Unforgiving Years

by Victor Serge

  Serge wrote in French, but his work is best situated in the Russian intelligentsia traditions of his expatriate parents. He inherited his father’s scientific culture (physics, geology, sociology) while his literary culture came from his mother, who taught him to read in cheap editions of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and the Russian social realist Korolenko. His mother’s family was apparently connected with Maxim Gorky.[15] By his concept of the writer’s mission, Serge saw himself “in the line of the Russian writers.”[16] And although he borrowed freely from cosmopolitan influences like Joyce, Dos Passos, and the French unanimists, Serge developed as a writer within the Soviet literary “renaissance” of the relatively liberated period of the free-market New Economic Policy (1921–1928). Indeed, during the 1920s, Serge was the principal transmission belt between the literary worlds of Soviet Russia and France. Through his translations and regular articles on Soviet culture in Henri Barbusse’s Clarté he introduced French readers to the postrevolutionary poetry of Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Esenin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as to fiction writers like Alexis Tolstoy, Babel, Zamiatine, Lebidinsky, Gladkov, Ivanov, Fedin, and Boris Pilniak — his colleagues in the Soviet Writers Union.[17]

  By the mid-1930s, many of Serge’s colleagues had been reduced to silence (suicide, censorship, the camps). “No PEN-club” wrote Serge in exile, “even those that held banquets for them, asked the least question about their cases. No literary review, to my knowledge, commented on their mysterious end.” Only Serge — because he wrote in French and was saved from the Gulag by his reputation in France — managed to survive. Only Serge had the freedom to further develop the revolutionary innovations of Soviet literature and to submit the world of Stalinism to the critical lens of fiction in novels like Midnight in the Century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. As one Russian scholar put it: “Although written in French, Serge’s novels are perhaps the nearest we have to what Soviet literature of the 30s might have been…”[18]

  Thus it was that Unforgiving Years remained unread for a quarter of a century. It was first published in Paris in 1971 by François Maspero, who was also bringing out many of Serge’s political books as the anti-Stalinist New Left developed in the 1960s. Praised by the critics at the time — Le Monde ran “The Secret Agent” as a serial and hailed the novel as Serge’s “political and literary testament”[19] — now, sixty years after it was written, it is appearing for the first time both in Russian and in English translation.

  “A RATHER TERRIFYING NOVEL…”

  Serge began writing Unforgiving Years (draft title Sands, Snows, Fire) in Mexico in September of 1945. In January 1946 he announced his subject in a letter to Daniel Guérin in newly liberated France: “in progress: a rather terrifying novel on the problems of consciousness in wartime which is giving me actual headaches.” And indeed, Unforgiving Years is the most pessimistic, the most inward, and the most contemporary of Serge’s novels. His 1946 characters are asking twenty-first-century questions: How to live if history no longer has a meaning? What remains of human consciousness if society has indeed entered a regressive era of ideological repression and technological pan-destruction?

  These themes are developed through a series of encounters among a quartet of Comintern agents — dedicated, idealistic men and women coming to terms with the transformation of their struggle for historical progress into the nightmare of totalitarianism and mechanized war. The Moscow Trials — the physical and moral destruction of Lenin’s 1917 “general staff ” — have left them stunned. Yet they also understand the secret logic of these loyal old Bolsheviks confessing to the most absurd “crimes.” They feel bound by a similar iron loyalty to the Party. Unthinkable to break, much less betray, what with the capitalist democracies coddling Hitler in the hope he will rid them of Red Russia. Where to turn? Trotsky may well speak the truth, but his puny “Fourth International” is riddled with Stalinist agents. “I can believe in nothing now but power,” thinks Secret Agent D. “Truth, stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth.”

