Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) (3 page)

Rodion’s escape into the starry night across the silent forest and the icy river is a symbolic flight into nature as well as a return to life, to the common destiny of the masses, who are part of nature and part of history. If Stalinist totalitarianism represents the negation of the revolution, then the masses represent what Hegel called “the negation of the negation.” Rodion, the least educated of the novel’s heroes, is also the most philosophical:

Rodion’s experiences in the forest are spiritual as well as physical trials, rites of passage that include a symbolic death by drowning and a rebirth. He is rescued by a nameless, solitary wolf hunter who represents the temptation of a life of self-sufficiency in nature but outside of society. This Rodion also rejects. Purified and tested, nameless now like the wolf man and the natural objects that surround him, he enters a nameless town and rejoins the ranks of the proletariat from which he had sprung. Rodion’s escape is, I assume, the muted “note of hope” with which Serge wanted to end his novel.

Significantly, the edifice on which he gets a job as a construction worker is the new headquarters for the secret police, the only concrete building in a desert of mud and wood. It is Serge’s ironic symbol for the paradox of “socialist construction” under the Stalinist system where the labor of the proletariat can only serve to increase the power of those who oppress it—until such time as the proletariat is ready once again to take destiny into its own hands. Until then, Serge seems to be saying, Rodion’s revolutionary vision will persist like “seeds germinating in the womb” of the Russian soil ready to bear fruit at the next thaw.

III. MESSAGES

History does not move in straight lines. It moves in waves. Those waves are revolutions. Serge’s Communist heroes in
Midnight in the Century
have ridden on the crest of the great revolutionary wave of 1917 to 1923—a height from which they have caught a glimpse of what might be, of humanity’s power to reshape society in its own image. Now, with Hitler and Stalin in the ascendant, they are in the trough, about to be engulfed in the sea of counter-revolutionary reaction. Yet through the wreckage of their lives and hopes they affirm the vision of what they have seen from the crest, the dangerous secret whose exposure their captors fear most—mankind can be free: What happened once can happen again. Others will succeed where we have failed. The next wave (or the one after that) will reach the shore. As Serge puts it in
Birth of Our Power
, “Nothing is ever lost.”

This continuity is the central political message of Serge’s novel for today’s readers. Like a shipwrecked explorer who places the log of his voyage in a bottle and consigns it to the waves, Serge epitomized the experience of a whole revolutionary generation in the form of a novel and set it afloat on the troubled seas of history. By 1939 his Russian comrades, the models for the heroes of
Midnight in the Century
, had all perished and, like Melville’s shipwrecked Ishmael, Serge might well have said with Job’s messenger, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”

Messages are an important theme in the novel. Indeed, its key chapter is entitled “Messages.” In its most dramatic scene, Varvara furiously tears apart a beautifully bound book she has received in the mail and removes from its binding sheets of ultrathin paper containing the “theses” of her Oppositionist comrades in the prison of Verkneuralsk concerning the “state-capitalist” nature of the Stalinist regime, which Trotsky still considered a “deformed workers state.” Serge was referring here to an authentic document, which was discovered and analyzed by the Moscow historian Alexei Gusev when the GPU archives were opened to scholars in the 1990s. Another “message,” this one from the exiled Trotsky, reaches the deportees by an even more circuitous route. An apolitical technocratic Soviet economist on a mission to Paris comes across a copy of
The Bulletin of the Left Opposition
and reads it before carefully tearing it up and flushing it down the toilet. Arrested later in a purge of economists, he passes Trotsky’s ideas on to the Oppositionists in the prison who pass it on to the deportee in Chernoe. These messages—the “mail” in prison jargon—are the ideas that nourish the novel’s heroes with information, ideas, and hope, reminding them that they are not alone.

Nor is it merely a poetical conceit on my part to present Serge’s novel as a kind of message. Serge himself, dedicating the book to his comrades in Spain, speaks of it as “messages from their brothers in Russia.” Like the messages transmitted from prison to prison within the novel, the book is first of all a kind of report, a balance sheet, an insider’s description of the economic and political situation and a firsthand account of the physical, moral, and intellectual health of the surviving Russian Opposition—including its hesitations and internal factional divisions. “The truth of men and things.” It is also the message to the world from the comrades Serge left behind in Russia. For Serge, “he who speaks, he who writes is essentially someone speaking for all those who are voiceless,” the persecuted, the oppressed, the gagged, the fallen. Serge was literally haunted by the memory of the fallen, of the dead comrades behind him, and his fiction was both the acquittal of a debt and an attempt to give them a kind of immortality.

