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Literature and Revolution

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collected essays, articles, and reviews

Marxists have always had a problem with theorising Art. Radical proposals for changing the State and replacing the power of one class with that of another does not sit easily with a taste for Beethoven, Michaelangelo, and Marcel Proust. And political sympathy for an oppressed class (the proletariat) has often resulted in wishing its artistic achievements into being. When a revolution (of sorts) did take place in St Petersburg in 1917, expectations were high that a different art would be formed in the new type of society. And at first it did start to happen. The graphic art of Rodchenko and El Lissitzsky, the architecture of Tatlin, and the poetry of Mayakovsky produced a native form of modernism whose influence is still alive today, almost one hundred years later. Literature and Revolution is Victor Serge’s on-the-spot essays engaging with the new literary endeavours of the period.

Literature and RevolutionBut none of these artists were working class, and before long Party apparatchiks were calling for the suppression of their work and demanding art that followed the Party line. Since the party had a monopoly of the means of production and even the supply of paper, they got what they called for. The result was worthless propaganda of the ‘boy meets tractor’ variety.

Victor Serge was able to avoid these ideological traps more than his contemporaries (and his predecessors) for two good reasons. The first was that throughout his life he retained a critical integrity that kept him free from any Party line prejudice. The second was that unlike many of the so-called theorists of his time, he was a practising artist. Even though he worked in the most appalling circumstances and spent the last twenty years of his life in exile, he produced two excellent trilogies of novels, as well as his amazing memoirs and other works.

The first part of this collection of his writings is on the subject of literature and politics, under the title of ‘The Theory of Proletarian Literature’. Serge is defending the political gains of the revolution and pointing out quite rightly that the proletariat is too busy defending itself and producing enough to sustain life to be creating great works of art.

The development of any intellectual culture takes for granted stable production, a high level of technique, well-being, leisure and time.

The so-called proletarian writing produced under Party diktat turned out to be entirely schematic, with heroes ‘bearing no resemblance to any human being one had actually ever met.’ But his argument is that this was to be expected.

The second part of the book is a collection of critical essays on literary topics written in the heat of events during the early 1920s. It’s interesting to note that they were all published in France – a fact which established Serge’s reputation outside Russia and later helped to save his life when he was granted permission to leave Russia at a time when his contemporaries were simply being shot.

These essays provide what’s called ‘A Chronicle of Intellectual Life in the Soviet Union’. Apart from beating the drum for Russian achievements at a time of austerity and shortages, the only artists to emerge from this honourably are the poets – Blok, Biely, Yesenin, and especially Mayakovsky, whom Serge puts into a category of his own, presumably because he was the most committed Bolshevik and therefore (in 1922) above criticism. The only other writer to emerge with laurels is Leon Trotsky, whose own Literature and Revolution closely resembles Serge’s own work.

There’s a section on individual writers – tributes to the poet Blok, novelist Boris Pilnyak who was an influence on Serge’s own literary style (shot during the purges) Gorky and Mayakovsky. Because so many of these articles were written during the early 1920s they have an optimistic tone and they speak of literary potential which is yet to be fully realised. Knowing as we do what happened shortly afterwards, they have a sort of unreality about them. It is therefore fortunate that the collection ends with appreciative notes on some of the same writers as they began to ‘disappear’ in the purges of the mid 1930s and onwards. This is why Serge was happy to accept Trotsky’s description of ‘the revolution betrayed’.

It is a dark but honest note on which to end the collection – his outrage at the murder of Osip Mandelstam and countless others in the purges, but it confirms that his line of argument on politics and literature was consistent, and it has been proved to be true.

Serge never fell into any of the crude over-simplifications of propagandist writing in his own fictional creations. His artistic practice was based firmly on the literary traditions which he and his fellow theorists would call ‘bourgeois’, and even though his material existence was light years away from the comforts of the western literary world of 1920-1945, he was in his own way a contributor to ‘modernism’.

