A Blaze in a Desert

by Victor Serge

  a pale Ophelia: Euphemia Vsevolozhkaya, dolled up and presented to the czar, was overcome by emotion and misgiving, and fainted. She and her family were deported. (JR)

  pure-hearted Natalya: Natalya Kirillovna Naryshkina was the ward of Prime Minister Artamon Matveyev, who was concerned with ensuring his own power. She was presented to the czar on 11 February 1670. Intrigues by the Miloslavsky clan delayed the marriage for nine months. (JR)

  the incorruptible patriarch: Nikon (1605–1681), for a time a favorite of Czar Alexis Mikhaylovich, was dismissed and exiled in 1666. He was a partisan of liturgical reforms that resulted in a schism whose guiding spirit was “the steadfast heresiarch,” Avvakum (1620–1682). Avvakum was exiled in 1653 and 1664, then burned alive. (JR)

  II. Stenka Razin

  Stenka Razin: Stepan Timofeyevich Razin (c. 1630–1671), a Don Cossack, was the illustrious chief of the peasant revolt of 1670–1671. In October 1670, he was defeated near Simbirsk by the armies of Czar Alexis Mikhaylovich, then betrayed and handed over in April 1671. With his brother Frol, he was executed in Moscow that June. (JR)

  Tom Mooney: A radical San Francisco labor leader wrongfully charged with participation in the bombing of the 1916 Preparedness Day parade, which advocated American involvement in the First World War. In the highly politicized trial, he and Warren Billings were convicted and sentenced to death. In response to an international campaign, the sentences were commuted to life imprisonment in 1918. The campaign for their release continued; they were pardoned and set free only in 1939. Saragossa general strike: In March 1934, the anarchist Confederación Nacional del Trabajo (CNT) in Saragossa, Spain, called a general strike “as a protest against the bad treatment of the prisoners taken in the previous December” during an insurrection against the newly installed right-wing government (Brenan, Spanish Labyrinth, 271).

  Congress of the United Federation of Teachers: At this August 1934 conference in Montpellier, France, two schoolteachers introduced a successful resolution in favor of Victor Serge. (JR)

  Koloman Wallisch: A member of the Austrian Social Democratic Party, Wallisch was hanged, with eight others, for his participation in the 12 February 1934 uprising in Vienna against the authoritarian Dollfuss government. As he died, he shouted: “Long live social democracy! Freedom!” (JR)

  III. Confessions

  Inspired by the “confessions” at the three Moscow Trials (1936, 1937, 1938) organized by Stalin. (JR)

  Boat on the Ural, p. 57

  Dedicated to “Henry Poulaille fraternellement V. S.” and dated Orenburg, 20 May 1935; published in Poulaille’s review À Contre courant, no. 11 (Paris, May 1936): 97–99. (JR)

  Tête-à-Tête, p. 60

  You whom they welcomed: A reference to Serge’s wife, Liuba Russakova (1898–1984), who was diagnosed with schizophrenia and eventually institutionalized, first in the Soviet Union and later in Marseille, where she died. With her family, Liuba had emigrated from Russia to Marseille (1908–1919) after the 1905 pogroms. Returning to Russia on the same ship as Serge in February 1919, she soon became his companion. Her psychiatric problems first appeared in 1930. (JR)

  From the late 1920s on, the persecution of the anti-Stalin Opposition to which Serge belonged grew ever more severe:

  In this atmosphere my wife lost her reason. I found her one evening lying in bed with a medical dictionary in her hand, calm but ravaged. “I have just read the article on madness. I know that I am going mad. Wouldn’t I be better off dead?” … I took her to psychiatrists, who were generally excellent men, and she settled down in the clinics … She would come home again a little better for a while, and then the old story began again: ration cards refused, denunciations, arrests, death sentences demanded over all the loudspeakers placed at the street corners. (Memoirs, 320–321)

  During a period of remission in 1934, Liuba briefly joined Serge and their teenage son, Vlady, in exile in Orenburg before relapsing and returning to the mental hospital (492).

  In “Le nuage intérieur,” 17 juin 1941, Carnets, 101, Serge writes, in an entry addressed to Laurette Séjourné, who had not yet joined him in Mexico:

  I will not go mad. I am destined to remain implacably lucid, and I would be even intolerably so if I did not have a tragic sense of life that is almost childish. I’ve so often skirted the borders of madness that I’ve become convinced of the impossibility of my crossing them—and I am the author of this strength, having seen up close the indescribable defeat of the mind and the unimaginable suffering that comes with it (Liuba).

