Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (2 page)

From 1936 to 1940, he lived a precarious existence in Brussels and Paris, working in print shops and campaigning against the Stalinist persecution of revolutionary minorities in Russia and Spain. During this brief period of relative security (and despite severe material hardships, including a Communist campaign of slander that effectively closed the major media to him), Serge produced poetry, journalism, political essays, and fiction in profusion. He collaborated with Leon Trotsky (whose
Revolution Betrayed
he translated into French) and analyzed the Russian experience in three book-length essays (
From Lenin to Stalin, Destiny of a Revolution
, and
Portrait of Stalin
), which anticipate
The Gulag Archipelago
by their compelling fusion of authentic documentation, personal testimony, and historical irony, but which differ from Solzhenitsyn’s later novels in their consistent commitment to the ideals of socialism and freedom.

In 1938, having fulfilled his political duty by exposing Stalin’s betrayal of socialism in these nonfiction works, Serge felt free to return to fiction in order to re-create the full human dimension of this experience in
Midnight in the Century
, which was published by Grasset in Paris in 1939 and mentioned for that year’s Prix Goncourt. However, the onset of the Second World War soon destroyed Serge’s precarious hold on literary success along with his even more precarious Parisian exile. His books were suppressed and their author forced to flee to Marseilles and thence, after an excruciating “battle for visas,” to Mexico, where he died in 1947 in poverty and obscurity with three unpublished books in his desk drawer: among them his classic
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
and two novels,
Unforgiving Years
and
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
.

II.
MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

The theme of the persistence of the socialist ideal runs like a red thread through all of Serge’s works, but nowhere is it more evident than in the novel that chronicles the eclipse of that ideal—
Midnight in the Century
. It is a novel about one of history’s darkest hours, the hour of Hitler’s triumph in Germany and Stalin’s apotheosis in Russia. It is a book about men and women in defeat, about Russian Communists whose fidelity to the liberating revolution of 1917 has landed them in the Gulag of 1934, and who must now ask themselves the question: “What is to be done if it is midnight in the century?”

It is also a book radiant with admiration of the courage, political integrity, and humanity of its Communist heroes, glowing with intellectual passion as it grapples with the essential questions of socialism, history, and human destiny at a time when thought itself is “glacial . . . something of a midnight sun piercing the skull.” Radiant, too, in its revolutionary faith in an unknown future dimly viewed across an abyss of foreseeable cataclysms, a future symbolized by the image of seeds germinating in the earth. Responding in 1940 to criticism that his novel was “too dark,” Serge declared: “I did not wish it so. I wanted only to be truthful, I even made efforts to include all the muted, secret, tenacious light that I have never ceased to see among the men of the Russian soil. I would have liked to end it on a note of hope, and I believe it is there.”

It is an authentic book that records—and transfigures—Serge’s ordeal of eighty days of solitary confinement and interrogation in the GPU prison in Moscow, his resistance during two years of deportation in Central Asia, and his unending opposition to the Stalinist betrayal of the revolutionary movement to which he had dedicated his life. Serge devoted a chapter of his
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
to his “Years of Captivity: 1933–1936,” and there left indelible portraits of his comrades among the deportees in Orenburg, revolutionary heroes and irreducible opponents of Stalinism like Fanya Upstein, Lisa Senatskaya, Vassily Pankratov, and Boris Eltsin, among whom it is possible to identify “models” for some of the protagonists of
Midnight in the Century
.
[2]
However, in the 1940 article cited above, Serge insists that “
Midnight in the Century
, because it is a novel, is a much truer more profound testimony than would be Memoirs, in which the author would only relate what he himself had lived.” He adds: “It is a mistake to try to recognize the author in his characters. Why would he create them if it were not to escape from himself, to break the rather stifling circle of the self, break with involuntary egocentrism, penetrate another being, incorporate oneself within him, and by a sort of communion attain a more general truth about man?”

Finally, it is an important book politically, for the main issue that Serge deals with—socialism versus barbarism—is more than ever fundamental to humankind’s survival. Serge’s genius lies in his ability to dramatize with clarity the problems that have been besetting revolutionaries for over two hundred years in a style that is moving and poetic. Through the anguish of his heroes, we are led to rethink the dilemma of the world’s first successful socialist revolution in the throes of transformation into its own opposite—from the activity of millions struggling to create a new world in the image of justice into a narrow, exploitative tyranny—and to pose the question anew for our own age. Serge’s development of the motifs of life’s renewal, of the passage of seasons and generations, and of the transmission of messages among the imprisoned, isolated, and persecuted revolutionaries raises his theme, the persistence of the socialist ideal, to the level of poetic vision. It is a vision that extends backward in time to connect with earlier traditions of revolt and dissidence while prefiguring, in the most explicit fashion, the struggles of Russian and East European socialist rebels that rose to the surface again during the years of glasnost. Indeed, Serge was one of the first Soviet dissidents to be eagerly rediscovered by the “new left” generation of Russian anti-totalitarian socialists during the 1980s and ’90s.
[3]

During his years of deportation in Orenburg, Serge was keenly aware of belonging to a long tradition of persecuted Russian dissidents:

The theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution is omnipresent in
Midnight in the Century
. It broods over Chernoe (Black-Waters), Serge’s fictional town on the steppe, which has hosted generations of exiles, refugees, sectarians, and heretics. The town, we are told, was founded by the semilegendary patriarch Seraphim Lack-Land, a seventeenth-century religious schismatic who led his people into the wilderness to escape the unholy power of the centralizing Orthodox hierarchy only to be dragged back to Moscow and a martyr’s fate. The image of the righteous, unrepentant old man chained in his dungeon, repeating, “Lord, I will never deny thee, I will never deny thy people,” reverberates through the entire novel.

