Victor Serge

Victor Serge
Born	December 30, 1890 (1890-12-30) Brussels, Belgium
Died	November 17, 1947 (1947-11-18) (aged 56) Mexico City, Mexico
Nationality	Belgian Russian
Political party	Socialist Young Guards (1905–1909) Russian Communist Party (1919–1928) POUM (1937)
Spouse	Liuba Russakova
Partner	Laurette Séjourné
Children	2, including Vlady
Signature

Victor Serge (French: [viktɔʁ sɛʁʒ]; December 30, 1890 – November 17, 1947), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Russian: Ви́ктор Льво́вич Киба́льчич), was a Russian writer, poet, Marxist revolutionary, and historian. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. He was a close supporter of the Left Opposition and associate of Leon Trotsky.

According to William Giraldi, Serge's novels may be "read like an alloy of" George Orwell and Franz Kafka: "the uncommon political acuity of Orwell and the absurdist comedy of Kafka, a comedy with the damning squint of satire, except the satire is real." In his studies of Serge, Richard Greeman described him as a Modernist writer influenced by James Joyce, Andrei Bely and Freud; Greeman also believed that Serge, although writing in French, continued the experiments of such Russian Soviet writers as Isaac Babel, Osip Mandelstam, and Boris Pilnyak, and poets Vladimir Mayakovsky and Sergei Yesenin.

Serge is remembered as the author of novels and other prose works, memoirs (e.g. Memoirs of a Revolutionary) and poetry. Among his novels chronicling the lives of Soviet people and revolutionaries and of the first half of the 20th century, the best-known is The Case of Comrade Tulayev (French: L'affaire Toulaev). Nicholas Lezard calls the novel " of the great 20th-century Russian novels" that follows the traditions of "Gogolian absurdity".

Early life

Serge was born in Belgium to Russian revolutionaries in exile. He had little formal schooling and left home in his teens. He lived in a French mining village, worked as a typesetter, and went to Paris. While in Paris he became an anarchist and editor of one of the movement's newspapers.

During that time, Serge was caught up in the trial of the Bonnot Gang with his then-wife Rirette Maîtrejean and others. Some of the accused were executed, the women were acquitted, and Serge was sentenced to five years imprisonment for refusing to testify. He was 22 years old at the time of his sentencing and was released in 1917.

In 1919, Serge arrived in revolutionary Russia during the civil war between the Red (revolutionary) and White (counter-revolutionary) armies. While concerned that the Bolsheviks were repressing opposition to their left, he later wrote, "Even if there was only one chance in a hundred for the regeneration of the revolution and its workers' democracy, that chance had to be taken."

Emigration and death

Serge was arrested in 1928, shortly after Leon Trotsky, with whom he had sometimes associated, and confined to Leningrad until 1933, a time in which his second wife Liouba Roussakov began to suffer from mental illness.

Following international pressure on the USSR over its treatment of writers and other cultural figures in the Moscow trials, Serge was expelled from the USSR in 1936 and left for Belgium and France, where he returned to Paris. Roussakov came with him, as did their son Vlady, but Roussakov was institutionalized in 1937, following the move to Paris. Serge met the Italian-born archaeologist Laurette Séjourné. Upon the German invasion of France in 1941, Serge decided to leave Europe, seeking passage to the United States, where he could not obtain a visa. He accepted passage for Mexico despite having heard of Trotsky's recent assassination there. He took an oceanliner for Mexico (sharing a passage with Claude Levi-Strauss and Andre Breton), with Séjourné joining him in 1942. They married that year, but in Mexico Serge was beset with fear of arrest or assassination and struggled to work. He died in 1947 and was buried in Mexico City.

Works available in English

Fiction

• The Long Dusk (1946) Translator: Ralph Manheim; New York : The Dial Press. Translation of Les derniers temps, Montreal 1946.
• The Case of Comrade Tulayev (1967) Translator: Willard R. Trask; New York : New York Review of Books Classics. Translation of L'Affaire Toulaev. Paris 1949.
• Birth of our Power (1967) Translator: Richard Greeman; New York : Doubleday. Translation of Naissance de notre force, Paris 1931.
• Men in Prison (1969) Translator: Richard Greeman; Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Translation of Les hommes dans le prison, Paris 1930.
• Serge, Victor (1932). Conquered City [Ville conquise] (in French). Translated by Greeman, Richard. New York City: NYRB Classics (published 2011). ISBN 978-1-59017-366-4.
• Serge, Victor (1939). Midnight in the Century [S'il est minuit dans le siècle] (in French). Translated by Greeman, Richard. New York City: NYRB Classics (published 2014). ISBN 9781590177709.
• Serge, Victor (1971). Unforgiving Years [Les Années sans pardon] (in French). Translated by Greeman, Richard. New York City: NYRB Classics (published 2008). ISBN 978-1-59017-247-6.
• Serge, Victor (2022). Greeman, Richard (ed.). Last Times. Translated by Manheim, Ralph. New York City: NYRB Classics. ISBN 9781681375144. (revised edition of The Long Dusk)

Poems

• Resistance (1989) Translator: James Brooks; San Francisco: City Lights. Translation of Résistance, Paris 1938.
• A Blaze in the Desert: Selected Poems by Victor Serge, translated by James Brook PM Press, Oakland, California, 2017.

