1. Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Guardian

    Enthusiasm took Serge to revolutionary Soviet Russia, and it was there that he began to notice that Bolshevik tyranny, rather than general incompetence, was going to be the problem (like Orwell, he despaired of the attraction of radical politics to people who refused to eat meat, or salt, or anything but fruit). Memoirs is a document that is essential, above all, as a denouncement of oppression, an eye-witness account, written in heat and at speed, but with the talent of the true writer, of what it was like to be at the heart of the machine – and to stand up to it.

    —from Nicholas Lezard’s review of Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Guardian. He ends the review by asking, “How it has taken so long to appear is one of those unfathomable mysteries. (Is it because some people can’t comprehend a humane revolutionary?) Anyway, here it is at last, and anyone who cares about justice and freedom of speech should have a copy.” We like that.

  2. Memoirs of a Revolutionary reviewed

    It doesn’t happen very often, but I love it when I pick up a book simply planning to scan the first few pages and find myself still reading an hour later.  It’s wonderful to get completely swept away, and I must say it was completely unexpected when I picked up anarchist Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1951; tr. from the French by Peter Sedgwick with George Paizis; 2012).  I don’t know why I expected this book to be somewhat dry; this is an NYRB Classic, after all, and one thing I’ve learned is that their books are first and foremost superbly written in a manner that utilizes language to capture the reader.

      - from a review of Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Mookse and the Gripes blog. Read the rest of the review here, it’s the kind we like best.

  3. Happy May Day and Memoirs of a Revolutionary Publication Day

    Today is May Day. And what better way to celebrate International Workers’s Day and remember the activists and reformers of the past by publishing Victor Serge’s autobiography Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the first time the complete text has been published in English. Serge had an incredibly active and courageous life, and this book is the story of that life and the fellow revolutionaries he knew along the way. The bio from the book sums it up well:

    Victor Serge (1890–1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living ‘by chance’ in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider’s knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and of machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written ‘for the desk drawer’ and published posthumously.

  4. Victor Serge talk tonight at The New School

    Tonight at The New School (Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Building, 65 W.11th St., 5th Fl.) at 6pm, Ken Wark, Ross Poole and Michael Taussig will be talking about the life and work of Victor Serge in honor of the publication of our edition of Memoirs of a Revolutionary, the first time the complete text has been published in English. For all event details go here.

    Serge led a truly amazing life: becoming involved as a very young man in the socialist and then anarchist movements in his native Belgium; continuing his work in Paris editing the anarchist journal L’Anarchie and sentenced for five years for his connection the Bonnot Gang; moving to the newly born Soviet Union in 1918  (he was exchanged for anti-Bolshevik French citizens arrested there) where he worked for the Third International, studied the Tsarist police archives, and was sent to Germany to foment revolution; joining the Left Opposition headed by Trotsky and working hard to publicize their ideas; being arrested and sent to exile in Orenberg for three years under Stalin; returning to Belgium where he communicated and worked with Trotsky and the POUM (anarchist) movement in the Spanish Civil War; and finally sailing to Mexico where he spent the remainder of his days writing.

    During all this he was able to write many novels in French, three of which NYRB Classics has published. No wonder Susan Sontag called him “one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.” If his life and work intrigues you come to The New School tonight and learn more.

  5. “Famous for his jokes.”

    Expelled from Party in 1927, readmitted in 1930. Tried for treason (second Moscow Trial of the 17 in 1937), confesses and implicates close friend BUKHARIN and others; spared death. Murdered by NKVD agents in labor camp. Famous for his jokes.

    An excerpt from Karl Radek’s entry in the glossary of the forthcoming edition of Memoirs of a Revolutionary by Victor Serge