  Skardanelli: Gaston Ferdière, a psychiatrist who wanted to shed light on Liuba’s condition, had sent Serge a copy of Poèmes de la folie d’Hölderlin (Poems of Hölderlin’s Madness), translated by Pierre-Jean Jouve and Pierre Klossowski. (JR) Friedrich Hölderlin signed some of his last poems with the name Skardanelli or Scardanelli and gave them seemingly random dates, e.g., 9 March 1940.

  On the splendor of man: My rendering of the French translation of the first line of Hölderlin’s “Griechenland”: “Wie Menschen sind, so ist das Leben prächtig.” The poem is signed Scardanelli and dated 24 May 1748.

  Dialectic, p. 62

  I.

  desperate Communards: Defenders of the Paris Commune (18 March–28 May 1871), a radically democratic, socialist uprising against the French government at the close of the Franco-Prussian War. Toward the end of the fighting, many Communards were shot against a wall of the Père Lachaise cemetery.

  Versaillais: Soldiers in the regular French army that put down the Commune.

  the Cheka: The All-Russian Extraordinary Commission was the Soviet security apparatus formed at the beginning of the revolution.

  II.

  Monsieur le Marquis de Galliffet: General Gaston de Galliffet, notorious as the suppressor of the Paris Commune.

  III.

  They perish exactly as: Incidents of the September Massacres in Paris, which were triggered by the fall of the fortress of Verdun to the invading Prussians on 2 September 1792 (Peter McPhee, The French Revolution 1789–1799 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002], 98).

  La Force: A prison in Paris.

  Citizen Billaud: Jacques Nicolas Billaud-Varenne (1756–1819), a Jacobin orator known for his fiery diatribes. (JR)

  Constellation of Dead Brothers, p. 66

  Written at the time (1933–1934) that Serge was also writing his novel Les Hommes perdus (The Fallen), the poem evokes friends who died tragically. André Brode was a Latvian sailor and revolutionary whom Serge met in the French concentration camp in Précigné, Sarthe, where Serge was held (1918–1919) at the end of the First World War. Brode died fighting the Whites in defense of Riga in 1919. “Dario” is Salvador Seguí, a Catalan CNT leader, who was killed in 1923 in Barcelona by the ultraright or the police. (On Seguí and the struggle in Barcelona, see Memoirs, 60–68, and Serge’s novel Birth of Our Power [Richard Greeman, trans. (New York: New York Review Books, 2011)], where Seguí is fictionalized as “Dario.”) “Boris” is probably Dimitri Barakov, a sailor and syndicalist whom Serge met in Précigné. In 1919 Serge and Barakov sailed to the Soviet Union in a postwar hostage exchange; Barakov died of tuberculosis soon after arrival. (See notes to “Max” below.) “David” is another acquaintance from Précigné, Aaron Zieplinck, a young Russian who was killed during an escape attempt in 1918. “Karl” is Vladimir Ossipovich Lichtenstadt-Mazin, a colleague and close friend of Serge’s in the press section in the early days of the Communist International, who died on the front during the Civil War. (According to a note in Memoirs, 481, Serge named his son Vlady after Mazin.) “The Four” are the writer and Communist activist Raymond Lefebvre, the anarcho-syndicalist Jules Marius Lepetit (Louis Alexandre Bertho), the revolutionary syndicalist activist Marcel Vergeat, and their Russian interpreter Sasha Tubin (Sasha Mitkovitser). Having come to Moscow for the Second Congress of the Third International (1920), on their return voyage they died in mysterious circumstances off Murmansk in the Arctic Ocean. Vassily Nikiforovic
h Chadayev was a Communist activist in Leningrad (1917–1928). (See notes to “26 August 28” below.) Nguyen Ai Quoc was the pseudonym of Nguyen Tat Thanh, later known as Ho Chi Minh, founder of the Vietminh and the first president of Vietnam; at the time of Serge’s writing, the Communist press had mistakenly reported his death in prison. René Valet, a locksmith and deserter, a member of the Bonnot Gang (an anarchist group led by Jules Bonnot), was killed by the police after an epic siege (1912). Raymond Callemin, Serge’s boyhood friend and also a member of the Bonnot Gang, was guillotined (1913). (JR)

  In this translation, the word “camerado” is borrowed from Whitman, whose “As I lay with my head in your lap, Camerado” resonates with “Constellation of Dead Brothers”: “Dear camerado! I confess I have urged you onward with me, and still urge you, without the least idea what is our destination, / Or whether we shall be victorious, or utterly quell’d and defeated” (Walt Whitman, Drum-Taps: The Complete 1865 Edition, Lawrence Kramer, ed. [New York: New York Review Books, 2015], 123).

