A Blaze in a Desert

by Victor Serge

  If Serge remembers such rhymes and phrases from Rictus, it is perhaps because they so accurately reflect the mood of his youth. In December 1908, on the eve of his eighteenth birthday, Le Rétif poured his own despair into a long article on Rictus, in whose poetry he saw “poverty symbolized, incarnated, gifted with language … a marvelous language full of unexpected figures—vulgar, naïve, even burlesque but of such penetrating poetry!”3

  Serge and his Brussels comrades, although too poor to go to school, were nonetheless great readers. Through the Workers’ Party, in whose cultural activities the Belgian Symbolist poets and playwrights Verhaeren and Maeterlinck were intensely involved, they were exposed to avant-garde writers, musicians, and painters. And they were regulars at the party’s Maison du Peuple, which organized discussions on subjects like modern Russian literature, Ibsen, Wagner, Shakespeare, William Morris, and Verlaine.

  Fin-de-siècle Europe was marked by the high tide of Symbolist poetry, which coincided with the high tide of bomb-throwing anarchism. For several years, the two movements carried on a curious flirtation. Thus we find names like Paul Valéry, Stéphane Mallarmé, and Émile Verhaeren alongside the names of radicals like Félix Fénéon, Lucien Descaves, Charles Malato, Saint-Pol-Roux, and Octave Mirbeau in the pages of anarchist reviews like Jean Grave’s Le Révolté and Zo d’Axa’s L’En-dehors. The period’s aesthetic is epitomized by a notorious remark by the anarchist poet Laurent Tailhade at a banquet attended by Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rodin, and Zola. Asked his opinion of Auguste Vaillant’s bombing of the Chamber of Deputies in 1893, Tailhade replied, “What matter the victims if the gesture be beautiful?” In this atmosphere, Serge and his fellow teenage agitators felt no contradiction between their love of poetry and their increasingly violent anarchist militancy.

  By 1909 Serge and his friends had drifted over to Paris, where they became individualist anarchists. One of the tenets of individualist anarchism was “illegalism”: the right of “individual expropriation,” that is, theft. A rift developed in the group between the ruthlessly Spencerian “scientifics” and the “sentimentals.” Among the latter were Serge; his first great love, Rirette Maîtrejean; and his closest Paris friend, René Valet, with whom he spent long nights pacing the Latin Quarter reciting and discussing poetry: “Together we muttered scraps of Vildrac’s White Bird, Jules Romains’s Ode to the Crowd, Jehan Rictus’s The Ghost.”4 Nonetheless, this heady mixture of solidarity, idealism, and illegalist doctrine, combined with poverty and despair, led inexorably to tragedy. By 1913 Valet and most of Serge’s companions had perished on the guillotine or in shoot-outs with the police in their doomed war against an opulent, complacent society.

  Serge did not participate in the bloody bank robberies of the “tragic bandits of French anarchy” (aka the Bonnot Gang), but he refused to testify against them, and he glorified their deeds in his weekly paper l’anarchie until he himself was arrested. At the trial in 1913, Serge and Maîtrejean were in the dock with the surviving bandits, who were sentenced to die on the guillotine or to life terms on Devil’s Island. Maîtrejean got off with time served, but Serge was condemned to five years in the penitentiary (1912–1917). (This ordeal inspired his first novel, Men in Prison [1930].)5 He survived thanks to mental self-discipline, physical exercise, “and recourse to that exaltation, or light spiritual intoxication, which is provided by great works of poetry. Altogether, [he] spent around fifteen months in solitary confinement, in various conditions, some of them quite hellish.”6 Nonetheless, the poems “Un jour de pluie” (A Rainy Day) and “Je sais des plaines” (I Know Plains), perhaps smuggled out of prison, appeared in an individualist-anarchist review in the middle of the First World War.

  Expelled from France in 1917, Serge spent six months in Barcelona, where he worked as a typesetter, wrote for the anarcho-syndicalist press, and participated in a failed uprising of the workers. (It was in this period that he started using the name Victor Serge.) Serge chronicled the people and events in his novel Birth of Our Power (1931),7 and he recorded his impressions in Notations d’Espagne (1917), a series of prose poems.