He removed the central ‘I’ from the controlling individual consciousness of his narratives, and put in its place a more general ‘We’. That was his conscious political choice. We read his novels and come away with a sense of collectives or representatives of general social tendencies, rather than Big Individuals.

And his other literary techniques fit comfortably alongside other literary modernists – from Conrad to Woolf and Beckett. He uses extended metaphors, repeated motifs, sparkling imagery, blurs the distinctions between prose and poetry, flits from one point of view to another with no clunky connecting passages, and has what might be called a ‘mosaic’ rather than a linear approach to narrative.

Serge survived in terrible conditions in Mexican exile until 1946, and thank goodness he was able to produce his finest novels in those last years. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Unforgiving Years, and The Long Dusk stand as testaments to a passionate belief in truth, a militant critic, and a great artist.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, London: Francis Boutle Publishers, 2004, pp.367, ISBN: 1903427169

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Literature and the Great War

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conflict, culture, language, and literature 1914-1918

Literature and the Great War is a study of the relationship between language, literature, and the events of the conflicts that took place between 1914 and 1918. It also addresses the fact that quite a lot of what we call ‘war poetry’ and ‘first world war memoirs’ was not produced during that period, but many years later – for very good reasons.

With the exception of poetry, which can quickly capture impressions and emotions on the fly, most writing about major events in other genres such as stories, novels, documentaries, histories, and autobiographies require a period of reflection and digestion before they can be properly expressed. This is especially true of events as cataclysmically disruptive as the first world war – which turned the whole world’s view of itself upside down.

Literature and the Great WarThere were memorable and enduring works written during the conflict — Henri Barbusse’s Under Fire (1916) and the poetry of Wilfred Owen and Edward Thomas. However, the majority of works which seem to encapsulate both the horrors of the war and the almost universal sense of disillusionment which followed were produced almost a decade later — Robert Graves Goodbye to All That (1929), Ernest Hemingway A Farewell to Arms (1929), Richard Aldington, Death of a Hero (1929), Siegfried Sassoon Memoirs of a Fox-Hunting Man (1928), R.C. Sheriff Journey’s End (1929), Erich Maria Remarque All Quiet on the Western Front (1929)

There are a number of explanations for this delay. Many people felt that the horrors of the war were almost too shocking to write about at the time – especially when official propaganda and the newspapers were telling everybody about ‘heroic’ victories and not mentioning the vast number of men slaughtered (the hundreds of thousands killed were described as ‘wastage’).

After the war very few combatants wanted to talk about their experiences, and those who had survived understandably wanted to simply get back to normal life, often feeling guilty about those they had left behind on the Somme, Passchendale, and Gallipoli.

Because everyone had been persuaded that it had been a ‘war to end all wars’ there was a general sense that optimism would prevail. But then in the 1920s came a period of economic collapse, austerity, and poverty throughout most of Europe. Instead of having fought a war to achieve a better world, it appeared that nothing had been achieved at all, and the huge sacrifice of lost lives had been wasted. .It was the period from late 1920s onward when the spate of angry, critical, and anti-establishment narratives concerning 1914—1918 were produced

Nor should it be thought that during the war itself the public were eager for critical accounts of the carnage, the gassings, and the colossal numbers of people killed. Some of the most popular publications at the time were patriotic and religious works speaking to ‘heroism’, ‘sacrifice’. and ‘victory’.

Stevenson’s (persuasive) argument is that society in the post-war period felt saturated by this sort of language, and writers purged their vocabularies of these now-corrupted abstract generalisations. They used instead a language of concrete nouns, in which only that-which-can-be-known was named. Hence the rise in popularity in the 1920s of writers such as Ernest Hemingway, whose terse and pared-down literary prose style had been shaped by his experience of the first world war:

I was always embarrassed by the words sacred, glorious, and sacrifice and the expression in vain … I had seen nothing sacred, and the things that were glorious had no glory and the sacrifices were like the stockyards at Chicago …. Abstract words such as glory, honour, courage or hallow were obscene beside the concrete names of villages, the numbers of roads, the names of rivers, the numbers of regiments and the dates.