  The death of consciousness is the central theme of Unforgiving Years, written at a time when Serge was meditating on his own death and on that of the planet — conceivable since the explosion of the “cosmic weapon” of August 4, 1945. “The most tragic thing about death, the most unacceptable thing for the mind,” Serge noted on the passing of his friend Fritz Frankel, the cultivated psychoanalyst and fellow Comintern veteran, “is the total disappearance of a spiritual greatness built out of experience, intellectual elaboration, knowledge, and understanding, much of it incommunicable.” Serge’s Notebooks continues: “The individual strives to gain enduring existence for himself by the fame of his activity (accomplishing a mission, pursuit of glory; for the writer and the reformer, the need to capture the moment, to express, to teach; the need to be integrated with history).”[20]

  Serge and the protagonists of Unforgiving Years live by this ethos, inherited from the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary intelligentsia and derived from the Hegelian (and Marxist) sense of “Consciousness” as a historically active thing in itself, the world spirit unfolding through time, the self-discovery of human intelligence as the dialectic of freedom, the meaning of life. “The sense of history,” noted Serge in 1944, “is the consciousness of participating in the collective destiny, in the constant becoming of men; it implies knowledge, tradition, choice, and finally, conviction, it demands a duty — for, once you know, once you have understood, once you have made out the possible courses, you must live (act) according to that understanding.”[21] How then to live outside of history, outside of the purposeful struggle, outside (for agents like D and his comrades) the Party?

  Each of Serge’s four protagonists tries to answer (or to avoid) that question in his or her own way. In Paris we are first introduced to secret agent D (alias Sacha, alias Bruno Battisti) on the verge of his “resignation” from the Service; then we meet D’s lover and protégée Nadine (alias Noémi); both are connected with a young French Communist, a painter named Alain. Finally, we catch a glimpse of Daria — D’s female alter ego — a comrade he has known since she was a girl fighter in the Russian Civil War. The plot, which is not easy to follow, is woven through their various encounters in the four sections of the novel.

  In the Paris segment, “The Secret Agent,” D and Nadine prepare their escape to parts unknown while Daria refuses D’s offer to escape with them, preferring to return to Russia and probable arrest. In the second section, “The Flame Beneath the Snow,” Daria is called back to wartime intelligence service (after deportation to Kazakhstan) during the siege of Leningrad. In the final pages of the German section, “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs,” Daria resurfaces (along with Alain) working for the Berlin underground as a nurse under the name of Erna. In the last, tragic movement, “Journey’s End,” Daria finds her way to Mexico where she is reunited with D and Nadine/Noémi.

  Daria is thus the central protagonist connecting the four sections of the novel. She is also the only character in this oddly allusive novel for whom one can construct an actual “biography” (albeit only by patching together allusions and flashbacks scattered throughout the work). If D, the introspective male protagonist, poses the “problems of consciousness” in the first and final chapters of the novel, Daria is Serge’s active protagonist. She is the hero who struggles against fate, the warrior who fights for humankind, the traveler whose quest takes her across war-torn Europe from Russia to Mexico. She is also the lover who experiences passion and grief, the great-souled woman who is granted a rich inner life. Daria’s diary and soliloquies explore erotic love, grief, and anger from the viewpoint of a distinctly female sensibility. Indeed, Daria represents a creative breakthrough for Serge the novelist, whose previous novel, The Long Dusk, was marred by somewhat clichéd female characters generally seen from without and in relation to male heroes (as wife, daug
hter, sister, lover).

  In the opening pages of Unforgiving Years, we sense rather than understand the futility of prewar Paris. Defeat is in the air. In this sinister atmosphere, everything seems base and livid: the light, the hotels, the streets, the people. Serge’s secret agent is ambivalent about the doomed French capital, admiring the freedom, the easy way of life, even the decadence and cynicism. Crossing place de la République, D looks up at the statue: “a solitary, decorative, and disarmed Marianne, stood ignored by the streams of people following their interwoven pathways around her feet. And no one gives a shit! That’s one way — perhaps the most genuine way — of being republicans…” This self-absorbed Paris will soon join Serge’s other cities — Barcelona, Leningrad, Berlin — as “fissured icebergs drifting toward naked dawns” in the poem that adorns the title page of the second movement.

