Dilip Simeon's blog

Midnight in the Century by Victor Serge reviewed by Nicholas Lezard About halfway through this novel, we find ourselves at the head of a queue for cigarettes in the no-horse town of Chernaya (or “black-waters”). It’s , essentially a penal colony. There are two other queues, for bread and kerosene, but, as the novel puts it: “Right now the third queue, for cigarettes, is the most interesting since the cigarettes are there.” Anyway, Rodion – a young, self-educated man who’s ended up in Chernaya for innocently making the Communist party look ridiculous by, among other things, quoting from a year-old issue of Pravda – hands over his money, which the clerk just sweeps up and says “Next” without handing over the goods. And why should he? “The counter-revolution,” as someone else in the queue explains, “has no right to them.” Elsewhere, a friend tries to look on the bright side; the sun is shining. “Remember the sunshine of this moment. The greatest joy on earth, love apart, i...

Victor Serge’s Notebooks: 1936-1947 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-tim...

The “cowardice of intellectuals,” as he writes in an entry from 1943, defies reason. Its roots, he decides, are a fear of “taking a firm stand and seeing clearly.” Beneath all their posturing, writes Serge, is a fear of commitment - something from which intellectuals recoil... NOTEBOOKS: 1936-1947: BY VICTOR SERGE.  EDITED BY CLAUDIO ALBERTANI et al..  reviewed by Alex Press “I often feel like I’m being suffocated in my magnificent desert.” So wrote Victor Serge to Dwight Macdonald of his exile in Mexico. For Serge, exile was nothing new; he’d been a persecuted militant for most of his life. But his simultaneous opposition to Stalin and refusal to renounce the revolution left him isolated in the stifling hothouse of the country’s left-wing exile community. Macdonald tried to find Serge publishers in the United States, but with little luck. (Of the editors who rejected his manuscripts, Macdonald wrote, “There’s nothing here but cowardice on the part of these sheep.”)...

The Last Years of Victor Serge via his Mexican diaries New Left Review 82, July-August 2013 Click here for the full text:  http://sacw.net/article12755. html Victor Serge (1890–1947) spent the last six years of his life in Mexico, joining the exodus from Marseille in 1941 and remaining behind after the War. Here he completed his two most celebrated works. Memoirs of a Revolutionary evokes his vagabond anarchist youth, passage to revolutionary Russia, years as assistant to Zinoviev in the Comintern and Left Oppositionist, prison, exile; a cast of thousands from the Old Bolshevik generation recalled in vivid detail.   The Case of Comrade Tulayev was the most powerful of his ‘documentary novels’ on the turmoil of the inter-war years. Extracts from Serge’s 1944, 45 and 47 diaries had appeared in Les Temps modernes in 1949 and were collected in a 1953 French volume, which also included notebooks from the 1930s. Find a short biography here . In 2010, three cardboard boxes o...

Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century - and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary -and exemplary- career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world. Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when fi...

In R ussian, the proverb ‘Ignorance is bliss’ translates as ‘The less you know, the better you sleep’. For those who experienced the worst of the Soviet Union’s terrors, this is not just a throwaway adage but a strategy for self-preservation. As Alex Halberstadt’s father - the son of one of Stalin’s former bodyguards - attests: ‘There is no more to be gained from sifting through the past than through cigarette ashes.’ Young Heroes of the Soviet Union: A Memoir and a Reckoning By  Alex Halberstadt. Reviewed by Matthew Janney Halberstadt, a Soviet-born American writer, doesn’t agree. Aged nine, soon after leaving Moscow with his family and defecting to the West, he began having a recurring nightmare in which he was chased by a ferocious bulldog, a dream that lingered into adulthood. Contrary to the proverb, ignorance, it seems, is a shoddy defence against night terrors. Throughout his life an inner dread has followed him like a ‘medieval possession’, something he b...

The official conclusion that Vladimir Putin “probably approved” the murder of the former spy  Alexander Litvinenko  in London in 2006 has again raised uncomfortable questions about Russian exceptionalism – and how best to handle relations with what many conservative western politicians regard as a rogue regime in Moscow. Russia's Litvinenko Is Just One Of Many Silenced Kremlin Critics Russia’s sense of detachment from the European mainstream, or to put it another way, its self-created isolationism and separateness, is nothing new. It dates back to the 1917 revolution and the communist era, or even further, to the days of Tolstoy, Turgenev and the tsars.  But there are particular doubts about Putin, his strange brand of paranoid nationalism, and the state that has formed around the president. A key issue for Putin’s western interlocutors is that  Litvinenko’s death  is not an isolated case, though the manner of his death was exceptional. Prominent op...

When the novelist Mikhail Sholokhov, who later won the Nobel Prize for literature, had trouble getting the third part of The Quiet Don approved for publication, he appealed to Maxim Gorky, then the supreme authority in Soviet literary affairs. Gorky invited him to his mansion, which had been a gift from Stalin to lure Gorky home from self-imposed exile. When Sholokhov arrived, he discovered that Gorky had company: Stalin himself. Stalin’s Library: A Dictator and His Books by Geoffrey Roberts Reviewed by by Gary Saul Morson Stalin interrogated Sholokhov about ideologically problematic passages but agreed to the book’s publication on condition that Sholokhov also write a novel glorifying the Soviet collectivization of agriculture. Still more important, he gave Sholokhov a piece of paper explaining how to contact Stalin’s personal secretary, Aleksandr Poskrebyshev, and providing the number of his direct phone line. Sholokhov’s collectivization novel also ran into trouble with officials t...