The Sun Also Rises (1926) and A Farewell to Arms (1929) were enormously popular at the time, and went on to influence two or three generations of writers (particularly writers of thrillers and crime fiction) until the fashion for this sort of writing faded (following Hemingway’s suicide) in the 1960s.

Stevenson argues that the war produced a fracturing of time and language. Events began to be described as ‘pre-war’ and post-war’; double summer-time was introduced; and ordinary men and women were plunged into a linguistic vortex in which official language in no way reflected the reality they faced every day in the trenches.

An interesting point he makes about the language of the war is that many of the volunteers and conscripts who took part from the early days of 1914 onwards would be young men (almost boys) who at that time had probably never travelled more than a few miles beyond their own towns and villages. Consequently, since there was at that time, no national broadcasting system, they would never have heard speech other than their own regional accents.

In addition to this, they were plunged into Picardy, where the vast majority of them had never heard the French language spoken before. It is not surprising that towns such as Ypres and Auchonvillers were translated into ‘Wipers and ‘Ocean Villas’ and indeed the satirical newspaper produced by the troops was called the Wipers Times. Newly conscipted men also had to grapple with enormous amounts of army slang and jargon – some of it remnants of the imperial past. Words such as cushy, blighty, and dekko were Hindi or Urdu in origin.

The latter part of the book is devoted largely to the reception and evaluation of poetry produced during the war and in the years since, reminding us that at the time religious and patriotic poetry was far more highly regarded, whereas the critical reputation of writers such as Owen, Thomas, and Sassoon has taken much longer to establish

I was glad to see that he put the reputation of Rupert Brooke into perspective. Brooke had glorified a jingoistic sense of Englishness and war prior to 1914 but didn’t actually have any first-hand experience of combat – dying of a rather inglorious flea bite before he reached Gallipoli.

Stevenson does his best to be fair to modernists such as T.S.Eliot and Virginia Woolf, but he misses the opportunity to note that almost the whole of the Bloomsbury Group and its adherents were pacifists during 1914-1918. And this was not based simply on an unwillingness to fight, but on a genuine sense of internationalism and the belief that the war was a huge mistake which need not have taken place. Indeed, before the war had even ended Leonard Woolf helped set up the League of Nations (which went on to become the United Nations) with the sole aim of preventing any further conflicts of its size and kind between nations.

This was an extremely unpopular view to hold at the time – though it has become increasingly sane with hindsight. People were jailed for ‘conscientious objection’ and of course this is a period when young men were executed and crucified in no-man’s-land for crimes of ‘cowardice’ and falling asleep on duty. The only other people to oppose the war on internationalist grounds were figures such as Trotsky and Lenin.

Stevenson’s final chapter considers revisionist histories of the war which have been produced in recent years. He gives their defence of the blundering generals and the gigantic carnage a fair hearing, but eventually undermines their arguments with a few well chosen quotations that emphasise his concluding argument – that we need to read closely and not be swayed by rhetoric and false metaphors.

Revisionist history cannot be accused of ignoring the war’s loss and mutilation. [Gary Sheffield’s] Forgotten Victory is regularly attentive to the ‘callous arithmetic of battle’ and the ‘butcher’s bill’ that resulted. Yet Sheffield also suggests that at one stage that the Canadians’ capture of Vimy Ridge in 1917 was achieved ‘with relatively little difficulty, although at the cost of 11,000 casualties’. Such remarks cast doubt on his promise of ‘analysis based on firm grasp of the facts’. Avoidance of difficulty, even relatively, at the cost of 11,000 casualties, is not fact but interpretation, the kind of interpretation the generals were apt to make themselves.

