by Victor Serge
This striking affirmation illustrates what Serge’s son, Vlady, used to call his father’s “materialist spirituality” — since it was derived from Serge’s scientific worldview rather than from any tendency toward mysticism. Serge’s notion of materialism is closer to Spinoza’s Substance, Bergson’s élan vital, Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, Verdnatsky’s noosphere, and Edgar Morin’s Complexity than to positivism and vulgar scientism. “The immaterial is not in the least unreal, but on the contrary an essential form of the real (thought) completely unexplainable by yesterday’s scientific rules.”[23] Indeed, it was after reading two scientific books about recent discoveries and theories in genetics that he noted: “The old materialist schools would wax indignant and yet it is quite evident, however mysterious nature may be, that thought is the product of life, consubstantial with life, and that there would be nothing particularly bold in maintaining that it [thought] is itself life coming to discover and know itself.” In consequence, even after a nuclear holocaust, consciousness/life will survive, if only in the form of a virus whose reproduction will, over the eons, evolve toward greater complexity until it reaches the stage of intelligent life in some unimagined form “coming to discover and know itself.” Thus while Serge the socialist activist continued to “set his course on hope,” Serge the creator of Unforgiving Years put hope further off into the long term, to archaeological, geological, and evolutionary time where ultimately “true death does not exist.” A writer for our times — which well may be (to quote the title of another Serge novel) Last Times.[24]
— RICHARD GREEMAN
Montpellier, November 2007
[1] Paul Morelle, “Les Années sans pardon de Victor Serge,” Le Monde, September 3, 1971, p. 11.
[2] All quotations from Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford University Press, 1963), an indispensable introduction to twentieth-century revolutionary politics for readers who don’t want to die asphyxiated by political correctness. With close-up sketches of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks; anarchists like Voline, Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman; and poets like Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Esenin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.
[3] Jim Haberman first asked this question twenty years ago in the title of his Voice Literary Supplement article on Serge (November 30, 1984).
[4] The name Kibalchich is famous in Russia because of a distant relative of Victor’s father, the Narodnik N. I. Kibalchich, who was hanged in 1881 for his participation in the assassination of Czar Alexander II.
[5] See Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings on Russia 1919–1921, translated by Ian Birchall (London: Redwords, 1997).
[6] Cronstadt later became a bone of contention between Serge and Trotsky in exile.
[7] I first identified “R. Albert” as Serge’s pseudonym in the archives of Inprokorr on the basis of his style. These articles have been collected and translated by my colleague/comrade Ian Birchall inWitness to the German Revolution (London: Redwords, 1997).
[8] I was privileged to know Vlady from 1963 until his death in 2005, and he is the source of much of my information about his father. His 2,000 square meters of murals, which reflect Serge’s politics and aesthetics, can be seen in Mexico City and on the Web site www.vlady.org].
[9] The manuscripts have never been recovered, despite diligent searches of recently opened Soviet archives. See Richard Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left,” Revolutionary History 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994).
[10] See Alfred Rosmer, Victor Serge, and Maurice Wullens, “L’Assassinat d’Ignace Reiss,” Les Humbles (April 1938).
[11] Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (Harper, 1939).
[12] FBI Archives, Serge’s file for February 13, 1941. Courtesy of Susan Weissman.
[13] The Course Is Set on Hope (Verso, 2002), p. 67. The book’s main argument is that “Serge’s critique of Stalinism was the core of his life and work” (p. 6), and she gives short shift to his anarchist years, his poetry, and his fiction, which she finds “useful” in understanding Stalinism.
[14] Serge is better known in US and British French departments, with two Ph.D. theses: my own (Columbia) and Bill Marshall’s (Oxford), later published as Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (New York: Berg, 1992).
[15] Serge went to see Gorky as soon as he arrived in Russia in 1919, but declined an offer to join the staff of Gorky’s newspaper. During the civil war, Serge depended on Gorky’s relationship with Lenin to intercede to save anarchist comrades from being shot by the Cheka.