  Readers of Serge’s earlier novels will find it surprising that the characters in Unforgiving Years rarely discuss politics, and there are few precise allusions to contemporary events. Do we even know the date of the Paris episode? Has Franco already won the Spanish Civil War? Are we before or after the Munich crisis and the Stalin-Hitler Pact? Whereas Serge’s earlier novels may be read as witness-chronicles of the revolutionary struggle, this last novel is denuded of political and historical specifics. If Serge seems to have deliberately set aside chronicle to concentrate on symbol and atmosphere, perhaps he is inviting us to read the novel on the level of meta-politics, of the history of consciousness seen from a geological, biological, evolutionary perspective.

  Serge hints he is up to something of the kind through the device of a “book within a book.” Deported to a tiny Kazakh village, Daria keeps a journal, which she knows will be studied by the local GPU chief. To protect herself and her comrades, she must censor out all compromising names, dates, places, and events, and this “literary constraint” obliges her to focus on her feelings and sense impressions as she relives the memories of her life with physical intensity. The lyrical texts that result express her intimate feelings of erotic love, anger, and grief recollected in tranquillity. The author then slyly pats himself on the back for this fictional tour de force when the cynical GPU chief compliments Daria on the literary qualities of her journal — before advising her to burn it. It is difficult not to see Daria’s journal as a metaphor for Serge’s self-censored novel. In his Notebooks he remarks: “Curious to observe that I am writing at the present moment, in this free country of America, like the Russians were writing around 1930 when the last spiritual freedom was expiring there.”

  As Serge was writing Unforgiving Years, the dark shadows of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and the Gulag were casting question marks over the future of civilized human society, indeed of the planet itself. Serge, like Gramsci, responded to this radically new historical situation with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Serge’s willed optimism came to the fore in an argument with Dwight Macdonald, whose belief in socialism had been shaken by the threat of the A-bomb: “It is possible,” Serge admits, “that it all must end via atomic destruction of this terrestrial sphere, as Anatole France foresaw in the final chapter of Penguin Island. But this is not at all a certainty. And it seems less probable, rationally, than the proper organization of a society in which atomic energy will contribute to ending the last slavery, that of hard work. As long as this possibility-probability continues, isn’t it our job to push in that direction?” The same optimism has inspired generations of readers of his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, where he sums up:

  I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several occasions a press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression. Those were the only roads open to us. I have more confidence in humankind and in the future than ever before.

  However, Serge’s pessimism of the intellect came out in his private journals, letters, and fiction. In a 1946 letter, he opines that the world “after a period of dark struggles and anxieties, may succumb to a terrible conflagration” and compares the “shock” of modern weapons of mass destruction to “cosmic phenomena.” “Today, all explosives have attained such power that their effect is no longer on a human scale.” In his Notebooks, he reflected that “Trotsky correctly foresaw that we might enter a phase of uninterrupted, permanent warfare if humanity does not achieve a social (and psychological) reorganization, the means to which appear, realistically, pitifully weak.” There was not much time left either: “For technological reasons, decisions [about society’s future] can not be put off indefinitely.” Yet such social changes depend on intellectual clarity, on critical thinking, which Serge increasingly saw both as impotent in the face of mass social conditioning and as threatened with outright extinction: “Destroy a few brains, quickly done! ” And if they are the few thousand brains that understand Einstein, Freud, or Marx?

  These pessimistic visions inspired Serge’s “terrifying” novel about “the problem of consciousness in time of war.” The imagery of the chapter titles and the poems placed at their heads evokes planetary catastrophe (“the central fire,” “lightning,” “smoking rains,” “naked dawns”). A Russian soldier wonders that “they haven’t invented war toys to split open the planet yet.” A German soldier reflects: “There are no warriors anymore: only poor bastards facing exploding volcanoes. The cosmos has gone berserk…. He was…alive, living under the cold light of a huge, dark, sulfurous star: the sun of destruction.” The Berlin section opens in an underground shelter where the thunder of bombs sends “huge waves through the earth.” “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs” is full of images of dreams, geological eruptions, and buried civilizations like Pompeii and Atlantis. Serge had to invent a neologism, “pan-destruction,” to express the scale of the devastation.