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© Roy Johnson 2013

Randall Stevenson, Literature and the Great War 1914-1918, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp.262, ISBN: 019959645X

Love in Bloomsbury

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the memoirs of Frances Partridge

Beautiful, well read, and educated at Cambridge, Frances Partridge was a member of the Bloomsbury Group and until quite recently the last survivor of the group’s most famous love quadrangle. Love in Bloomsbury is a collection of her memoirs, which sketch out her childhood and adolescence, then focus on that celebrated quartet, two of whom were doomed, the other two survivors. Her story begins and ends in Bloomsbury, because she was raised in an upper middle-class Edwardian family in Bedford Square.

Love in Bloomsbury She was the youngest of a large family which also included her sister Ray Marshall, the painter (who later married David Garnett). They were friends of both the Stracheys and the Stephens (Virginia Woolf‘s family) and her education included school at Queen’s College, Harley Street (which Katherine Mansfield also attended) then Newnham College Cambridge, where she graduated in English and Philosophy.

Her introduction to the Bloomsbury set was via her job at David Garnett’s bookshop. She gives a vivid account of parties, dancing, and the heady artsy-Bohemian atmosphere which flourished after the first world war. There are character sketches of all the principal Bloomsberries, Virginia Woolf, her sister Vanessa Bell, and Roger Fry, though like most of them when it came to writing their memoirs, she is extremely discreet and gives little away about the background to what were in some cases quite extraordinary liaisons.

She formed a relation ship with Ralph Partridge, who was at that time married to Dora Carrington, who in her turn happened to be in love with Lytton Strachey, with whom Carrington lived – though there is no open acknowledgement of the complex sexual relationships between the principals. You would never know from this for instance that Dora Carrington had affairs with women as well as men.

Frances Partridge

There are some delightful vignettes: a long summer weekend at Charleston with Vanessa Bell and Duncan Grant, then a visit to Gerald Brenan‘s house in the Spanish Alpujarraras (which he describes in his classic, South from Granada).

Lots of famous names flit through the pages – Arnold Bennett, Princess Bibesco, Cyril Connolly, Maurice Chevalier, and even Ludwig Wittgenstein. At one point, once her relationship with Ralph Partridge has become established (there was a rather hurried marriage) a child appears – only to disappear seven words later.

In the second part of the book her account centres on the late 1920s, reaching its climax in the death of Lytton Strachey and the subsequent suicide of Dora Carrington. After that, the narrative comes to a quiet ending, celebrating the central Bloomsbury belief that friendship ought to be cherished and celebrated.

I actually enjoyed the earlier schoolgirl and student years of her account more than the later, though her confirmation of some of the famous Bloomsberry anecdotes that one has read elsewhere does help to authenticate their veracity.

It should also be said that the writing is very stylish and poised. Frances Partridge went on to become a prolific writer in her later years, translating from French and Spanish, including work by the Cuban Nobel prizewinner Alejo Carpentier, but mainly devoting herself to her memoirs of the years which follow these.

© Roy Johnson 2000

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Frances Partridge, Love in Bloomsbury, Boston: Little, Brown, 1981, pp.244, ISBN: 0316692840

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Ludwig Wittgenstein

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portrait of the tortured Anglo-Austrian ‘genius’

Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889-1951) was born into an aristocratic and fabulously wealthy family in Vienna at a time when it was the epicentre of the Hapsburg empire. The family was Jewish, but had largely converted to Christianity. It provided a very rich cultural and intellectual environment – Brahms, Mahler, Klimt and Schiele were family friends. Ludwig was the youngest of eight very talented children but was regarded in comparison as not very bright. He studied at the same secondary school in Linz as Adolf Hitler, did poorly in most subjects, lost any scraps of religious belief. and came under the influence of Schopenhauer, Karl Kraus, and the anti-Semitic misogynist work Sex and Character by Otto Weininger, a homosexual and Jew who became a cult figure following his suicide at the age of twenty-three.

