by Victor Serge
VICTOR SERGE (1890–1947) was born Victor Kibalchich in Brussels in 1890, the son of Russian political exiles. As a young man, he lived in Paris, moving in anarchist circles and enduring five years in prison for his beliefs. In 1919, he went to Russia to support the Bolshevik Revolution. Traveling between Petrograd, Moscow, Berlin, and Vienna, Serge served as the editor of the journal Communist International, but in 1928 his condemnation of Stalin’s growing power led to his expulsion from the Communist Party and imprisonment. Released, Serge turned to writing fiction and history, only to be arrested again in 1933 and deported to Central Asia. International protests from eminent figures such as André Gide succeeded in securing Serge’s freedom, and in 1936 he left Russia for exile in France. There Serge continued to write fiction, while struggling to expose the totalitarian character of the Soviet state; for a while he also aided Trotsky, translating a number of his works. After the German occupation of France, Serge fled to Mexico, where he died in 1947. Along with his most famous work, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Serge’s many books include Year One of the Russian Revolution, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, From Lenin to Stalin, and the novels Conquered City, Midnight in the Century, Birth of Our Power, Men in Prison, and The Long Dusk.
SUSAN SONTAG is the author of four novels, The Benefactor, Death Kit, The Volcano Lover, and In America, which won the 2000 National Book Award for Fiction; a collection of stories, I, Etcetera; several plays, including Alice in Bed and Lady from the Sea; and seven works of nonfiction, among them Where the Stress Falls and Regarding the Pain of Others. Her books have been translated into thirty-two languages. In 2001, she was awarded the Jerusalem Prize for the body of her work; in 2003, she received the Prince of Asturias Prize for Literature and the Peace Prize of the German Book Trade.
THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV
VICTOR SERGE
Translated from the French by
WILLARD R. TRASK
Introduction by
SUSAN SONTAG
NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS
New York
CONTENTS
Biographical Notes
Title Page
Unextinguished (The Case for Victor Serge)
THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV
Author's Note
1. Comets Are Born at Night
2. The Sword Is Blind
3. Men at Bay
4. To Build Is to Perish
5. Journey into Defeat
6. Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning
7. The Brink of Nothing
8. The Road to Gold
9. Let Purity Be Treason
10. And Still the Floes Came Down…
Copyright and More Information
Unextinguished
(The Case for Victor Serge)
“… after all, there is such a thing as truth.”
THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV
How to explain the obscurity of one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes, Victor Serge? How to account for the neglect of The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a wonderful novel that has gone on being rediscovered and reforgotten ever since its publication, a year after Serge’s death in 1947?
Is it because no country can fully claim him? “A political exile since my birth” — so Serge (real name: Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) described himself. His parents were opponents of tsarist tyranny who had fled Russia in the early 1880s, and Serge was born in 1890 “in Brussels, as it happened, in mid-journey across the world,” he relates in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, written in 1942 and 1943 in Mexico City, where, a penurious refugee from Hitler’s Europe and Stalin’s assassins at large, he spent his last years. Before Mexico, Serge had lived, written, conspired, and propagandized in six countries: Belgium, in his early youth and again in 1936; France, repeatedly; Spain, in 1917 — it was then that he adopted the pen name of Serge; Russia, the homeland he saw for the first time in early 1919, at the age of twenty-eight, when he arrived to join the Bolshevik Revolution; and Germany and Austria in the mid-1920s, on Comintern business. In each country his residence was provisional, full of hardship and contention, threatened. In several, it ended with Serge booted out, banished, obliged to move on.
Is it because he was not — the familiar model — a writer engaged intermittently in political partisanship and struggle, like Silone and Camus and Koestler and Orwell, but a lifelong activist and agitator? In Belgium, he militated in the Young Socialist movement, a branch of the Second International. In France, he became an anarchist (the so-called individualist kind), and for articles in the anarchist weekly he co-edited that expressed a modicum of sympathy for the notorious Bonnot gang after the bandits’ arrest (there was never any question of Serge’s complicity) and his refusal, after his arrest, to turn informer, was sentenced to five years of solitary confinement. In Barcelona following his release from prison, he quickly became disillusioned with the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists for their reluctance to attempt to seize power. Back in France, in late 1917 he was incarcerated for fifteen months, this time as (the words of the arrest order) “an undesirable, a defeatist, and a Bolshevik sympathizer.” In Russia, he joined the Communist Party, fought in the siege of Petrograd during the Civil War, was commissioned to examine the archives of the tsarist secret police (and wrote a treatise on state oppression), headed the administrative staff of the Executive Committee of the Third — Communist — International and participated in its first three congresses, and, distressed by the mounting barbarity of governance in the newly consolidated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, arranged to be sent abroad by the Comintern in 1922 as a propagandist and organizer. (In this time there were more than a few freelance, foreign members of the Comintern, which was, in effect, the Foreign, or World Revolution, Department of the Russian Communist Party.) After the failure of revolution in Berlin and subsequent time spent in Vienna, Serge returned in 1926 to the USSR now ruled by Stalin and officially joined the Left Opposition, Trotsky’s coalition, with which he had been allied since 1923: he was expelled from the Party in late 1927 and arrested soon after. All in all, Serge was to endure more than ten years of captivity for his serial revolutionary commitments. There is a problem for writers who exercise another, more strenuous profession full-time.
