Notes from NYRB Classics
Dear Best Made Co.,
Thank you for putting together this Spring Reading Collection. We’re not sure what Victor Serge would have made of your artisanal ax(e)s, but we’re certain Patrick Leigh Fermor would have looked great in your Chitina Guide Sweater.
Warm regards,
NYRB Classics
February is Victor Serge month at the Brecht Forum.
John Berger drawing Tilda Swinton, on top of a copy of Victor Serge’s Unforgiving Years. (Apologies if the video isn’t working, it was having problems earlier).
When I first read these memoirs, as a young would-be Soviet historian at the time of their first publication in English, the paragraph that struck me most poignantly and remained imprinted was Serge’s confession that ‘the feeling of having so many dead men at my back, many of them my betters in energy, talent, and historical character, has often overwhelmed me, and that this feeling has been for me the source of a certain courage, if that is the right word for it.’ This remains one of the great lines in the annals of revolutionary memoir. On rereading, however, I found myself equally moved by Serge’s rueful meditations on the uses of human reason. ‘Many times,’ he writes, ‘I have felt myself on the brink of a pessimistic conclusion as to the function of thinking, of intelligence, in society’, even to the point of wondering whether ‘the role of critical intelligence’, which he had exercised so often and at such costs to himself, might not be ‘dangerous, and very nearly useless’. He banishes such thoughts rather lamely with the remark that societies need critical thinking and ‘better times will come’—but then adds, with more conviction, that in any case, the use of the critical faculty is ‘a source of immense satisfactions’ to the thinker. Perhaps, after all, we can regard the life of Victor Serge, perennial critic and dissenter, as, in a certain sense, a happy one.
—Sheila Fitzpatrick, reviewing Memoirs of a Revolutionary in The Guardian. Fitzpatrick was one of the leading figures of the second generation of “revisionist” historians working on the U.S.S.R. in the 1980s. Her early work focused on the social mobility of the early Soviet era, emphasizing that, though bloody, Stalinist purges enabled educated people from the lower classes to move upward in Soviet society, and therefore fulfilled some of the purposes of a democratic revolution. Serge himself, as Fitzpatrick points out in her review, was both a witness of the intolerance of criticism towards the Soviet regime (and the brutal suppression of it) and a critic of its undemocratic governance, but ultimately continued to believe in the Bolshevik revolution as a necessary movement towards (Serge’s words) “total transformation.”
Victor Serge’s son, Vladimir (or Vlady) Kibalchich grew up to be an accomplished artist. His murals decorate the reading room of the Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada in Mexico City.
Susan Wiseman’s memorial essay on Vlady describes his career and recounts some of his exploits—including that time he peed on Lenin.
(See Vlady’s sketch of his father’s hands here, and also note that our edition of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary includes quite a few of young Vlady’s drawings.)
Biblioteca Miguel Lerdo de Tejada on Flickr.
By Richard Greeman
Was Victor Serge moving to the right at the time of his death, as some have contended? Richard Greeman of the International Victor Serge Foundation addresses the question on the occasion of the publication of Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary.
“My Father’s Hands” by Serge’s son, Vladimir Kibalchich
“What would be Victor Serge’s political position if he were alive today?” During the sixty-odd years since Serge’s untimely death, this question—a priori unanswerable—has been asked (and answered) many times—on occasion, as we shall see, by self-interested politicos and pundits. The consensus among these postmortem prophets is that this hypothetical posthumous Serge would have moved to the right, along with ex-Communists like Arthur Koestler and the so-called “New York intellectuals” around the Partisan Review. It is of course impossible to prove otherwise. Yet the fact remains that throughout the Cold War neither the CIA-sponsored Congress for Cultural Freedom nor any other conservative anti-Communist group ever attempted to exploit Serge’s writings, which continued to speak far too revolutionary a language and remained largely out of print. Nonetheless, the specter of an undead right-wing Serge continues to haunt the critics, and there are reasons why.
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.
— Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years (via rednotebooks)
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.
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.
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.
Upcoming readings and discussions in New York, Boston and the Bay Area
Wednesday, April 25th at 6:00 pm
Victor Serge: Remembering a Revolutionary
With Michael Taussig, Ross Poole, and McKenzie Wark
at The New School, Wollman Hall, Eugene Lang Bldg, 65 West 11th Street, 5th Floor
Sunday, May 6th at 1:00 pm
Co-sponsored with PEN World Voices Festival of International Literature
A Place Out of Time: Gregor von Rezzori’s Bukovina Trilogy
with Michael Cunningham, Deborah Eisenberg, Daniel Kehlmann, and Edmund White; moderated by Edwin Frank.
Damion Searls will read from and discuss his English translation of Nescio’s Amsterdam Stories on both coasts in April and May
Tuesday, April 24th at 7:00 pm at 192 Books
Come and sip jenever and while listening to the words of one of Holland’s most beloved writers.
Tuesday, May 8th at 7:00 pm
City Lights Bookstore, San Francisco
with Peter Orner
Wednesday, May 9th at 7:00 pm
Co-sponsored by Books Inc and Palo Alto City Library
City of Palo Alto Library — Downtown Branch
Thursday, May 10th at 7:30 pm
Mrs. Dalloway’s Bookstore, Berkeley
with Jeroen Dewulf, Director of Dutch Studies Program, UC-Berkeley
Wednesday, May 23rd
Harvard Bookstore, Cambridge at 7:00 pm
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
