by Victor Serge
The point of fiction was storytelling, world-evoking. This credo drew Serge as a fiction writer to two seemingly incompatible ideas of the novel.
One is the historical panorama, in which single novels have their place as episodes of a comprehensive story. The story, for Serge, was heroism and injustice in the first half of the European twentieth century, and could have started with a novel set in anarchist circles in France just before 1914 (about which he did finish a memoir, seized by the GPU). Of the novels Serge was able to complete, the time line runs from the First through the Second World War — that is, from Men in Prison, written in Leningrad at the end of the 1920s and published in Paris in 1930, to Les Années sans pardon (The Pitiless Years), his last novel, written in Mexico in 1946 and not published until 1971, in Paris. (It has yet to be translated into English.) The Case of Comrade Tulayev, whose material is the Great Terror of the 1930s, comes towards the end of the cycle. Characters recur — a classic feature of novels, like some of Balzac’s, conceived as a sequence — though not as many as one might expect, and none of them an alter ego, a stand-in for Serge himself. The High Commissar for Security Erchov, the prosecutor Fleischman, the loathsome apparatchik Zvyeryeva, and the virtuous Left Oppositionist Ryzhik of The Case of Comrade Tulayev had all figured in Conquered City (1932), Serge’s third novel, which takes place during the siege of Petrograd, and, probably, in the lost novel, La Tourmente (The Storm), which was the sequel to Conquered City. (Ryzhik is also an important character, and Fleischman a minor one, in Midnight in the Century.)
Of this project we have only fragments. But if Serge did not commit himself doggedly to a chronicle, like Solzhenitsyn’s sequence of novels about the Lenin era, it is not simply because Serge lacked the time to complete his sequence, but because another idea of the novel was at work, somewhat subverting the first. Solzhenitsyn’s historical novels are all of a piece from a literary point of view, and none the better for that. Serge’s novels illustrate several different conceptions of how to narrate and to what end. The “I” of Men in Prison (1930) is a medium for giving voice to the others, many others; it is a novel of compassion, of solidarity. “I don’t want to write memoirs,” he said in a letter to Istrati, who did the preface to Serge’s first novel. The second novel, The Birth of Our Power (1931), uses a mix of voices — the first-person “I” and “we” and an omniscient third person. The multivolume chronicle, the novel as sequel, was not the best vessel for Serge’s development as a literary writer, but remained a kind of default position from which, always working under harassment and financial strain, he could generate new fictional tasks.
Serge’s literary affinities, and many of his friendships, were with the great modernists of the 1920s, such as Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Sergei Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Daniil Kharms (his brother-in-law), and Mandelstam — rather than with realists like Gorky, a relative on his mother’s side, and Alexei Tolstoy. But in 1928, when Serge started writing fiction, the miraculous new literary era was virtually over, killed by the censors, and soon the writers themselves, most of them, were to be arrested and killed or to commit suicide. The broad-canvas novel, the narrative with multiple voices (another example: Noli me tangere by the late-nineteenth-century Filipino revolutionary José Rizal), might well be the preferred form of a writer with a powerful political consciousness — the political consciousness that was certainly not wanted in the Soviet Union, where, Serge knew, there was no chance of his being translated and published. But it is also the form of some of the enduring works of literary modernism, and has spawned several new fictional genres. Serge’s third novel, Conquered City, is a brilliant work in one of these genres, the novel with a city as protagonist (as Men in Prison had as protagonist “that terrible machine, prison”) — clearly influenced by Biely’s Petersburg, and by Manhattan Transfer (he cites Dos Passos as an influence), and possibly by Ulysses, a book he greatly admired.