  Max, p. 68

  Sent by Serge on 5 July 1931 to Poulaille, who published it as “Pour un mort” (For a Dead Man) in his review Nouvel ge, no. 9 (Paris, September 1931): 828–829. “Max” is probably Dimitri Barakov, the “Boris” of “Constellation of Dead Brothers,” who died of tuberculosis in 1919, soon after he and Serge arrived in the Soviet Union. (JR)

  City, p. 72

  Published, with “26 August 28,” in Le Journal des Poètes, no. 9 (Brussels, 5 February 1933): 3, to which they were sent on 1 December 1932; reprinted by Poulaille in Les Feuillets bleus, no. 295 (Paris, 15 May 1935): 625–626. (JR)

  Serge also evokes Petrograd, now St. Petersburg, in Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921, Ian Birchall, trans. (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 1997) and in Conquered City, Richard Greeman, trans. (New York: Doubleday, 1975).

  26 August 28, p. 74

  See the publication facts for “City.”

  The poem recalls the death of a close friend and comrade, Vassily Nikiforovich Chadayev, also evoked in “Constellation of Dead Brothers.” (JR) In 1928, Chadayev was arrested at the same time as Serge for being a Left Oppositionist. After his release from prison and en route to Kuban on an official mission, Chadayev visited Serge at Detskoye Selo: “We spent several hours rowing on the lake … Vassily Nikiforovich sang me the praises of prison, that benevolent retreat where a man takes stock of himself” (Memoirs, 281). Serge describes Chadayev’s murder under suspicious circumstances while investigating corruption in Kuban:

  All I ever saw of him again were some dreadful photographs: the dumdum bullets, fired from sawn-off rifles, had harrowed his face and chest monstrously … A stone with an inscription, erected on the spot where he died, was broken into fragments. (282)

  We must be strong: In “Marseille,” 24 mars 1941, Carnets, 57, Serge quotes this stanza in the context of temporarily leaving Laurette Séjourné behind as he sets sail from Marseille on his journey into exile in Mexico. Detskoye Selo: Site of an imperial residence outside Petrograd, frequented by poets and writers, including Serge’s friends Andrei Bely, author of Petersburg (1922), and Fyodor Sologub, author of The Petty Demon (1907) (Memoirs, 314).

  Death of Panait, p. 76

  Panait Istrati (1884–1935), a Francophone Romanian novelist born in Brăila, was a great friend and defender of Serge. Serge met Istrati in November 1927 in the company of Nikos Kazantzakis (1883–1957). Both writers had been invited to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution, with Istrati staying sixteen months in the Soviet Union. On his return to Europe, Istrati published his Vers l’autre flamme (Toward the Other Flame) trilogy with Rieder (1929), which contains devastating critiques of emerging Stalinism and its effects on society. Although all three volumes were signed by Istrati, he is the author of only volume 1, Après seize mois dans l’U.R.S.S. (After Sixteen Months in the USSR). Volume 2, Soviets 1929, is by Serge, and volume 3, La Russie nue, is by Boris Souvarine. (JR)

  “Death of Panait” was written in Orenburg in 1935 but confiscated as Serge was leaving the Soviet Union in April 1936. In Brussels, Serge recomposed the poem from memory on 24 December 1936. In 1937, he gave the poem to Eleni Samios (the wife of Nikos Kazantzakis) to preface her book La Véritable tragédie de Panaït Istrati (The True Tragedy of Panait Istrati), which saw publication only in Spanish as La Verdadera Tragedia de Panait Istrati, Luis Alberto Sánchez, trans. (Santiago de Chile: Ediciones Ercilla, 1938). (JR) The French original of the book (minus the prefatory poem) was finally published in Eleni Samios-Kazantzaki, La Véritable tragédie de Panaït Istrati, édition établie par Maria Teresa Ricci et Anselm Jappe (Fécamp, France: Nouvelles Éditions Lignes, 2013), with Serge’s letters of 1929–1932 to Istrati.

  the Salt Lake Inn: The Hotel Bobesco in Istrati’s Méditerranée (Coucher du soleil). (JR)

  Nerrantsoula: The heroine of Istrati’s novel of the same name. (JR)

  at Rieder’s: Éditions Rieder published works by Istrati and Serge, including Serge’s first three novels: Men in Prison (1930) (preface by Istrati), Birth of Our Power (1930), and Conquered City (1932). A friend of Serge’s, the poet Marcel Martinet, was for a time the literary director at Rieder (George Paizis, Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution [London: Francis Boutle, 2008], 242). For more on Martinet, see the notes to “Mexico: Idyll.”