Ludwig Wittgenstein

Even though Wittgenstein’s first thoughts about philosophy began in his late teenage years he continued his studies in engineering (under his father’s influence) and in 1908 went to Manchester to study the very young discipline of aeronautics. He invented an early form of jet engine and even patented the design for a propeller – but his real interest had been piqued by reading Bertrand Russell’s The Principles of Mathematics. In 1911 he introduced himself to Russell at Trinity College Cambridge – a meeting which was to be decisive for both of them. He gave up engineering and the following year became Russell’s student.

Bertrand Russell

The relationship between them was complex and emotional. Russell regarded Wittgenstein as his intellectual successor in the study of philosophy, but quickly tired of his self-obsessed rantings and his neurotic behaviour. As a recognised ‘genius’ ( though still only twenty-four and an undergraduate student) Wittgenstein was immediately proposed as an Apostle – but he resigned the honour just as immediately, despite the support and continued sponsorship of the prestigious John Maynard Keynes.

Wittgenstein formed a close bond with fellow student David Pinsent – and given what we know of his later homosexuality it is difficult to escape the suggestion that a great deal of his lacerating self-criticism and worries about ‘sin’ and ‘one great flaw’ are attributable to repressed homo-eroticism. They took a holiday together in Norway which was full of emotional scenes, fallings-out, and reconciliations.

Meanwhile, Russell’s work on the fundamentals of logic was abandoned because of Wittgenstein’s criticisms. Russell handed over the baton to his student, his own confidence completely shattered. Wittgenstein developed the neurotic idea that he was shortly going to die, and that in order to complete his great work he must cut himself off from society and live alone like a hermit. This also included leaving Cambridge, so he went to live in a remote Norwegian village for a year, submerged himself in logic, put his relationship with Russell on a cooler footing, and immediately started paying court to G.E. Moore, who was a central figure at Cambridge following the success of his Principia Ethica in 1903.

However, when he discovered that his work on logic could not be submitted for his B.A. degree (because it entirely lacked a preface, structure, examples, and critical aparatus) he took out his anger on the unsuspecting Moore, and the two of them did not speak again for fifteen years. Following this disappointment he returned home to Vienna and gave large sums from his personal fortune to literary artists and painters whose work he did not know at all.

The soldier

At the outbreak of war in 1914 he immediately enlisted in the army but since Austria was at war with Britain he found himself on the opposite side to all his friends. He served in a variety of menial roles for a year before he was granted his fervent wish – to go to the front and face death. He did face it – and behaved with conspicuous bravery. It is amazing to note that despite his active military service, he continued to work on what became his magnum opus, the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. But he also changed its original purpose: the final work on symbolic logic was blended with reflections on religious mysticism, which is one of the reasons why the work is still so difficult to understand. But his death wish was denied him. He was taken prisoner by the Italians at Monte Cassino and was not released until August 1919.

After the war, he was a changed man. He continued to wear his army uniform (of a state that no longer existed) ; he gave away all his money to his brothers and sisters (who were already enormously wealthy); and he enrolled to train as an infant school teacher. He could not get his book published (or understood) and he was beset by repeated thoughts of suicide as he grappled with his inner daemons . (It’s worth noting that three of his brothers had previously committed suicide.) His experiences as a village schoolmaster were at first a relief from his Weltschmerz, but within a couple of terms he had concluded that the local villagers were ‘loathsome worms’.

Then in 1922 his luck changed: his book was published in both Britain and Germany – though because of the work’s inherent unreadability he didn’t receive any royalty from sales. He continued working hard but unhappily in rural schools until his penchant for corporal punishment got the better of him, and when a young boy collapsed after a beating around the head. Wittgenstein disappeared the same day.