“I had the strong conviction of charting a new road for the novel,” Serge says in the Memoirs. One way in which Serge is not charting a new road is his view of women, reminiscent of the great Soviet films about revolutionary ideals, from Eisenstein to Alexei Gherman. In this entirely men-centered society of challenge — and ordeal, and sacrifice — women barely exist, at least not positively, except through being the love objects or wards of very busy men. For revolution, as Serge describes it, is itself a heroic, masculinist enterprise, invested with the values of virility: courage, daring, endurance, decisiveness, independence, ability to be brutal. An attractive woman, someone warm, cherishing, sturdy, often a victim, cannot have these manly characteristics; therefore she cannot be other than a revolutionary’s junior partner. The one powerful woman in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, the Bolshevik prosecutor Zvyeryeva (who will soon have her turn to be arrested and killed), is repeatedly characterized by her pathetically needy sexuality (in one scene she is shown masturbating) and physical repulsiveness. All the men in the novel, villainous or not, have forthright carnal needs and unaffected sexual self-confidence.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev relates a set of stories, of fates, in a densely populated world. Besides the cast of supportive women, there are at least eight major characters: two emblems of disaffection, Kostia and Romachkin, lowly bachelor clerks who share a single room with a partition in a communal apartment in Moscow — they open the novel — and the veteran loyalists, careerists, and sincere Communists, Ivan Kondratiev, Artyem Makeyev, Stefan Stern, Maxim Erchov, Kiril Rublev, old Ryzhik, who are, one by one, arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to die. (Only Kondratiev is spared, and sent to a remote post in Siberia, by an arbitrarily benign whim of “the Chief,” as Stalin is called in the novel.) Whole lives are portrayed, each of which could make a novel. The account of Makeyev’s ingeniously staged arrest while attending the opera (at the end of Chapter 4) is in itself a short story worthy of Chekhov. And the drama of Makeyev — his antecedents, ascent to power (he is governor of Kurgansk), sudden arrest on a visit to Moscow, imprisonment, interrogation, confession — is only one of the plots elaborated in The Case of Comrade Tulayev.
No interrogator is a major character. Among the minor characters is Serge’s fictional epitome of the fellow traveler of influence. In a late scene, set in Paris, “Professor Passereau, famous in two hemispheres, President of the Congress for the Defense of Culture,” tells the young émigré, Xenia Popov, vainly seeking his intervention on behalf of the most sympathetic of Serge’s Old Bolshevik protagonists: “For the justice of your country I have a respect which is absolute … If Rublev is innocent, the Supreme Tribunal will accord him justice.” As for the eponymous Tulayev, the high government official whose murder sets off the arrest and execution of the others, he makes only the briefest appearance early in the novel. He is there to be shot.
Serge’s Tulayev, at any rate his murder and its consequences, seems obviously to point back to Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Party organization, whose assassination in his office on December 1, 1934, by a young Party member named Leon Nikolayev became Stalin’s pretext for the years of slaughter that followed, which decimated the loyal Party membership and killed or kept imprisoned for decades millions of ordinary citizens. It may be difficult not to read The Case of Comrade Tulayev as a roman à clef, though Serge in a prefatory note explicitly warns against doing just that. “This novel,” he writes, “belongs entirely to the domain of literary fiction. The truth created by the novelist cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of the historian or the chronicler.” One can hardly imagine Solzhenitsyn prefacing one of his Lenin-novels with such a disclaimer. But perhaps one should take Serge at his word — noting that he set his novel in 1939. The arrests and trials in The Case of Comrade Tulayev are fictional successors to, rather than a fictional synthesis of, the actual Moscow trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938.
Serge is not just pointing out that the truth of the novelist differs from the truth of the historian. He is asserting, here only implicitly, the superiority of t
he novelist’s truth. Serge had made the bolder claim in the letter to Istrati about Men in Prison: a novel that, despite “the convenient use of the first person singular,” is “not about me,” and in which “I don’t even want to stick too close to things I have actually seen.” The novelist, Serge continues, is after “a richer and more general truth than the truth of observation.” That truth “sometimes coincides almost photographically with certain things I have seen; sometimes it differs from them in every respect.”
