Posts tagged: Victor Serge

#9. On Victor Serge and the Revolution in Danger

February 15, 2013, by Adam David Morton No comments yet

Let's defend the besieged camp of Soviet Russia! by D. Moor (1919)

In the 1920s Victor Serge published a series of pamphlets on the Russian Revolution that together form a unity. These were (1) During the Civil War; (2) The Endangered City, that was a series of journal articles; and (3) The Anarchists and the Experience of the Russian Revolution. These essays were first translated by Ian Birchall and have been re-published by Haymarket Books as Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia, 1919-1921. They are invaluable documents in their own right but also act as a crucial supplement to Serge’s novels, poetry, correspondence, and memoirs, much of which have been covered in For the Desk Drawer.

These writings, though, start with the period of the ‘civil war’ in 1919, when the revolutionary workers’ state in Russia was under attack from fourteen states – including Britain, France, the United States, Canada, Czechoslovakia, and Japan – that all sent military forces to assist the anti-communist ‘White Army’. Petrograd, the frontline red city of the Russian Revolution, was the key spatial target during this struggle over territoriality. As Serge grasped, struggles over the city’s isotopies (its broad avenues, its canals, the voids of its squares, and its monuments) would equally define and shape its utopias (its projection of non-places in novels, poetry, and musical composition).

#8. On Victor Serge and Absolute Power: Memoirs of a Revolutionary

January 11, 2013, by Adam David Morton No comments yet

Comrade Lenin sweeping scum off the earth by V. Deni (1920)

David Harvey famously opined that Paris was ‘a capital city being shaped by bourgeois power into a city of capital’, hence his focus on the organisation of relations of space in Paris, Capital of Modernity. It is an insight that Victor Serge may well have approved given the writer’s own acute awareness of the spatial order of urban development across not just Paris but also Barcelona, Berlin, Brussels, Petrograd, Moscow, Marseille and more.

This spatial awareness comes through vividly in Victor Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary, which also offers a rich and wide array of insights. The book has been recently published in a complete unabridged version by NYRB Classics accompanied by a wonderfully detailed glossary by Richard Greeman. To do justice to this important document in a short blog post would be nearly impossible. Nevertheless, my aim is to tease out some of the detail in the translator Peter Sedgwick’s comment that the book focuses on the ‘degenerescence of revolutions’ without collapsing into some kind of fatalism.

#7. On Victor Serge and Neon Loneliness: Unforgiving Years

December 18, 2012, by Adam David Morton 2 comments

Beyond the six novels written by Victor Serge, that make up the two informal trilogies on the ‘cycle of revolution’ [Men in Prison; Birth of Our Power; Conquered City] and the ‘cycle of resistance’ [Midnight in the Century; The Case of Comrade Tulayev; The Long Dusk] there is Unforgiving Years, which is the last novel he wrote in 1946. It is available as a NYRB Classic and Roy Johnson provides a good introductory overview of the novel. The book is set in various cities and geographical settings moving from Paris, to Leningrad, to Berlin, and ending in Mexico. Once again, readers are presented with distinctive insights on issues of space and territory, which are integrated throughout the novel and set within specific historical-geographical conditions. The spatial forms of the cities are central to the narrative, including decaying Paris, stoic Leningrad, and stricken Berlin, which are contrasted with the geographic scale and alternative promise of fertile Mexico. Assessing in more detail the forms of these city spaces as well as wider territorial and geographical developments in Unforgiving Years, once again reveals Victor Serge as a pre-eminent theorist of the spatial ordering of power and geography in the novel form.

#6. On Victor Serge and a Requiem for Paris: The Long Dusk

November 5, 2012, by Adam David Morton No comments yet

Marseille, Metropole Industrielle by Roger Broders (1883-1953)

Closing the second informal trilogy that comprises the ‘cycle of resistance’, as defined by Richard Greeman, The Long Dusk [1946] is Victor Serge’s sixth novel translated into English. The book is extremely rare and hard to come across and one cannot wait for NYRB Classics to republish this in its Victor Serge Collection. The Long Dusk is an adieu to Paris, France, and Europe from an assemblage of characters defined by Serge as a ‘family of stateless refugees’ facing Nazi occupied France in 1940. The constellation of characters based in Paris attempt to avoid the abyss of occupation by fleeing to Marseilles, some arriving on railway routes defined by the Paris Lyon Méditerranée Company (PLM), while others are carried by trucks loaded with ‘human potpourri’.

The Long Dusk is a prescient contemplation of the plight of stateless refugees as well as a requiem for Paris that offers further insight on the spatiality of state power. It delivers reflections on different landscapes of statehood and how the spatial form of the French state during the Vichy government extended across diverse zones, locations, places and regions. In The Long Dusk the reader is once again exposed to a narrative treatment of the territorial articulation of state space, the changing geography of state power, and the grip that forces acting in and through the state have on the subjects and agents of history.

#5. On Victor Serge and the Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

September 24, 2012, by Adam David Morton No comments yet

Delivering searing criticism on the psychosis of absolute power, Victor Serge’s fifth novel to be featured in my personal blog is a masterly work. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was written in 1942 and is situated in the context of the Great Terror in Soviet Russia orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. In the sequence that constitutes the ‘defeat-in-victory’ trilogy (preceded by Midnight in the Century [1939] and succeeded by The Long Dusk [1943-5]), the novel intersects in several subtle ways with Serge’s other books. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a chronicle of the Moscow arrests and show trials in the 1930s that pulls in a myriad of characters as well as the overbearing appearance of ‘the Chief’, Stalin himself. It does so by offering at least two intersections to aspects present in Serge’s earlier novels. First, it offers a set of intersecting elements linked to specific characters that appear in the earlier books; second, it offers direct intersections on the theme of space and the state. How the spatial logistics of the state, how the modern state organises space, and how the state engenders social relations in space are thus a quintessential feature of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.