  your Baragan: Romanian steppe evoked in Istrati’s Les Chardons du Baragan, translated by Jacques Le Clerc as The Thistles of the Baragan (New York: The Vanguard Press, 1930). (JR)

  Why Inscribe a Name?, p. 81

  Published by Poulaille in Les Feuillets bleus, no. 295 (Paris, 15 May 1935): 628. (JR)

  The title might be an allusion to the death of Serge’s friend Vassily Nikiforovich Chadayev, memorialized in “Constellation of Dead Brothers” and “26 August 28,” but the question foreshadows Serge’s own eventual burial in a common grave in Mexico two decades on. Koktebel: A cultural center in the Crimea, presided over by the Symbolist poet Maximilian Voloshin, whom Serge and his family had visited in 1932. (JR)

  Cassiopeia, p. 82

  Tatiana: According to Vlady, a Cossack nurse with whom Serge was romantically involved in Orenburg. (JR)

  Song, p. 84

  The epigraph is from Guillaume Apollinaire’s “La chanson du malaimé,” in his Alcools. Like Apollinaire’s equally mysterious poem, Serge’s original is in five-line stanzas of rhymed octosyllabics. The first couplet of “Song” appears as the beginning of a poem in progress composed by Félicien Mûrier, a character in Victor Serge, The Long Dusk, Ralph Manheim, trans. (New York: The Dial Press, 1946), 153. The last stanza appears as written by an unnamed poet in Victor Serge, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Willard R. Trask, trans. (Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1950), 294. For Apollinaire’s poem, see “The Song of the Poorly Loved,” in Guillaume Apollinaire, Alcools, Anne Hyde Greet, trans. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1965), 16–37.

  Trust, p. 86

  Sent to Poulaille on 25 September 1934 and published in Les Feuillets bleus, no. 295 (15 May 1935): 628; published in René Lefeuvre’s Spartacus, no. 2 (Paris, Friday, 14 December 1934): 5. (JR)

  the nonextended: Possibly a reference to Descartes’s distinction between the “extended” body and the “nonextended” mind.

  Sensation, p. 88

  For L …: Laurette Séjourné, (1911–2003), Serge’s companion from 1937 till his death in 1947. The dedication is in English in the original.

  II. Messages

  At his death, Serge left this unpublished collection as a typed manuscript with the “provisional title” of Messages (1946). Jean Rière received a copy of the manuscript from Léo Moulin (1906–1996), a sociologist and the husband of the poet Jeanine Moulin. Léo Moulin had received the manuscript from Jef Rens (1905–1985), an official in the International Labor Organization in Brussels and Geneva; Rens had received the manuscript from Serge. (JR) Messages was first published in Rière’s edition of Serge’s poems. In Rière’s est
imation, the collection translated here is only part of a lost manuscript that contained ten additional poems.

  “Messages” is also the title of a chapter of Serge’s Midnight in the Century. In his introduction, Greeman notes that messages “are an important theme in the novel” (xx) as they circulate among Oppositionists in the Gulag, nourishing “the novel’s heroes with information, ideas, and hope, reminding them that they are not alone” (xxii).

  Sunday, p. 91

  oh life is so beautiful: “Ah, que la vie est belle” (1911) is a chansonnette by the singer and songwriter Doralys (d. 1934) (Renée Morel, private communication).

  Bérangère, p. 93

  Published, thanks to Jeanine Moulin, in Le Journal des Poètes, 28e année, no. 1 (Brussels, 1958): 10. (JR)

  The poem seems to reflect the style of Jehan Rictus (1867–1933); my free translation of “Bérangère” tries to convey a similar style and feeling. Rictus was a post-Symbolist poet who, in the years before the First World War, wrote poems of the down-and-out (notably, Les Soliloques du Pauvre [1903] [The Poor Man’s Soliloquies]), reciting them in Parisian cabarets and other public venues. For a time, he led a vagabond existence in the city and was close to the prewar anarchists. (See Herbert W. Kitson, Les Soliloques du Pauvre de Jehan Rictus: Translation with Introduction and Notes [Washington, DC: University Press of America, 1982].) Serge admired his work: “Jehan Rictus lamented the suffering of the penniless intellectual dragging out his nights on the benches of foreign boulevards” (Memoirs, 21). The final stanza echoes a chantey in Serge, Conquered City, 102: “Every ship will go to the bottom / Sixty fathoms deep! / Who gives a damn! Who gives a damn!”