Victor Serge
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by Philip Gambone

"Rare are those who know how to resist demoralization in defeat." So wrote Victor Serge in 1941. Serge was a committed Russian revolutionary, but a fierce opponent of the turn the Soviet Union had taken under Josef Stalin's murderous regime. In his seven novels, Serge managed, in the words of one of his translators, Richard Greeman, "to submit the world of Stalinism to the critical lens of fiction." In doing so, he became, Greeman says, "arguably as important a novelist in the political genre as Malraux, Orwell, Silone, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn."

Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Serge was his pen name) was born in Brussels in 1890 into a family of poor, wandering anti-czarists, who were always in search of "good libraries and cheap lodgings." He was home-schooled in both the classics and revolutionary ideology: "On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodging there were always portraits of men who had been hanged." The family was so poor that his brother died of malnutrition.

As a teenager, Serge became a "precocious anarchist firebrand," joining the Socialist Young Guard, contributing to a revolutionary leaflet, and, at age 18, going to Paris, where he lectured, gave Russian lessons, and translated Russian novels in order to survive. In 1912, he was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary for his association with anarchist causes. Upon release he ended up in Barcelona, undaunted in his revolutionary zeal and activities.

Serge joined the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Revolution in 1919. But, with the rise of Stalin and his demonic reign of secret police, censored free press, purges, closed trials and murders, he soon became an outspoken critic of the direction the Revolution had taken. As Adam Hochschild points out in the foreword to Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the Russia that took shape under Stalin "was not the one Serge had risked his life for." He joined Trotsky's Left Opposition, which led to his expulsion from the Communist Party in 1928. A near-death experience inspired his resolve to write "a series of documentary novels about these unforgettable times."

Leon Trotsky
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Arrested in 1933, Serge was deported to Kazakhstan with his wife and children. While many of his fellow writers and compatriots suffered horribly in Stalin's Gulag—censored, sent to camps, or committing suicide—Serge, with support from important French writers, managed to survive. In 1936, he was given permission to leave the USSR. "It was a miracle that Victor Serge was able to leave the Soviet Union," recalled his companion in exile, Julián Gómez García Gorkin. "He was only spared from being condemned … to the common grave of the opposition by a matter of months."

Despite his Russian heritage, Serge wrote in French. In 1939, one of his novels was nominated for the Prix Goncourt. But at the outbreak of World War II, his books, which were considered subversive, were taken out of circulation. In 1941, he and his son Vlady boarded the last refugee ship out of Vichy France, bound for Mexico City. There he wrote his last three masterpieces, all of which were relegated to his desk drawer. He died in Mexico City in 1947.

Memoirs of a Revolutionary
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"He carried within him the self-devouring tragedy of the Russian Revolution and the faces of all the great revolutionaries who had disappeared or been exterminated, the invasion of the Soviet Union by Hitler, the tragedy of the conquered and betrayed people of Spain, for whom over a million dead clamoured for justice, and the misery of a France and a Belgium occupied by the Nazis," wrote Gorkin in The Last Years of Victor Serge.

Among the novels Serge wrote in Mexico City is Unforgiving Years. "The most bitter, the most cerebral, and the most poetic" of his novels, writes translator Richard Greeman. Begun in 1945, it was not published until 1971 in France. It was first translated into English in 2008.

The novel is in four sections—Greeman calls them "four symphonic movements," not unlike Shostakovich's wartime symphonies. Each section is set in a place where Serge had lived: Paris in the months before the Nazi takeover; Leningrad during the Nazi siege; Berlin in the final days of the War; and finally, "a tragic requiem" set in Mexico in the aftermath of the War.

We meet a quartet of idealistic revolutionaries, disillusioned by the turn that Russia has taken under Stalin. "They search for an escape from a 'world without possible escape' while trying to make sense of history and their individual lives." They feel duty-bound to remain loyal to the Party—to the "collective destiny" of humankind—even as they live in a "labyrinth of pure madness" where truth, consciousness, intellectual integrity, and spiritual freedom were crushed under a regime where social conditioning was the only thing that mattered. As one of them observes, "Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth."

Siege of Leningrad
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The final section of the novel, "Journey's End," takes place in Mexico in 1946. Daria, who, unlike the other three revolutionaries, chose not to flee the cataclysm in Europe and a dead revolution, has at last boarded a freighter for America. Traveling with a fake passport, she is undertaking a "complicated journey" to locate her former Party colleague Sacha, alias Secret Agent D. "If she failed to locate D on the other side of the Atlantic, there was one final resort: a painless injection."

