VICTOR SERGE (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living "by chance" in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and briefly arrested in 1928. Henceforth an "unperson," he completed three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), all published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like Andre Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider's knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposes of Stalin's Moscow show trials and machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written "for the desk drawer" and published posthumously. RICHARD GREEMAN has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge's novels (including Unforgiving Years and Conquered City, both available as NYRB Classics). A veteran socialist and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Greeman is the author of the Web site The Invisible International.
"Unforgiving Years, published in France in 1971 and translated into
English this year, is a visionary literary work rooted in the
political tragedy of a Soviet secret agent who tries to take back
his existence from the Party. The settings are prewar Paris, the
siege of Leningrad, the fall of Berlin, and a postwar refuge in
Mexico. This is the ultimate farewell to Communism." --The Boston
Globe "The Unforgiving Years...has now at last been translated
into electric English by the indefatigable Richard Greeman...It's a
seething, hallucinatory novel..." --Harper's "Born in
Brussels of Russian revolutionary exiles, Serge (1890-1947) has
long had a reputation as polemicist and journalist, but this
powerful novel of the descent into WWII makes a strong case for his
political fiction...Serge remains sophisticated even during the
book's more noirish moments, and action sequences form an
inseparable part of his hypnotic, prophetic vision." --Publisher's
Weekly (Starred Reveiw) “The work of the writer Victor Serge
faultlessly captures the labyrinth of bureaucratic incrimination
into which the Soviet Union descended.” –The Atlantic “A
witness to revolution and reaction in Europe between the wars,
Serge searingly evoked the epochal hopes and shattering setbacks of
a generation of leftists…Yet under the bleakest of conditions,
Serge’s optimism, his humane sympathies and generous spirit, never
waned. A radical misfit, no faction, no sect could contain him; he
inhabited a lonely no-man’s-land all his own. These qualities are
precisely what make him such an inspiring, even moving figure.”
–Bookforum "Both Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade
Tulayev in 2003 have been wonderfully translated by Richard
Greeman, who has spent his academic and post-academic life bringing
to prominence Serge’s writings as literature in the first ranks of
modernism and in the mainstream of Russian and French literature.
His foreword to Unforgiving Years is worth the price of the book,
which deserves attention as well for reminding us that the
political novel was once a prominent genre and fulfilled a need
hard to meet in this self-absorbed literary period. It also gives
us a clear-eyed picture of Serge’s sad last years when hope, if it
existed at all, was mostly the frail hope of inmates in prisons and
concentration camps." -World Socialist Web Site “A worker, a
militant, an intellectual, an internationalist by experience and
conviction, an inveterate optimist, and always poor…He took part in
three revolutions, spent a decade in captivity, published more than
thirty books and left behind thousands of pages of unpublished
manuscripts, correspondence and articles. He was born into one
political exile, died in another, and was politically active in
seven countries. His life was spent in permanent political
opposition…His refusal to surrender to either the Soviet state or
the capitalist West assured his marginality and consigned him to a
life of persecution and poverty. Despite living in the shadows,
Serge’s work and his life amount to a corrective to Stalinism, and
an alternative to the market.” –Susan Weissman, Victor
Serge “I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very
usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be
found in his attitude to the truth. There have of course been many
scrupulously honest writers. But for Serge the value of the truth
extended far beyond the simple (or complex) telling of it.” –John
Berger "Serge, who has been championed by Susan Sontag and
many others, was born in Brussels in 1899 to emigre Russians who'd
fled the Czar. He became a political activist, was jailed and
arrived in Russia in 1919 to support the Bolshevik Revolution. He
rose high in the Comintern before falling foul of Stalin and
finding himself in jail and then exile. He was steamrolled by
history, and out of this experience he crafted a series of
extraordinary memoirs and novels. "Unforgiving Years," here
translated into English for the first time by Richard Greeman,
tells the story of two revolutionaries, D and his friend Daria, as
they approach, endure and survive World War II. This is downbeat
and dangerous mise-en-scene...written for real by a man who was
there." —Los Angeles Times
"Serge can recognize the range of experience and responses that
make up the texture of life in even the most nightmarishly
repressive system." --Scott McLemee
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