Is it because — despite all these distractions — he wrote so much? Hyperproductivity is not as well regarded as it used to be, and Serge was unusually productive. His published writings — almost all of which are out of print — include seven novels, two volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, a late diary, his memoirs, some thirty political and historical books and pamphlets, three political biographies, and hundreds of articles and essays. And there was more: a memoir of the anarchist movement in pre-First World War France, a novel about the Russian Revolution, a short book of poems, and a historical chronicle of Year II of the Revolution, all confiscated when Serge was finally allowed to leave the USSR in 1936, as the consequence of his having applied to Glavlit, the literary censor, for an exit permit for his manuscripts — these have never been recovered — as well as a great deal of safely archived but still unpublished material. If anything, his being prolific has probably counted against him.
Is it because most of what he wrote does not belong to literature? Serge began writing fiction — his first novel, Men in Prison — when he was thirty-nine. Behind him lay more than twenty years’ worth of works of expert historical assessment and political analysis, and a profusion of brilliant political and cultural journalism. He is commonly remembered, if at all, as a valiant dissident Communist, a clear-eyed, assiduous opponent of Stalin’s counterrevolution. (Serge was the first to call the USSR
a “totalitarian” state, in a letter he wrote to friends in Paris on the eve of his arrest in Leningrad in February 1933.) No twentieth-century novelist had anything like his firsthand experiences of insurgency, of intimate contact with epochal leaders, of dialogue with founding political intellectuals. He had known Lenin — Serge’s wife Liubov Rusakova was Lenin’s stenographer in 1921; Serge had translated State and Revolution into French, and wrote a biography of Lenin soon after his death in January 1924. He was close to Trotsky, although they did not meet again after Trotsky’s banishment in 1929; Serge was to translate The Revolution Betrayed and other late writings and, in Mexico, where Trotsky had preceded him as a political refugee, collaborate with his widow on a biography. Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács were among Serge’s interlocutors, with whom he discussed, when they were all living in Vienna in 1924 and 1925, the despotic turn that the revolution had taken almost immediately, under Lenin. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev, whose epic subject is the Stalinist state’s murder of millions of the Party faithful as well as of most dissidents in the 1930s, Serge writes about a fate he himself most improbably, and just barely, escaped. Serge’s novels have been admired principally as testimony; polemic; inspired journalism; fictionalized history. It is easy to underestimate the literary accomplishment of a writer the bulk of whose work is not literary.
Is it because no national literature can entirely claim him? Cosmopolitan by vocation, he was fluent in five languages: French, Russian, German, Spanish, and English. (He spent part of his childhood in England.) In his fiction, he has to be considered a Russian writer, bearing in mind the extraordinary continuity of Russian voices in literature — one whose forbears are Dostoevsky, the Dostoevsky of The House of the Dead and The Devils, and Chekhov, and whose contemporary influences were the great writers of the 1920s, notably Boris Pilnyak, the Pilnyak of The Naked Year, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Isaac Babel. But French remained his literary language. Serge’s copious output as a translator was from Russian into French: works of Lenin, Trotsky, the founder of the Comintern Grigori Zinoviev, the pre-Bolshevik revolutionary Vera Figner (1852–1942), whose memoirs relate her twenty years of solitary confinement in a tsarist prison, and, among novelists and poets, of Andrei Biely, Fyodor Gladkov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And his own books were all written in French. A Russian writer who writes in French — it means that Serge remains absent, even as a footnote, from the histories of both modern French and Russian literature.
Is it because whatever stature he had as a literary writer was always politicized, that is, viewed as a moral achievement? His was the literary voice of a righteous political militancy, a narrowing prism through which to view a body of work that has other, nondidactic claims on our attention. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, he had been a much-published writer, at least in France, with an ardent if small constituency — a political constituency, of course, mainly of the Trotskyist persuasion. But in the last years, after Serge had been excommunicated by Trotsky, that constituency had abandoned him to the predictable calumnies of the pro-Soviet Popular Front press. And the socialist positions Serge espoused after arriving in Mexico in 1941, a year after Trotsky was axed by the executioner sent by Stalin, seemed to his remaining supporters to be indistinguishable from those of the social democrats. More isolated than ever, boycotted by both the right and the left back in postwar Western Europe, the ex-Bolshevik, ex-Trotskyist, anti-Communist Serge continued to write — mostly for the drawer. He did publish a short book, Hitler versus Stalin, collaborate with a Spanish comrade in exile on a political magazine (Mundo), and contribute regularly to a few magazines abroad, but — despite the efforts of admirers as influential as Dwight Macdonald in New York and Orwell in London to find him a publisher — two of Serge’s last three novels, the late stories and poems, and the memoirs remained unpublished in any language until after, mostly decades after, his death.