  Serge and Soviet Literature

  As the revolution in Barcelona sputtered, Serge set out to join the ascending revolution in Russia. This perilous journey entailed crossing Europe in the middle of the war. Serge had been forbidden to reenter France after his expulsion, but reenter he did, only to find himself locked up as a Bolshevik suspect in a French concentration camp, desperate and without papers. Finally, after the Armistice, Serge and other Russians were exchanged as hostages against French officers held in Soviet Russia. He arrived in Petrograd in January 1919 to find not a great turbulent revolutionary forum but a grim, frozen, starving, besieged city struggling to survive under the iron discipline of the Communist Party, a situation that Serge explores in Conquered City (1932).8

  Although Serge’s spoken Russian was rusty at first, he had long-standing connections with the Russian poetry of his time. As early as 1909, we find him eking out a precarious living in Paris translating Russian novels and the poetry of Artsybashev, Balmont, and Merezhkovsky. Later in Paris, while attempting to cross into Russia to join the revolutionaries, he struck up a friendship with the Acmeist poet Nikolai Stepanovich Gumilev, who was on his way to join the Whites. “I am a traditionalist, monarchist, imperialist, and pan-Slavist,” declared Gumilev. “Mine is the true Russian nature, just as it was formed by Orthodox Christianity. You also have the true Russian nature, but at its opposite extreme, that of spontaneous anarchy, primitive violence, and unruly belief. I love all of Russia, even what I want to fight in it, even what you represent.”9 In 1921 Serge, by then an influential Communist, was to struggle in vain to stop the Cheka from shooting this friend and adversary whose face and poems were to haunt him for years.

  Among the first people Serge saw on arriving in Petrograd was Maxim Gorky, a relation of Serge’s mother’s family, who was at that time bitterly critical of the Bolshevik’s dictatorial methods. Gorky offered Serge a position in his international publishing house, but Serge, despite similar misgivings about the authoritarianism of the Bolsheviks, could not stand on the sidelines and threw himself body and soul into the defense of the revolution. He joined the militia, went to work for the press services of the Communist International, and ultimately joined the Party, all the while retaining his anarchist reservations about Communist authoritarianism.

  One of the factors that won Serge over to the Communists was their support of the arts. In besieged Petrograd the unheated theaters and concert halls were full to the rafters with roughly dressed men and women, while poets were declaiming in cafés and on street corners and public spaces were given over to avant-garde artists to decorate. Trotsky, the Commissar of War, was writing literary criticism on his armored train at the same time that Viktor Shklovsky was writing his seminal Theory of Prose and serving as instructor and political commissar in an armored car unit.

  From the time of his arrival in revolutionary Russia, Serge was in contact with poets and writers. The articles on Soviet literary life he penned for the French magazine Clarté in the 1920s provide fascinating portraits of poets like Alexander Blok, Andrei Bely, Sergei Yesenin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as penetrating analyses and appreciations of their work.10

  According to Serge, most of the poets of the prewar Silver Age had a conciliatory attitude toward the revolution. The epic spirit of the revolution, he wrote in 1922, had sparked new creative impulses among the poets, whether of Christian, Symbolist, or Futurist inspiration. Citing the examples of Bely’s “Christ Is Risen” (which Serge translated into French), of Blok’s mystical vision of Christ marching in a snowstorm at the head of a band of Red Guards in “The Twelve,” and of Mayakovsky’s grandiose “One Hundred and Fifty Million,” Serge concludes: “The fact is that there is a profound lyricism in the revolution, that it is a new faith, and that at all times it teaches us to sacrifice the old, shrinking, outworn and outdated values
for new values … it sometimes arouses an irresistible sense of greatness in the individual.”11 Serge’s own poems of the period—including “Mitrailleuse” (Machine Gun, 1919), “La flamme sur la neige” (The Flame upon the Snow, 1920–21), “Ville” (City, 1920), and “Max” (1921)—were infused with this epic mood.

