateurs operate everywhere and gives practical advice on security to activists.
The Chinese Revolution
(1927–1928), Online at
http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html
.
Year One of the Russian Revolution (L’an 1 de la révolution russe,
1930) Translated by Peter Sedgwick. London: Pluto Press. Written soon after Stalin’s takeover in Russia, this history presents the Left Opposition’s take on the October Revolution and early Bolshevism.
From Lenin to Stalin
(De Lénine à Staline,
1937). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Monad and Pathfinder Press, 1973. A brilliant, short primer, on the Russian Revolution and its degeneration, with close-ups of Lenin and Trotsky.
Russia Twenty Years After
(Destin d’une Revolution,
1937). Translated by Max Shactman (Includes “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,” 1947). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Descriptive panorama and analysis of bureaucratic tyranny and chaos in Russia under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, based on statistics and economic, sociological, and political analysis.
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky
(Vie et Mort de Léon Trotski,
1951), by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Wildwood, 1975; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Still the most concise, authentic, and well-written Trotsky biography, based on the two authors’ intimate knowledge of the man and his times and on Trotsky’s personal archives (before they were sealed up in Harvard).
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
(Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941)
Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951. Translated by Peter Sedwick. New York: NYRB Classics, 2012. Originally titled “Souvenirs of Vanished Worlds,” Serge’s
Memoirs
are an eyewitness chronicle of the revolutionary movements Belgium, France, Spain, Russia, and Germany studded with brilliant portraits of the people he knew. This is the first complete English translation and comes with a glossary.
The Serge-Trotsky Papers: Correspondence and Other Writings between Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky.
D. Cotterill, ed. London, Pluto Press, 1994. Includes their personal letters and polemical articles as well as essays on Serge and Trotsky by various authors.
Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution.
Translated and edited by Al Richardson. London: Francis Boutle, 2004. Includes Serge’s reports on Soviet Cultural life in the 1920s (published in Paris in
Clarté),
studies of writers like Blok, Mayakovsky, Essenin, and Pilniak as well as his highly original contributions to the debate on “proletarian literature” in the 1930s.
Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938.
Oakland: PM Press, 2015. An original anthology of Serge’s writing on anarchism translated, edited, and introduced by Mitchell Abidor. Foreword by Richard Greeman.
BOOKS IN FRENCH:
Carnets,
Expanded edition with newly discovered manuscripts presented by Claudio Albertani. Marseille: Agone, 2012. Notebook sketches and meditations dating from 1936 to 1947 on subjects ranging from Gide, Giraudoux, and Trotsky to Mexican earthquakes, popular wrestling matches, and death.
Le tropique et le nord
. Montpellier: Maspero 1972; Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Four short stories:
Mer blanche
(1931),
L’Impasse St. Barnabé
(1936),
La folie d’Iouriev [L’Hôpital de Léningrad,
1953] and
Le Séisme [San Juan Parangarcutiro]
Retour à l’Ouest: Chroniques, juin 1936-mai 1940
.
Preface by Richard Greeman. Marseille: Agone, 2010. From the euphoria of Pop Front France in June 1936 to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, Serge’s weekly columns for a trade union-owned independent daily in Belgium provide a lucid panorama of this confused and confusing period.
MANUSCRIPTS:
The Victor Serge Papers (1936–1947), Beinecke Library, Yale University. Twenty-seven boxes of correspondence, documents, and manuscripts (mostly unpublished) on a wide variety of subjects from politics to Mexican anthropology. Catalog online:
| 1890 | Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Victor Serge) born on December 30 in Brussels to a family of sympathizers with Narodnik terrorism who had fled from Russia after the assassination of Alexander II. |
| 1908 | Photographer’s apprentice and member of the socialist Jeunes-Gardes. Spends a short period in an anarchist ‘utopian’ community in the Ardennes. Leaves for Paris. |
| 1910–1911 | Becomes editor of the French anarchist-individualist magazine, Anarchie. Writes and agitates. |
| 1912 | Serge is implicated in the trial of the anarchist outlaws known as the Bonnot Gang. Despite arrest, he refuses to turn informer and is sentenced to five years in a maison centrale. Three of his co-defendants were guillotined. |
| 1917–1918 | Serge is released from prison and banned from France. Goes to Barcelona where he participates in the syndicalist uprising. Writes his first article signed Victor Serge. Leaves Barcelona to join the Russian army in France. Is detained for over a year in a French concentration camp as a Bolshevik suspect. |
| 1919 | Arrives in Red Petrograd at the height of the Civil War. Gets to work organizing the administration of the Communist International under Zinoviev. |
| 1920–1922 | Participates in Comintern Congresses. Edits various international journals. Exposes Tsarist secret-police archives and fights in the defense of the city. |
| 1923–1926 | Serves Comintern as a secret agent and editor of Imprekor in Berlin and Vienna. Returns to the Soviet Union to take part in the last stand of the left opposition. |
| 1927 | Series of articles on the Chinese Revolution in which he criticizes Stalin’s complacence towards the Kuomintang and draws attention to the importance of Mao Zedong. |
| 1928 | Expelled from Communist Party and relieved of all official functions. |
| 1928–1933 | Barred from all other work, Serge takes up writing. He sends his manuscripts to France, since publication in the Soviet Union is impossible. Apart from many articles, he produces Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930; Men in Prison, 1930; Birth of Our Power, 1931; and Conquered City, 1932. |
| 1933 | Serge is arrested and deported to Orenburg in Central Asia, where he is joined by his young son, Vlady. |
| 1935 | Oppositionists raise the ‘Case of Victor Serge’ at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris. Paris intellectuals campaign for his freedom. |
| 1936 | Serge is released from Orenburg and simultaneously deprived of Soviet citizenship. His manuscripts are confiscated and his is expelled from the USSR. He settles first in Brussels, then in Paris. His return to Europe is accompanied by a slander campaign in the Communist press. |
| 1937 | From Lenin to Stalin and Destiny of a Revolution appear in which Serge analyses the Stalinist counter-revolution. He is elected a councilor to the Spanish POUM (Independent Marxist Party) and campaigns against the Moscow trials. |
| 1940 | Serge leaves Paris just as the Nazis advance. In Marseilles, he struggles for months to obtain a visa. Finally finds refuge in Mexico. |
| 1940–1947 | Serge lives in isolation and poverty. Writes The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary for his “desk drawer,” since publication was impossible. |
| 1947 | November 17: Serge dies and is buried as a “Spanish Republican” in the French section of the Mexico City cemetery. |
Victor Serge
(1890–1947) was born to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles living in Brussels. As a young anarchist firebrand, he was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. In 1919, Serge joined the Bolsheviks. An outspoken critic of Stalin, he was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men
in Prison, Birth of Our Power,
and
Conquered City)
and a history
(Year One of the Russian Revolution),
published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers such as André Gide and Romain Rolland. Hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947.
Richard Greeman
has translated and written the introductions for five of Victor Serge’s novels. Cofounder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Greeman is the author of
Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays.
David Gilbert
is an anti-imperialist political prisoner at Auburn Correctional Facility and is the author of
Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond
(PM Press, 2011) and
No Surrender
(Abraham Guillen Press and Arm the Spirit, 2004).