Post-War America dazzles her: the plains of wheat, the luxuriously clean restrooms, the newspapers that run to forty pages "offering comfort-enhancing gadgets at bargain prices (sums which elsewhere would represent years of toil or self-denial), the opulence of standardized apparel. That this could appear normal, acceptable to one who had just changed hemispheres, was disconcerting."

Daria eventually learns that Sasha is in Mexico and flies to the capital, "a city like nowhere else on earth, drowsy with sunset." Her first impression of Mexico is that it is "very beautiful." Having turned away from the devastation of war-torn Europe and "one shipwrecked revolution," she finds in Mexico "a splendidly simple world" of purple bougainvillea, thickets of nopals, yellow campaniles. "A monumental joy—not of living, more primordial than that; of existing—conjoined earth and sky in the embrace of the light."

Soon Daria reconnects with her old Party colleague, Sacha, who is now running a paradisiacal plantation under the alias Bruno Battisti. Sacha, still paranoid after years of living in a world where subterfuge and betrayal were the norm, is suspicious. Has Daria arrived to kill him, he wonders. Aware of his fears, she assures him she has run away, too.

Sasha invites her on a tour of the plantation, which, under the incandescent sunshine of Mexico, he tends "with a kind of love." He explains his current, post-Party life: "The plantation lives by the rhythm of seasons different from those in Europe. Here life is ruled by two primordial divinities: Fire and Water, Sun and Rain. They are the true mother deities." In the ability of cacti to survive with scarce moisture, Sasha has found that "a humble, resistant victory is nearly always possible, even if it amounts to little more than holding out."

Mexico, his place of exile, has taught the weary, near-broken Sacha that "the true power is not that of darkness, of barrenness, but of life. All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist." He and his wife Noémi, another former agent who has been even more psychologically damaged by the War than he, have found a kind of solace in the "primeval voluptuousness and innocent cruelty" of the land.

Mexico City 1946
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"The fire in the sky first blesses the sap, the loves of insects and birds, the euphoria of the herds, the darting quickness of tadpoles in the ponds," he continues. "Then the fire in the sky turns to a burning hardness, as though the gods were reminding creation that no euphoria can last and that existence is not just the exultation of being; existence is also ordeal, courage, blind tenacity, hidden resourcefulness."

Realizing that Sacha had left the anti-Nazi, revolutionary struggle at a critical moment in the War, Daria restrains herself from bitterling crying out: "So that's how you lived while … while …! Doing nothing for anyone else in the world!" Sacha assures her that, despite it all, he has retained hope. After so many "necessary and needless massacres," he says that he has come out of the War with an understanding of "just what remains essential." "We have achieved justice. We have changed one of the faces of the world, enough to make living and dying worthwhile. Let us consent to everything."

Berlin at the end of the War
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Sacha is clearly a stand-in for Serge's own post-War viewpoint. "His driving passion," writes Adam Hochschild, "was to rescue the honor of the idealists who participated in the Russian Revolution from the Stalinists who took it over and turned it into a horror show." The novel ends with a sudden and violent denouement, one in which the corrupt Party that Sacha, Noémi and Daria have all fled gets its final, nasty say.

Unforgiving Years begins with the assertion that there is "no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world moving toward cataclysm"; but I'd like to think that its final chapter, set in the "cosmic vigor" of Mexico, expresses Serge's cautious, open-eyed assent to a different vision of humanity.

Unforgiving Years
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"Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life," Sacha tells Daria, "an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness? I am the owner of this plantation, lush and overgrown …. And thus I fulfill an instinctive duty toward the earth, the dead, and the defeats which are great temporary deaths. Such are my daily encounters, full of meaning."

Victor Serge's searing, unsettling masterpiece does not offer easy or reassuring solutions to the problem of a world moving toward cataclysm, but it never descends into hopelessness or nihilism. Its conscientious and principled humanity invites us to live with courage and tenacity. In the words of Sacha, "We observe that the true power is not that of darkness, or barrenness, but of life."

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Philip Gambone, a retired high school English teacher, also taught creative and expository writing at Harvard for twenty-eight years. He is the author of five books, most recently As Far As I Can Tell: Finding My Father in World War II, which was named one of the Best Books of 2020 by the Boston Globe. It is available through Amazon, at the Biblioteca bookshop, and at Aurora Books off the Calzada de la Aurora.

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