  Yet Serge’s accounts of these pro-Soviet poets are also tinged with increasing anguish as he witnesses the gradual extinction of the creative outpouring of this heroic period under the pressures of conformity, falseness, and corruption. “What can I do now in this life?” Bely asked him despondently one evening. “I cannot live outside this Russia of ours and I cannot breathe within it.”12

  Serge had viewed the Red Terror during the Civil War as an unavoidable necessity, while protesting against its excesses. However, he considered its perpetuation into the succeeding period of relative calm (the New Economic Policy of the post–Civil War period) to be “an immense and demoralizing blunder.”13 Serge believed that opening free markets while repressing political freedom could only lead to corruption, and he saw “the gigantic scale of certain royalties”14 during the NEP as a corrupting influence encouraging the worst kind of official literary conformity.

  By the mid-1920s Serge found himself surrounded by suicides: first, among idealistic Communist militants protesting the stifling of inner-Party debate, driven to despair by pervasive bureaucratization and corruption, and then among the poets: “The telephone rings: ‘Come quickly, Yesenin has killed himself.’ I run out in the snow, I enter his room in the Hotel International, and I can hardly recognize him; he no longer looks himself,” Serge recalls.15 Yesenin “had tried to be in tune with the times, and with our official literature,” Serge remarks of this flamboyant, decadent Bohemian. But soon Yesenin found himself despairing: “‘I am a stranger in my own land …’; ‘My poems are no longer needed now, and I myself am unwanted …’; … ‘I am not a new man, I have one foot in the past, and yet I wish, I the stumbler, I the cripple, to join the cohorts of steel once more …’”16

  Mayakovsky, a Party member who was himself soon to commit suicide, had addressed a reproachful farewell to Yesenin that depicts the poet circling in the void and “hustling the stars.” Serge describes how in public readings “Mayakovsky … coiled like a spring in a bantering style of violence, hammered out his farewell before audiences for whom [Yesenin’s] death was turning into a symbol:

  This planet’s not well equipped for happiness;

  Happiness will only be won at a future date!”17

  The advent of the Stalinist repression in 1928–1929 and the rise of the doctrine of socialist realism in 1932 spelled the doom of originality and independence in the arts. In “The Writer’s Conscience,” published shortly before his death in 1947,18 Serge recalls a literary soirée at the home of Osip Mandelstam in 1932, during which the poet read aloud a recently completed nature poem and asked his friends if they thought it was “publishable.” Mandelstam was trying to write “safe” poetry, but the voice of freedom within him was so strong that he could not censor it. For Serge, Mandelstam’s “visions of the lake of Erivan and of the snows of Ararat raised in the murmur of a breeze a demand for liberty, a subversive praise of the imagination, an affirmation of ungovernable thought.”19

  A few months after the evening with Mandelstam, Serge was arrested, interrogated for months in the Lubianka, a notorious secret prison, and deported to Orenburg in the Urals. Within months Mandelstam was also arrested; he apparently died in the camps. If Serge survived, it was thanks to a vigorous campaign for his freedom led by left-wing writers and a teachers’ union in France. But Serge’s case was a rare exception. For the most part, pro-Soviet writers and intellectuals in the West remained silent throughout an entire decade during which writers like Mandelstam, Boris Pilnyak, and Isaac Babel—personally known to them and translated into every language—were massacred. “No PEN club, even those who had offered them banquets, posed the least question on their cases,” Serge writes, decrying their “universal complicity.”20

  Also in “The Writer’s Conscience,” Serge praised the courage of the poets of the French Resistance, including Louis Aragon and Paul Éluard (former Surrealists who had become Stalinists), while also praising Jean-Paul Sartre’s concept of committed literature. However, Serge could not hide his indignation at the collaboration of the poets with another totalitarianism, Soviet Communism: “But that such [anti-Nazi] poetry should often be signed by poets who elsewhere praise the hangman, praise the torturer, insult the shot, speak untruths over the tombs of another Resistance inspired by the same motives—the defense of man against tyranny—that leads us, by a terrible alchemy, to the negation of all affirmed values.”21

  Resistance

  Serge wrote the bulk of the poems in Resistance (1938) while in deportation in Orenburg in 1933–1936. When he arrived the once-prosperous provincial capital of the Kazakhs (or Kirghiz), a nomadic people of the steppes of Central Asia, was in the throes of famine. Serge was joined by his son Vlady and his wife Liuba Russakova, who had been hospitalized in Leningrad for schizophrenia (triggered by political persecution). In the beginning Liuba’s symptoms were in remission in Orenburg, but soon her violent crises returned, and she had to be returned to the hospital in Moscow. (“Tête-à-Tête” is an imaginary dialogue with her.) Vlady, already a budding artist, remained with Serge, and from that time on he accompanied his father from deportation to exile until Serge’s death in Mexico in 1947.