The architect

Following this crisis Wittgenstein tried to become a monk, but was rejected by the monastery because of his ‘unsound motives’, so he took work as a gardener, then threw himself into work on the design of a house for his sister Gretl. He also became mildly enamoured of a Viennese woman Marguerite Respinger, but his idea of love was of a sexless, platonic kind. Then gradually, via meetings with other Viennese philosophers, his original interests resurfaced, and he felt the need to return to Cambridge.

In 1919 he was forgiven and re-admitted as an Apostle; he registered as a PhD student, and worked with a supervisor who was seventeen years younger than him. He made new acquaintances (including the literary critic F.R. Leavis) continued ‘research’ which consisted largely of challenging his own previous ideas, and enjoyed watching westerns at the cinema with his non-philosophic friend Gilbert Pattisson. He was awarded a doctorate for his Tractatus, after a farcical viva in which he forgave his supervisors (Russell and Moore) for their inability to understand his work.

In 1930 he was awarded a five year fellowship on the strength of what was published after his death as Philosophic Remarks. This cleared him to abandon philosophic theory and start to concentrate on language. Many of his approaches and attitudes at this period chimed in rather unfortunately with the reactionary notions popularised by Oswald Spengler’s The Decline of the Westwhich was influential around this time. This makes it less surprising that his next development was to look into the subject of magic and Frazer’s The Golden Bough (which T.S. Eliot had done some years previously) and it is even less surprising to realise that this led in its turn into outright anti-Semitism.

The apostate

Wittgenstein was very ambivalent about his racial heritage. His family were Jews who had largely converted to Christianity (Catholicism) but it was fairly clear that part of his anguished self-criticism sprung from an unwillingness to confront the truth of his origins (as in the case of his wealth and privilege) and the consequence of the self-hating and anti-Semitic Jew corresponds directly with the influence of Otto Weininger, whose reactionary opinions seem to run through Wittgenstein’s life like letters through a stick of rock.

Meanwhile he invited Marguerite, the woman he thought he was going to marry, for a three week holiday in Norway. He hardly saw her at all during that time, having also invited his friend Gilbert Pattisson. Not surprisingly, she decided he was not the marrying kind and left for Rome after two weeks. During this period Wittgenstein’s intellectual work proceeded in two directions: one was to undermine current notions of the philosophy of mathematics (he regarded maths as merely a technique for measurement) and the other was looking more and more closely into the roots of grammar, inventing for himself what he called ‘language games’.

At a personal level he became very close friends and eventually the lover of another young, clever, and very handsome undergraduate, Francis Skinner, someone who despite all his brilliance and promise, Wittgenstein eventually persuaded to give up academic life to work as a factory mechanic, which resulted in him becoming profoundly unhappy. Wittgenstein repeatedly urged the virtue of manual labour onto his students, whilst retaining his own position as a professional academic philosopher.

His teaching methods around this time were distinctly unorthodox. He gave up delivering lectures because they had become so popular. Instead, he dictated his ideas to a small group of favoured students, then let them circulate their notes amongst other students. This is the origin of what became known as The Blue and Brown Notebooks.

As his fellowship at Cambridge came towards its close, he faced another period of self-doubt and uncertainty. For a while there was a hare-brained scheme of going to work as a manual labourer in the Soviet Union – but that came to nothing, even after letters of introduction from the Russian ambassador in London. Instead, he retreated once again to living alone in Norway.

The confessions

However, from there he paid visits back home to Vienna and Cambridge to deliver a Tolstoyan ‘Confessions’ of his sins to friends and relatives. These turned out to be embarrassing revelations of trivial peccadillos and omissions of truthfulness which left most of his listeners mystified. What he doesn’t seem to have included is any mention of his homosexuality, which was subsumed under the heading of ‘sensuality’ in his diaries, along with detailed reports of his feelings of shame at masturbating.

In 1937, amidst Hitler’s manoeuvres to annex Austria, he was back in Vienna, missing Skinner but feeling at the same time that he should steer clear of ‘sensual temptations’. Instead he went to Dublin to investigate the possibility of a career in medicine. But following the Anschluss and his reclassification as a German Jew, he followed the advice of his friend and fellow philosopher Sraffa and obtained a job as research assistant at Cambridge and applied for British citizenship, which was granted in June 1939.