[16] Serge, Memoirs.
[17] See Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, translated by Al Richardson (London: Francis Boutle, 2004).
[18] Neil Cornwell, review of Midnight in the Century, Irish Slavonic Studies 4 (1983).
[19] Morelle, p. 12.
[20] Victor Serge, Carnets (Arles: Actes Sud, 1985). ß
[21] Serge, Carnets.
[22] The image of “smoking rains” probably came to Serge after witnessing the birth of the volcano Parcutin in 1943 under a rain of hot cinders which ignited and buried the surrounding dwellings and forest. They also refer, of course, to explosives raining from the sky which destroy the “cerebral forest” of human consciousness — seen as if rooted in the earth like a great living brain. Yet the poet’s attitude to this destruction is one of consent, for “nothing yet is lost.” Not as long as the earth preserves “funeral masks” — artefacts of dead cultures like the Aztecs and Mayas he wrote about in Tombeau des civilisations.
[23] Victor Serge, Carnets.
[24] Les derniers temps (Monteal: Editions de l’Arbre, 1946), translated into English by Ralph Manheim as The Long Dusk (Dial Press, 1946).
Unforgiving Years
I. The Secret Agent
Do I still have enough space for an intelligent death?
He who had no idea discovered the central fire.
AROUND seven in the morning, D personally loaded his two suitcases into the taxi. The street was still slumbering, tinged by the bleak whiteness of a Paris awakening. No one was about except for a milkman. Morning purity of cobbles and asphalt. The garbage cans were empty. D felt no suspicions. He had himself driven to the Gare du Nord, grew irritable at the station buffet because they made him wait for a tasteless cup of coffee, and piled his luggage into another cab which dropped him off in the place d’Iéna. Sure of not being followed, he took in the vast square, a stage set empty of actors, bathed in a dappled light under which one would wish to live for a long while, meditating. Before eight in the morning Paris, in her wealthier neighborhoods, seems delivered from herself; pacified, she is nothing more than a work of human wisdom. D found a chauffeurs’ bar where he was served a good, unpretentious coffee and two hot croissants, reminding him of that young condemned man whose sole last request was for croissants, which he could not have, because it was too early. “Just my luck!” said the pale young man, and he was right, for in fact the only thing he ever succeeded in was his own death by decapitation … Before boarding a third cab, which he had to call for, D reflected that all these complex precautions, reasonable as they might appear, were actually a semi-lunatic’s game. They left the path of danger studded with small markers, perhaps even with milestones. How easily he might have been seen, quite by chance, without realizing, at the Gare du Nord or in the vicinity of the place d’Iéna. Someone could have jotted down a license plate. The business of changing from one taxi to another might attract attention itself. If you took all these possibilities into account, you’d go right over the edge. This time he had himself driven directly to the hotel in the rue de Rochechouart. It was a middle-class establishment of the sort frequented by traveling salesmen, tourists on a modest budget, sedately adulterous couples, and well-behaved musicians with nightclub contracts. “Ah, Monsieur Lamberti,” the porter greeted him. D corrected him firmly, the better to steep himself in his new persona: “It’s Battisti, Bruno Battisti.” “Room 17, wasn’t it?” inquired the porter, who knew pe
rfectly well. Inside the room, D checked the locks on the suitcases even though he knew he’d closed them securely. By nine, he was back “home.” The concierge met him with a “Morning, Monsieur Malinesco! And me thinking you were gone on a trip!” (So you saw me with my luggage, you old witch!) “Quite so, Madame, I shall be away for six weeks.” (For all eternity, Madame!) “Well, it’s nice weather for you anyway, Monsieur Malinesco,” said the concierge, because you should always say something pleasant.