  In deportation, gainful employment was out of the question as long as Serge refused to toe the Party line, and the struggle for bread and firewood was a daily preoccupation. When the GPU cut off Serge’s correspondence with France (the source of his meager royalties), the family nearly starved. About this period Serge writes:

  I was finishing my books in a state of uncertainty. What would their destiny be, and mine? … By one of those strokes of irony that are so frequent in Russia, the Soviet press was, quite appropriately, commemorating an anniversary of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, who in 1847 had been exiled for ten years to the steppes of Orenburg, “forbidden to draw or to write.” He did, all the same, write some clandestine poetry that he concealed in his boots. In this report I had an overwhelming insight into the persistence in our Russian land, after a century of reform, progress, and revolution, of the same willful determination to wipe out the rebellious intelligence without mercy. Never mind, I told myself, I must hold on: hold on and work on, even under this slab of lead.22

  Serge’s determination is evident in such poems as “Be Hard,” “Trust,” and “Stenka Razin.” But the overwhelming feeling in the Orenburg poems is one of fraternity: of identity and communion with the land, with its people, and ultimately with the universe itself. For Serge, “he who speaks, he who writes is essentially someone speaking for all those who are voiceless”23—those memorialized in “People of the Ural,” “Old Woman,” “The Asphyxiated Man,” and “Constellation of Dead Brothers,” for example.

  Serge joined a clandestine cell of Oppositionists in Orenburg. Some were Old Bolsheviks who had fought in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917; others, like Serge, had joined the Party during the Civil War. All were distinguished by the courage and integrity that had brought them, by a tragic irony of history, from the summits of a power wrested from the hands of czarist reaction back to the status of persecuted, exiled, and imprisoned rebels. All were to perish resisting. “I have described these men,” writes Serge, “because I am grateful to them for having existed, and because they incarnated an epoch.”24 It is to them that Resistance is dedicated.

  On the other hand, during Stalin’s bloody show trials (which began in the summer of 1936, just a few months after Serge was released from Russia), a number of Old Bolsheviks reviled themselves and confessed to trumped-up charges out of fear, Party loyalty, or despair. In “Confessions” Serge portrays their inner drama, perhaps more intimately than does Arthur Koestler in Darkness at Noon.

  Ser
ge fictionalizes his Oppositionist comrades in Midnight in the Century (1939),25 which is based largely on his Orenburg experience. Vlady told me that the “comrades” often held their secret political meetings out of doors, under the cover of country excursions, for example, going by rowboat to the forest on the other side of the Ural from Orenburg. “Boat on the Ural” meditates on one such excursion.

  Messages

  In July 1935 the fellow-traveling writer Romain Rolland visited Stalin in the Kremlin and extracted his promise to release Serge and allow him to move abroad with his family. Yet Serge was to remain in captivity until April 1936 because no democratic country would take him in. Trotsky, whom Stalin had expelled from Russia in 1928, had faced the same dilemma: both men inhabited a “planet without visas.”26 Finally, thanks to the intervention of the writer Charles Plisnier and of Emile Vandervelde, a former prime minister of Belgium, Serge was granted temporary residency in Brussels. Serge did not reach Paris, the center of publishing and political life, for yet another year, because the French still considered him a dangerous anarchist subject to a 1917 expulsion order.

  Only three months after Serge’s return to Europe, Franco launched his coup against the Spanish Republic and Stalin began liquidating the Bolsheviks of Lenin’s generation at the Moscow Trials. From then on, the struggle against totalitarianism occupied Serge’s energies, and literature had to take a back seat.27 We thus have only two poems from Paris, and it was not until 1939 that Serge, his “militant’s duty done” (as he wrote to a friend) devoted himself to the novel Midnight in the Century.