Next in Serge’s line of apostolic succession is Lebedkin, the political deportee from Petersburg. Exiled under the tsarist regime, he welcomes the cleansing hurricane of the 1917 revolution in Chernoe—one thousand miles from the capital—and contemplates his lonely fate on the same hilltop where Seraphim had earlier meditated his martyrdom. Seventeen years pass and Chernoe is again populated by deportees, martyrs, and schismatics. Although the foreground of Serge’s novel is occupied by the Left Oppositionists, the heretics of the new Stalinist orthodoxy, the background is crowded with persecuted schismatics—religious sectarians, Old Believers, Zionists—who are also suffering for their faith. In the novel’s climactic scene, Rodion’s break from jail, there is a translucent moment of silent communion between the young Trotskyite and an Old Believer, which epitomizes the theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution in the tortured Russian land. This epiphany, for which Serge has carefully and lovingly prepared, takes place under streaming stars in a mystical atmosphere of biblical simplicity. It is a Marxist materialist’s homage to spirituality.

Nature, too, is intimately related to Serge’s theme of suffering and resistance. Although primarily a man of cities—Paris, Barcelona, Moscow, and Petrograd were his places of predilection and the setting of much of his fiction—Serge had a deep awareness of man’s place in the natural order. For him, the dialectic of human history is an outgrowth of the dialectic of nature, and in
Midnight in the Century
the rhythms of nature are at once the physical setting and the consistent metaphor against which the action develops.

The Chernoe section of the novel opens with a heartrendingly bittersweet evocation of the return of spring to the frozen steppe. The breakup of the ice on the river, greeted with joy by the villagers after the long, barren winter, is emblematic of the renewal of human hopes. The exiled Trotskyites are also touched by the spectacle. Their clandestine meeting on the riverbank becomes the occasion for a lyrical celebration of the northern spring on the part of the granite-faced Old Bolshevik, Ryzhik, and even the sarcasms of the cynical Elkin fail to dampen his ardor:

The joy of nature’s renewal is more deeply undercut by the irony of the political situation: “Spring . . . means sowing-time. Sowing time means repression.” The logic of events demands that in order to squeeze a grain surplus out of the sullenly resisting, newly collectivized peasantry, Stalin will take a new political tack, necessitating a new purge. The political exiles understand this process as a sign of the weakness of the regime. They have predicted it. The villagers, equally prescient in their resignation, accept it as one more seasonal cataclysm to be endured. Yet such is the power of nature’s spectacle of death and rebirth that neither group can resist the temptation to embrace life and hope. Life is struggle. Life goes on.

The central action of the novel unfolds in this brief moment between the breakup of the winter ice and the onset of the political freeze that will deprive Serge’s heroes of the semi-freedom of deportation and send them back to prison. During this interval there is time to take stock of their lives, to choose how they will resist the inevitable, to exchange significant messages, to fall in love, and to pass the living flame of revolution from one generation to the next. Thus the seasonal pattern of death and rebirth, destruction and continuity is intimately related to the theme of the generations, of the human forces who will carry on the struggle against oppression from one generation to the next.

Serge the Marxist believed that the Russian Revolution was not dead but only sleeping. He felt that as industry developed and Russia emerged from backwardness, the socialized system of production would inevitably come into contradiction with the oppressive system of bureaucratic privilege and control. A new proletariat, self-confident and schooled in this new industry, would then pick up the struggle where the vanquished vanguard of the 1920s and ’30s had gone down in defeat. This, however, might take generations (especially if war intervened, which it did) and until then the germ of revolutionary thought would be kept alive by minorities. Serge found a metaphoric expression for this vision in the related natural images of the spring thaw and of seeds germinating beneath the soil and in the traditional Russian theme of “fathers” and “sons.” A concrete, historically grounded political perspective thus develops as a structuring element in the novel.

The final section of
Midnight
, significantly entitled “The Beginning,” focuses on the character of the youngest of the political exiles, Rodion, a semi-educated, semi-alcoholic worker whose brain is befuddled by half-understood quotes from Hegel and whose spirit is obsessed with the problem of fate. As for so many before him, jail and exile have been the “universities” in which the revolutionary traditions of the “fathers” have been passed down to this rather unpromising “son.” It is Rodion who represents the new generation that will carry on the revolutionary idea and assure the continuity between the great but doomed generation of Old Bolsheviks and the unknown future.

Yet, to do this, he must break with a central element in that tradition: the idea of the Party as the incarnation of the proletarian vanguard. He alone dares to break the tie of Party unity that binds the older Trotskyite dissidents to their Stalinist persecutors, their refusal to appeal to the masses outside the Party, to even imagine creating a “second party.” “Listen to me,” he tells the comrades: “It’s no longer true: something has been lost forever. Lenin will never rise again in his mausoleum. Our only brothers are the working people who no longer have either rights or bread. They’re the ones we must talk to. It is with them that we must remake the Revolution and first of all a completely different Party . . .”

As he wanders the night streets of Chernoe, troubled and alone, his intuition becomes a certainty. The sight of GPU headquarters, lights blazing into the night, inspires him with a vision of that new revolution as an inevitable spring tide: “Work! Work night and day, you’ll still be swept away . . . The ice breaks up after the long winter, the spring floods sweep it away . . . It will be beautiful when they overflow . . . Your files, your papers, all your dirty little typewritten verdicts, and your prisons, all of them, the old wooden barracks, sealed with barbed wire, the modern American-style concrete buildings, all of that will be blown sky high . . .”