To assert the superiority of the truth of fiction is a venerable literary commonplace (its earliest formulation is in Aristotle’s Poetics), and in the mouths of many writers sounds glib and even self-serving: a permission claimed by the novelist to be inaccurate, or partial, or arbitrary. To say that the assertion voiced by Serge has nothing of this quality is to point to the evidence of his novels, their incontestable sincerity and intelligence applied to lived truths re-created in the form of fiction.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev has never enjoyed a fraction of the fame of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), a novel with ostensibly the same subject, which makes the opposite claim, for the correspondence of fiction to historical reality. “The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials,” the prefatory note to Darkness at Noon advises the reader. (Rubashov is thought to be mostly based on Nikolai Bukharin, with something of Karl Radek.) But synthesis is exactly the limitation of Koestler’s chamber drama, which is both political argument and psychological portrait. An entire era is seen through the prism of one person’s ordeal of confinement and interrogation, interspersed with passages of recollection; flashbacks. The novel opens with Rubashov, ex-Commissar of the People, being pushed into his cell and the door slamming behind him, and ends with the executioner arriving with the handcuffs, the descent to the prison cellar, and the bullet in the back of the head. (It is not surprising that Darkness at Noon could be made into a Broadway play.) The revelation of how — that is, by what arguments rather than by physical torture — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin, and the other ruling members of the Bolshevik elite could be induced to confess to the absurd charges of treason brought against them is the story of Darkness at Noon.
Serge’s polyphonic novel, with its many trajectories, has a much more complicated view of character, of the interweaving of politics and private life, and of the terrible procedures of Stalin’s inquisition. And it casts a much wider intellectual net. (An example: Rublev’s analysis of the revolutionary generation.) Of those arrested, all but one will eventually confess — Ryzhik, who remains defiant, prefers to go on a hunger strike and die — but only one resembles Koestler’s Rubashov: Erchov, who is persuaded to render one last service to the Party by admitting that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Tulayev. “Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning” is the title of one of the chapters.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a far less conventional novel than are Darkness at Noon and 1984, whose portraits of totalitarianism have proved so unforgettable — perhaps because those novels have a single protagonist and tell a single story. One need not think of either Koestler’s Rubashov or Orwell’s Winston Smith as a hero; the fact that both novels stay with their protagonists from beginning to end forces the reader’s identification with the archetypal victim of totalitarian tyranny. If Serge’s novel can be said to have a hero, it is someone, present only in the first and last chapters, who is not a victim: Kostia, the actual assassin of Tulayev, who remains unsuspected.
Murder, killing is in the air. It is what history is about. A Colt revolver is bought from a shady purveyor — for no particular reason, except that it is a magical object, bluish-black steel, and feels potent concealed in the pocket. One day, its purchaser, the insignificant Romachkin, a miserable soul and also (in his own eyes) “a pure man whose one thought was justice,” is walking near the Kremlin wall at the moment when a uniformed figure, “his uniform bare of insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual,” emerges, followed by two men in civilian clothes, a mere thirty feet away, then stops six feet away to light a pipe, and Romachkin realizes he has been presented with an opportunity to shoot Stalin (“the Chief”) himself. He doesn’t. Disgusted by his own cowardice, he gives the gun away to Kostia, who, out on a snowy night, observes a stout man in a fur-lined coat and astrakhan cap with a briefcase under his arm getting out of a powerful black car that has just pulled up in front of a private residence, hears him addressed by the chauffeur as Comrade Tulayev — Tulayev of the Central Committee, Kostia realizes, he of “the mass deportations” and “the university purges” — sees him sending the car away (in fact, Tulayev does not intend to enter his house but to continue on foot to a sexual assignation), at which moment, as if in a trance, a fit of absence, the gun comes out of Kostia’s pocket. The gun explodes, a sudden clap of thunder in a dead silence. Tulayev falls to the sidewalk. Kostia flees through the narrow quiet streets.