It is these comrades, the dead and the living, who form the collective hero of Serge’s novel cycle. They are the “men” of
Men in Prison
, the “we” of
Birth of Our Power
, the defenders of besieged Civil War Petrograd in
Conquered City
, the defeated yet defiant Oppositionists of
Midnight in the Century
. Together they form a kind of “invisible international” whose messages of solidarity cross the barriers of guarded frontiers and prison walls, the barriers of blood, lies, and slanders, and the barriers of time as well. These messages represent the accumulated experience, wisdom, and sacrifice of millions, distilled into truthful fiction through the alchemy of literary creation. They are a precious heritage for those who choose to receive them.

Today, seventy-five years after these messages were set down by the hand of a unique survivor who was also an incomparable novelist, the bottle containing them has washed up on our shores. They illuminate a past which is the origin of our present and tell us that the future may yet be a new beginning.

—R
ICHARD
G
REEMAN
October 2014

To the memory of

Kurt Landau, Andrés Nin, Erwin Wolf,
who disappeared in Barcelona and
whose very death was stolen from us
,

to
Joaquin Maurin,
in a Spanish prison
,

to
Juan Andrade, Julian Gorkin, Katia Landau, Olga
Nin
and through them to all those whose valour they
incarnate,

I
dedicate
these messages from their
brothers in Russia.

Mikhail Ivanovich Kostrov, who was not at all superstitious, had a feeling that things were about to happen in his life. They were heralded by almost imperceptible signs. So it was for his arrest. There had been the peculiar tone of voice with which the Rector had told him: “Mikhail Ivanovich, I’ve decided to suspend your course for the moment . . . You’re up to the
Directory
,
*
aren’t you?” Fear, obviously, of allusions to the new political turn. “So,” the Rector continued, “prepare me a very short course on Greece.” A shift of about two thousand years. Here, Kostrov felt he was making a mistake, but he made it joyfully, for the sheer pleasure of alarming this comfortably-established pussy-footer who put on a special voice whenever he telephoned the Committee Secretary.

“An excellent idea,” Kostrov replied. “I’ve had a lecture-series on the class struggle in the ancient city-state in my mind for a long time . . . There’s room for a whole new theory of tyranny.” The Rector avoided Kostrov’s eyes by keeping his head lowered over his papers. The bald-spot on the top of his skull made him look tonsured. “All the same, not too many new theories,” he muttered through his thick lips. “Goodbye.” It was when he noticed that tonsure that Mikhail Ivanovich sensed that things were going to happen.

He left there with a sharp suspicion: “Someone has informed on me: Who?” Then his memory recovered the image of a dumpy, inelegant little woman with a rather large bust draped in an army-supply-store trenchcoat. A narrow forehead, a long mouth, cold eyes—something rodent-like in her face. He didn’t like her. In her pudgy hand an activist’s briefcase already stuffed, he was sure, with important papers: District Committee Theses for agitators, lists of activists, etc.—“Comrade Professor, you weren’t very clear on the Left-wing Thermidorians . . . or I didn’t catch your point. . . .
They were
, you said (I noted it),
bad Thermidorians, who, by supporting Barras and Tallien, prepared their own undoing
. . . I don’t completely understand your distinction between good and bad
Thermidorians
.” “You’ve been spying on me, you little bitch. You’re the one who denounced me.”

At that instant she emerged from the Dia-Mat office (Dialectical Materialism) preceded by her briefcase and that odious soft bosom, talking loudly in her rather harsh voice, suitable for platforms constructed of unplaned planks and decorated with red gauze. She was talking, naturally, about the wall-newspaper. “That’s forbidden,” she said imperiously, “it’s quite, quite out of the question. The Editorial Committee . . .” At the words “out of the question” Kostrov had no more doubts. Informer. He walked more rapidly to avoid having to say hello to her, but she waved to him gaily, and behind her he saw the curly head of Irina, a little Zyrianka from the Kama highlands whom he found charming with her smooth face, wide-set eyes, sharp cheekbones, and fine lips chiselled by a miniaturist of the Reindeer Age. “Well, comrade,” he asked her, “your paper, is it coming along?” Yes, yes, she nodded, serious yet playful—playful only in the depths of her eyes, those tiny distant flecks of gold flashing as if from the bottom of a pool. They spoke for a moment, then a wave of students separated them, for the eleven o’clock bell was ringing.