Book review - A Hard Case: Victor Serge’s Notebooks: 1936-1947
Victor Serge’s Notebooks: 1936-1947
Reviewed by J. Hoberman
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/a-hard-case-victor-serge-notebooks/
More posts on Victor Serge
Reviewed by J. Hoberman
Victor Serge was born
into exile in 1890 and died in exile 57 years later. The child of Russian
radicals who fled to Belgium in the wake of the plot to assassinate Tsar
Alexander II, Serge (né Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) embraced anarchism and was
jailed for writing in support of a band of notorious, quasi-anarchist French
bank-robbers known as the Bonnot Gang. He subsequently participated in the
abortive anarcho-syndicalist Catalan uprising of 1917, was again imprisoned and
then made his way across Europe to his parents’ now revolutionary homeland,
where he made common cause with the Bolsheviks.
Dispatched in the
mid-1920s to Germany and Vienna as a Comintern agent, Serge came to know many
of the world’s leading revolutionaries. He returned to the Soviet Union to join
the anti-Stalin opposition, led by Leon Trotsky. With the opposition’s defeat
and his resulting expulsion from the Communist Party, he became a full-time
writer; his work was mailed out of Russia for publication in France. Arrested
once more and exiled to Central Asia, he managed to avoid liquidation thanks in
part to a series of organized protests by left-wing French intellectuals,
including André Gide. At the 1935 International Congress of Writers for the
Defense of Culture, they spoke out in protest when the Soviet delegation and
their supporters attempted to suppress all mention of the
“counter-revolutionary” Victor Serge.
Expelled from the
Soviet Union, a free man in Paris, Serge wrote book-length pamphlets
excoriating Stalin and, despite their disagreements, defending Trotsky. When
the Spanish Civil War broke out, he backed the Workers’ Party of Marxist
Unification, the same independent Marxist faction for whom George Orwell
fought; published his novel of the Gulag, Midnight in the Century;
and worked on what would be his best-known book, The Case of Comrade
Tulayev, a fictionalized account of the purge trials less monolithic in its
analysis of Bolshevik psychology than Arthur Koestler’s contemporaneous Darkness
at Noon.
In the 1960s, the
progressive American journalist I.F. Stone wrote that Serge, while “apparently
no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement … looms up as one
of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a
revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and
power.” That integrity and purity are factors of Serge’s marginality. A
permanent, often solitary, oppositionist, Serge was less a martyr than a
stubborn survivor—a man of action who was ultimately a witness and, as such,
crucial to understanding 1914-1945, a period that the historian Enzo Traverso
has called the European Civil War. Serge was too disciplined to seem a
revolutionary romantic and, at least in his writing, also too reflective... read more:
https://thepointmag.com/criticism/a-hard-case-victor-serge-notebooks/
More posts on Victor Serge