Serge makes the murder of Tulayev nearly involuntary, like the murder of an unknown man at the beach for which the protagonist of Camus’s The Stranger (1942) stands trial. (It seems very unlikely that Serge, marooned in Mexico, could have read Camus’s novel, published clandestinely in Occupied France, before finishing his own.) The affectless antihero of Camus’s novel is a kind of victim, first of all in his unawareness of his actions. In contrast, Kostia is full of feeling, and his acte gratuit is both sincere and irrational: his awareness of the iniquity of the Soviet system acts through him. However, the unlimited violence of the system makes his act of violence impossible to avow. When, towards the end of the novel, Kostia, tormented by how much further injustice has been unleashed by his deed, sends a written confession, unsigned, to the chief prosecutor on the Tulayev case, he, Fleischman — only a few steps from being arrested himself — burns the letter, collects the ashes and crushes them under his thumb, and “with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm” says half aloud to himself: “The Tulayev case is closed.” Truth, including a true confession, has no place in the kind of tyranny that the revolution has become.
To assassinate a tyrant is an accomplishment that may evoke Serge’s anarchist past, and Trotsky was not entirely wrong when he accused Serge of being more anarchist than Marxist. But he had never supported anarchist violence: it was his libertarian convictions that had made Serge, early on, an anarchist. His life as a militant gave him a profound experience of death. That experience is most keenly expressed in Conquered City, with its scenes of killing as compulsion, orgy, political necessity, but death presides over all Serge’s novels.
“It is not for us to be admirable,” declares the voice of a woeful encomium to revolutionary hardheartedness, “Meditation during an Air-Raid,” in Birth of Our Power. We revolutionaries “must be precise, clear-sighted, strong, unyielding, armed: like machines.” (Of course, Serge is totally committed, by temperament and by principle, to what is admirable.) Serge’s master theme is revolution and death: to make a revolution one must be pitiless, one must accept the inevitability of killing the innocent as well as the guilty. There is no limit to the sacrifices that the revolution can demand. Sacrifice of others; sacrifice of oneself. For that hubris, the sacrificing of so many others in revolution’s cause, virtually guarantees that eventually the same pitiless violence will be turned on those who made the revolution. In Serge’s fiction, the revolutionary is, in the strictest, classical sense, a tragic figure — a hero who will do, who is obliged to do, what is wrong; and in so doing courts, and will endure, retribution, punishment.
But in Serge’s best fiction — these are much more than “political novels” — the tragedy of revolution is set in a larger frame. Serge is devoted to showing the illogic of history and of human motivation and the course of individual lives, which can never be said to be either deserved or undeserved. Thus The Case of Comrade Tulayev ends with the contrasting destinies of its two lesser lives: Romachkin, the man obsessed by justic
e, who lacked the courage, or the absence of mind, to kill Stalin, and has become a valued bureaucrat (so far not purged) in Stalin’s terror state, and Kostia, Tulayev’s assassin, the man who protested in spite of himself, and has escaped into humble agricultural work in Russia’s far east, and mindlessness, and new love.
The truth of the novelist — unlike the truth of the historian — allows for the arbitrary, the mysterious, the undermotivated. The truth of fiction replenishes: for there is much more than politics, and more than the vagaries of human feeling. The truth of fiction embodies, as in the pungent physicalness of Serge’s descriptions of people and of landscapes. The truth of fiction depicts that for which one can never be consoled, and displaces it with a healing openness to everything finite and cosmic.
“I want to blow out the moon,” says the little girl at the end of Pilnyak’s “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1926), which re-creates as fiction one of the first liquidations of a possible future rival ordered by Stalin (here called “Number One”): the murder, in 1925, of Trotsky’s successor as the head of the Red Army, Mikhail Frunze, who was forced to undergo unnecessary surgery, and died, as planned, on the operating table. (Pilnyak’s subsequent cave-in to Stalinist literary directives in the 1930s did not keep him from being shot in 1938.) In a world of unbearable cruelty and injustice, it seems as if all of nature should rhyme with grief and loss. And indeed, Pilnyak relates, the moon, as if in response to the challenge, vanishes. “The moon, plump as a merchant’s wife, swam behind clouds, wearying of the chase.” But the moon is not to be extinguished. Neither is the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist’s or the poet’s — which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us there is more than politics, more, even, than history. Bravery … and indifference … and sensuality … and the living creatural world … and pity, pity for all, remain unextinguished.