Non-fiction: books

• From Lenin to Stalin (1937) Translator: Ralph Manheim; New York: Pioneer Publishers. Translation of De Lénine à Staline, Paris 1937.
• Russia Twenty Years After (1937) Translator: Max Shachtman; New York: Pioneer Publishers. Translation of Destin d'une révolution, Paris 1937. Also published as Destiny of a Revolution.
• Memoirs of a Revolutionary, 1901–1941 (2012) Translator: Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis; New York: New York Review of Books Classics. Translation of Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941, Paris 1951.
• Year One of the Russian Revolution (1972) Translator: Peter Sedgwick; London: Allen Lane. Translation of L'An 1 de la révolution russe, Paris 1930.
• The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (1973) (with Natalia Sedova Trotsky) Translator: Arnold J. Pomerans; Garden City, NY: Doubleday. Translation of: Vie et mort de Leon Trotsky, Paris 1951.
• What Everyone Should Know About State Repression (1979) Translator: Judith White; London: New Park Publications. Translation of Les Coulisses d'une Sûreté générale. Ce que tout révolutionnaire devrait savoir sur la répression, Paris 1926.
• Serge, Victor (2008). Albertani, Claudio; Rioux, Claude (eds.). Notebooks 1936-1947. Translated by Abidor, Mitchell; Greeman, Richard. New York City: NYRB Classics. ISBN 9781681372709.

Non-fiction: collections of essays and articles

• The Century of the Unexpected – Essays on Revolution and Counter-Revolution (1994) Editor: Al Richardson; special issue of Revolutionary History, Vol.5 No.3.
• The Serge-Trotsky Papers (1994) Editor: D.J. Cotterill; London: Pluto.
• Revolution in Danger – Writings from Russia 1919–1921 (1997) Translator: Ian Birchall; London: Redwords.
• The Ideas of Victor Serge: A Life as a Work of Art (1997), Edited by Susan Weissman, London: Merlin Press.
• Witness to the German Revolution (2000) Translator: Ian Birchall; London: Redwords.
• Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution (2004) Translator and editor: Al Richardson; London: Francis Boutle.

Non-fiction: pamphlet

• Kronstadt '21 (1975) Translator: not named; London: Solidarity.

Sources: British Library Catalogue and Catalog of the Library of Congress.

See also

• Anarchism in France
• Anti-Stalinist left
• Transatlantic (portrayal in 2023 TV series)

Sources

• Weissman, Susan (2001). Victor Serge: The Course is Set on Hope. London: Verso Books.
• Adam Hochschild Finding the Trapdoor: Essays, Portraits, Travels (Syracuse University Press, 1997), "Two Russians," pp. 65–87.

Further reading

• Fitzpatrick, Sheila (August 17, 2012). "Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge – review". The Guardian.
• Gorkin, Julián (1994). "The Last Years of Victor Serge, 1941–1947". Revolutionary History. 5 (3).
• Greeman, Richard (1993). "The return of Comrade Tulayev: Victor Serge and the tragic vision of Stalinism". International Socialism (58).
• Sedgwick, Peter (1978) [1963]. "Introduction". In Serge, Victor (ed.). Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Oxford University Press. pp. ix–xxiv. ISBN 0-19-281037-5.
• Sedgwick, Peter (1984). "The Unhappy Elitist: Victor Serge's Early Bolshevism". History Workshop Journal. 17 (17): 150–156. doi:10.1093/hwj/17.1.150.
• Weissman, Susan (ed.). "Introduction". Critique. 28/29. Archived from the original on February 12, 2005. Retrieved March 14, 2007.
• Weissman, Susan (2013). Victor Serge. A Political Biography (2nd ed.). London: Verso Books. ISBN 9781844678877.
• Gordon, Paul (May 31, 2013). Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the politics of hope. UK: Zero Books. ISBN 978-1-78099-327-0.

External links

• Victor Serge Internet Archive in the Marxists Internet Archive
• Bulletin of the Russian Opposition: "Victor Serge and the IVth International". Statement criticising Serge by the editors of the Bulletin of the Russian Opposition, writing in Quatrième Internationale, April 1939. Source: Victor Serge & Leon Trotsky, La Lutte Contre le Stalinisme. Maspero, Paris, 1977. Translated for Marxist Internet Archive by Mitch Abidor in 2005. Retrieved April 28, 2005.
• Victor Serge Papers. General Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library.
• An essay on Serge by Ben Lerner in The New York Review of Books