Is it because there were too many dualities in his life? He was a militant, a world-improver, to the end, which made him anathema to the right. (Even if, as he noted in his journal in February 1944, “Problems no longer have their former beautiful simplicity: it was convenient to live on antinomies like socialism or capitalism.”) But he was a knowledgeable enough anti-Communist to worry that the American and British governments had not grasped that Stalin’s goal after 1945 was to take over all of Europe (at the cost of a Third World War), and this, in the era of widespread pro-Soviet or anti-anti-Communist bias among intellectuals in Western Europe, made Serge a renegade, a reactionary, a warmonger. “All the right enemies,” the old motto proclaims: Serge had too many enemies. As an ex-, now anti-, Communist, he was never penitent enough. He deplores but he does not regret. He has not given up on the idea of radical social change because of the totalitarian outcome of the Russian Revolution. For Serge — to this extent he agrees with Trotsky — the revolution was betrayed. He is not saying it was a tragic illusion, a catastrophe for the Russian people, from the beginning. (But might Serge have said this had he lived another decade or more? Probably.) Finally, he was a lifelong practicing intellectual, which seemed to trump his achievement as a novelist, and he was a passionate political activist, which did not enhance his credentials as a novelist either.
Is it because he continued to the end to identify himself as a revolutionary, a vocation that is now so discredited in the prosperous world? Is it because, most implausibly, he insisted on being hopeful…still? “Behind us,” he wrote in 1943, in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness.” And yet Serge declares that “those were the only roads possible for us. And insists, “I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.” Surely this could not have been true.
Is it because, embattled and defeated as he was, his literary work refused to take on the expected cargo of melancholy? His indomitability is not as attractive to us as a more anguished reckoning. In his fiction, Serge writes about the worlds he has lived in, not about himself. It is a voice that forbids itself the requisite tones of despair or contrition or bewilderment — literary tones, as most people understand them — although Serge’s own situation was increasingly grim. By 1947, he was desperately trying to get out of Mexico, where, by the terms of his visa, he was banned from all political activity, and, since an American visa was out of the question because of his Communist Party membership in the 1920s, to return to France. At the same time, incapable of being uninterested, unstimulated, wherever he was, he became fascinated by what he had observed on several trips around the country of the indigenous cultures and the landscape, and had begun a book about Mexico. The end was miserable. Shabbily dressed, ill-nourished, increasingly plagued by angina — worsened by the high altitude of Mexico City — he had a heart attack while out late one evening, hailed a taxi, and died in the backseat. The driver deposited him at a police station: it was two days before his family learned what had happened to him and were able to claim the body.
In short, there was nothing, ever, triumphant about his life, as much that of the eternal poor student as the militant on the run — unless one excepts the triumph of being immensely gifted and industrious as a writer; the triumph of being principled and also astute, and therefore incapable of keeping company with the faithful and the cravenly gullible and the merely hopeful; the triumph of being incorruptible as well as brave, and therefore on a different, lonely path from the liars and toadies and careerists; the triumph of being, after the early 1920s, right.
Because he was right, he has been punished as a writer of fiction. The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction — as if one were obliged to choose between them…
Is it because the life was so steeped in historical drama as to overshadow the work? Indeed, some of his fervent supporters have asserted that Serge’s greatest literary work was his own tumultuous, danger-filled, ethically stalwart life. Something similar has been said of Os
car Wilde, who himself could not resist the masochistic quip, “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Wilde was mistaken, and so is this misguided compliment to Serge. As is the case with most major writers, Serge’s books are better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them. To think otherwise is to condescend to Serge and to the very questions — How shall one live? How can I make sense of my own life? How can life be made better for those who are oppressed? — he honored by his lucidity, his rectitude, his valor, his defeats. While it is true that literature, particularly nineteenth-century Russian literature, is the home of these questions, it is cynical — or merely philistine — to consider as literary a life lived in their light. That would be to denigrate both morality and literature. History, too.
English-language readers of Serge today have to think themselves back to a time when most people accepted that the course of their lives would be determined by history rather than psychology, public rather than private crises. It was history, a particular historical moment, that drove Serge’s parents out of tsarist Russia: the wave of repressiveness and state terror that followed the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), the terrorist branch of the populist movement, in 1881. Serge’s scientist father, Leon Kibalchich, at that time an officer in the Imperial Guard, belonged to a military group sympathetic to the narodnik (populist) demands, and barely escaped being shot when the group was discovered. In his first refuge, Geneva, he met and married a radical student from St. Petersburg of Polish gentry origin, and the couple was to spend the rest of the decade, in the words of their second-generation political-exile son, commuting “in quest of their daily bread and of good libraries… between London (the British Museum), Paris, Switzerland, and Belgium.”