Mademoiselle Armande turned up promptly at ten, being an odiously punctual person who had been known to loiter in the street with an eye on her wristwatch, or stand for thirty seconds on the landing before knocking. She entered the study through the door left half open and murmured, “Monsieur Malinesco,” the words more snuffled than pronounced, accompanied by a deferential bob of the head. She was an insipid woman, rather on the homely side, pink-complexioned and dressed in neutral colors, who wore large shiny spectacles over the face of a wizened, calculating child. D watched her with concealed attention. What did she know about him? That he was rich (he who had never owned anything), and she respected rich people. A philatelist, a bibliophile, a lover of ancient art, liable to jump on a train or into a car and scour Brittany in winter just to bring back an antique dresser … Friendly with artists. Her job was to answer the telephone, write the occasional letter, visit the bank, and receive Monsieur Soga, the embassy attaché, a nervous little man who reeked of cologne; Monsieur Sixte Mougin, the antiques dealer; Monsieur Kehl from the Philatelist Society; and, more rarely, Monsieur Alain, who didn’t much look like a painter. She was becoming a connoisseur of postage stamps and even did a little collecting herself, only the French colonies, not to be extravagant. It’s a highly regarded hobby; they say the King of England has built up a remarkable collection. D had Mademoiselle Armande periodically tailed by a detective. She stepped out on Saturday nights with Monsieur Dupois, a civil servant at the Ministry of Education; they went to the pictures; Dupois’s concierge referred to Mademoiselle Armande as “the lady engaged to that nice gentleman who has been so unfortunate …” D, who distrusted other people’s misfortunes even more than his own, set the detective onto Monsieur Evariste Dupois, age forty-seven, owner of a property at Ivry, divorced … A gentleman who bet judiciously on the horses, bought a weekly lottery ticket, read the right-wing press, and visited a brothel in the rue Saint-Sauveur every Friday evening. An innocent man.
“Are you engaged, then?” inquired D of Mademoiselle Armande.
She did not flinch, being no doubt incapable of such a lively reaction, but her fingers twitched a little.
“Dear me, Monsieur Malinesco … However did you know?”
He saw that her complexion was improved by embarrassment.
“Just a coincidence, Mademoiselle. I happened to see you one Saturday on the arm of your fiancé.”
“It has not been completely decided yet,” she said reticently.
Innocent, innocent! (But that was not a wholly rational conclusion …)
“I intend to go away for six weeks. You will please pass on the mail to Monsieur Mougin.”
If anybody was going to look miserable as a drowned rat in a bucket three days from now, it was definitely Monsieur Sixte Mougin! D regretted the atrophied state of his sense of humor; it would have cheered him up no end to dwell on the troubles of that quavering, servile bastard Monsieur Sixte Mougin.
“When Monsieur Soga calls, tell him I’m in Strasbourg.”
Strasbourg was code for “unforeseen complications.”
Mademoiselle Armande did not turn a hair. No one suspected anything. Unbelievable that They hadn’t moved to place me under internal surveillance months ago! But if the unbelievable were not sometimes a reality, there would be no possibility of struggle. In cramped italics, the secretary was scratching into her diary: “Monsieur Soga. Say Strasbourg …” D, who disliked things to be written down, forced a smile.
“You don’t have much faith in your memory, I see!”
“Oh I do, but it’s funny, I always mix up the names of towns like Edinburgh, Hamburg, Strasbourg, Mulhouse …”
He hadn’t expected that. His throat went instantly dry. In the same code, known to just five people, Mulhouse meant “watch out.”
“And why is that?”
“I’ve no idea, for the life of me! Look, I nearly wrote Mulhouse just now, I can’t help it.”
“I might go to Mulhouse as well,” D said moodily.
He was fixing her with the cold, hard, stony-eyed glare she seldom caught from him — not the look of an art lover. Mademoiselle Armande put on a falsely bright smile, while D rapidly weighed the pros and cons.
“Here’s the key to the bottom right-hand drawer of the small cabinet in the hall. Fetch me the Zürich folder, Monsieur Feuvre, you know, the Swiss collection … The files are not in order, you’ll have to rummage.”