  Nowhere was the destruction so total as in Germany. Serge fearlessly depicted Germany’s defeat from the point of view of ordinary middle-class Germans seen principally as victims. This viewpoint is only now being legitimized sixty years later with a reexamination of the unparalleled destruction of German civilian cities by the Anglo-American bomber command and the publication in Germany of World War II memoirs and diaries. Serge satirized the cliché of German collective responsibility in the figure of an arrogant, overfed American journalist who drives up to a bombed-out Berlin neighborhood in a jeep and asks the uncomprehending survivors — whom Serge compares to “inhabitants of Chicago’s slums” — if they feel guilty.

  As distinct from the rich and powerful Germans, whose country estates were largely untouched by the war, Serge portrays ordinary Germans as more or less good people who patriotically believed what the government and the media told them (like many Americans today). As he explained in a letter to Macdonald: “People are caught up in the gears [of the social machine…] Nothing mysterious about it.” For Serge, neither the German soldiers killed and mutilated at the front nor their starved, bombed-out, and mass-raped mothers and sisters were “responsible” for the war. Indeed, the Nazis and industrialists who started it needed first to arrest thousands of German trade unionists, socialists, Communists, and conscious-stricken Christians like Brigitte’s fiancé. These were the Germans he had lived with and written about twenty years earlier in Witness to the German Revolution.

  Serge symbolized German innocence in the angelic figure of Brigitte, a gentle, cultivated, middle-class girl, orphaned by the war and driven to Ophelia-like madness by the death at the front of her beloved fiancé (shot by the SS for questioning the war). A midnight bombing raid draws the ecstatic girl to the roof. We see her frail figure silhouetted against the constellations and the “lightning” of explosions: “The whiteness wove a tissue of radiance around the city, around the entire planet: the
planet in her wedding dress. A bright cupola rose high above Brigitte’s rapt, thrown-back head.” When she is found mysteriously strangled, a neighbor picks some lilacs that have miraculously survived the bombings — testimony to “the power of simple vegetative life” — and lays them next to her fragile body. Alain, the artist, sees her as “Botticellian,” and her image returns in his delirious meditations on the nature of beauty and art which conclude the German section.

  The final movement, “Journey’s End,” returns to the question “What to live for?” by posing another: “What will endure, when it all blows up, melts down, or grinds to a sulfurous halt?” It opens with an invocation:

  And let fall the smoking rains

  over the cerebral forest!

  So many funeral masks

  lie preserved in the earth

  that nothing yet is lost.[22]

  Serge’s “funeral masks” suggest that enduring works of art can preserve the content of human consciousness from oblivion — even after the destruction of whole civilizations. They may point as well to works of literature which successfully “capture the moment” — thus winning their author a kind of immortality. But these are forlorn hopes. In Birth of Our Power, his 1930 novel about a failed workers’ uprising in Barcelona, Serge had confidently written “Nothing is ever lost” — correctly anticipating the coming Spanish revolution of 1936. The 1946 version “nothing yet is lost” signals a change of historical perspective to archaeological time and from social progress to art.

  It is in art that Alain, now disillusioned about Russia, finds his solution to the problem of “what to live for.” Daria is still seeking a solution of her own as she crosses the Atlantic and makes her way to join Sacha/D/Bruno Battisti at his remote coffee plantation in rural Mexico. However, instead of discoursing on politics and history with her, Sacha tells her about his life in Mexico, about its ancient peoples, who “lived in an unstable cosmos, as we live in an unstable humanity armed with cosmic powers”; about its seasons, the annual death of the sun-parched earth and its irresistible luxuriant rebirth under the violent rains and lightning storms of the spring. In response to her horrifying account of the bombing of Berlin, he leads her to a banana tree and points to its “violet-tinted, powerfully-sexed turgidity.” His consciousness, free of the imperative of historical integration, has led him to this final affirmation: “All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist.”