“Yes, Monsieur.”
Naturally, she left her handbag sitting next to the typewriter. D opened it with an unhurried dexterity acquired in the mail-interception department of the Secret Service. He scanned a note signed “Your fondly affectionate, Evariste.” Leafed through the address book. Saw — sickeningly — a telephone number: X 11-47. The number to fear was 11-74. Numeric inversion! Inside his head suspicion exploded into certainty. The returning Mademoiselle Armande glanced at her bag — ah, so we understand each other! D selected a letter from Monsieur Feuvre and put it in his pocket. “Will you kindly put the folder back in the file …” But he took back the keys to the cabinet, and she didn’t ask for them … Right, then; we thoroughly understand each other, thought D. This changed everything. He remembered finding his first taxicab parked and available only a few steps from the house, and how the driver had leaned toward him in a peculiarly obsequious manner … Soon as I leave here, she’ll call 11-74 — or another number, just around the corner perhaps, or in this very building … Made-moiselle Armande, clearly flustered, was struggling to surmount some hesitation or inhibition.
“What’s the matter?” D demanded unceremoniously.
She explained that in Monsieur Malinesco’s absence she would dearly like to take three days off, if that were at all possible, in order to … A matter of an aunt, a small property in the country, Monsieur Dupois. A notary’s letter fluttered out of the handbag.
“But of course,” he stopped her.
The worst of it was the need to distrust himself, to suspect his own suspicions. D saw the number 11-47 printed on the legal letterhead. Reassured, he stopped fretting over Mulhouse. “In addition, you must allow me to offer you a bonus of 500 francs for the last quarter …” You can assess the degree of corruptibility by the way a person accepts money. The sparkle in the young woman’s spectacles was one of innocence.
Just as a magician believes in his little tricks, so D believed in secrets, ciphers, stratagems, silence, masks, and in playing the game impeccably; at the same time he knew very well that secrets are sold, codes deciphered, stratagems outwitted, and silences broken; that masks are easier to read than faces, that the carbon copies of dispatches lie in ministerial wastepaper baskets for the taking, and that the perfect game does not exist. He believed the Organization to be infallible by virtue of its stability, its ramifications, its resources, its power, its single-minded commitment — even by the complicity of its opponents, who feed it, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes as a deliberate ploy. But from the day he had begun to pull away from the Organization, he felt himself rejected by it; and its power behind him, within him, became stifling.
His inner break with the Organization dated back to when the Crime had been revealed. The Crime had burst into view after a long, stealthy approach, like a sinister squadron on the ocean suddenly lighted by searchlights. D had cried out silently to himself, one night, over the newspapers scattered across the rug: “I can’t go on! This is the end of everything!” And nothing meant anything to him any longer in this stupidly snug apartment, where the play-acting only
let up after hours — when he could hunch forward in the armchair with the chessboard set up and solve problems, which he inevitably did, since problems are given away in advance, you just have to keep looking, all problems are hollow in the end. Or at night, cozily in bed under cozy lamplight, a glass of lemon water by his elbow, reading a work of physics, since the structure of the atom is probably the only problem left in the universe and they will solve it; then the age of despair will begin. Such mental exercises calmed him but failed to relax him. There is no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world moving toward cataclysms, lurching from one cataclysm to the next.
He bid a discreet farewell to the secretary. “Have a nice trip, Monsieur Malinesco … Count on me … They say Strasbourg is a beautiful city …” The ghost of a smile curled the man’s wrinkled face as he teased, circumspect even in laughter, “What’s a beautiful city, Mulhouse?” Mademoiselle Armande was mortified. “Oh, you must think me a child …” “Never that!” he said, and meant it. “I trust that when I return, you’ll be announcing the publication of the banns.” “I might indeed, Monsieur …” she said, with such a glow in her eyes that D felt a twinge of pity. (“When I return — meaning never …”)