He moved in with Skinner and they lived together as a couple for the next two years. Wittgenstein was elected Professor of Philosophy and continued his lectures criticising what he saw as ‘scientific idol worship’. One of the students in his select audience who dared to take an opposing view was the young Alan Turing, who went on to develop his own philosophy of mathematics (in Manchester) to establish the foundations of modern computing.

When the war got under way two further events changed the direction of his life. First the sudden death of his lover Francis Skinner, and second his decision that he must give up teaching and take up some form of manual labour. He became a hospital porter at Guy’s Hospital in London. However, when his talents (and identity) were recognised, he was invited to join a medical research team based in Newcastle.

His next move was to Swansea where he had been given permission to continue his work in private. He continued with the philosophy of mathematics as his main concern, but began to include reflections on Freudian psychology and what he called ‘private language’. He arrived back in Cambridge in 1946 at the same time as his old tutor Bertrand Russell, who had been in America during the war. Both of them though the recent work of the other was worthless.

The living death

Following the end of the war, he was severely critical of the British government and its punitive attitude towards Germany, and he became rather sympathetic to the Left, though from a deeply conservative and an anti-science point of view. His antipathy to professional philosophy also deepened, and he regarded his own professorship as ‘an absurd …kind of living death’.

But as he wrestled with his pessimism and his plans to abandon philosophy (especially Cambridge) a glimmer of light came into his life. He fell in love with Ben Richards, a medical undergraduate almost forty years his junior. But to his existential worries was now added the issue raised by all such relationships – would it last? He answered this question for himself in characteristically perverse fashion by resigning from his post and going to live alone in a remote part of Ireland for the next year.

Once there, he thought he was losing the ability to do any constructive work, and the locals all thought he was mad. His only form of entertainment continued to be detective magazines and American ‘hard-boiled’ fiction. After a holiday in Vienna and Cambridge, he went to live in a hotel in Dublin, where he became a member of the Zoological Gardens in Phoenix Park. At first his work went well, but then he became ill and depressed, and despite uplifting visits from Ben Richards he began to feel that the end was drawing nearer.

In fact he had two years left to live, and he spent them living with friends in New York, Cambridge, and Oxford. He participated in philosophy seminars at Cornell University, but then became ill and felt he must return to Europe to die. Back in Cambridge he was diagnosed with prostate cancer. He returned to live in the family palace in Vienna (where his sister was also dying) taking a great deal of trouble to conceal the nature of his disease from his relatives.

When the hormone treatment for his cancer brought about improvement, he moved back to Cambridge, despite all his continuing claims that he was disgusted by English culture. He undertook another holiday trip to Norway with Ben Richards, but his illness forced him back, where he moved into his doctor’s appropriately named house, ‘Storeys End’. The hormone treatment was stopped; he realised he was soon to die; and he put in a final creative burst for the last two months of his life, then died in April 1951 at the age of sixty-two.

*****

Wittgenstein spent a great deal of his adult life in states of anguish, anxiety, and despair, even though he was very successful and became internationally famous. In this sense he was not unlike his fellow genius of the Hapsburg Empire and near contemporary, Franz Kafka, of whose works Wittgenstein remarked – ‘That man gives himself a great deal of trouble not writing about his trouble’ (though he could almost be speaking about himself). This apparent contradiction and perversity in Wittgenstein’s nature can perhaps be illuminated if not fully explained by a comparison with Leo Tolstoy.

Both Wittgenstein and Tolstoy came from extremely wealthy families with estates and retinues of servants; both felt guilty about the social privilege they enjoyed, and both ended up giving away their fortunes. Both of them adopted puritanical and Spartan lifestyles and became more or less vegetarian. Both of them felt driven by but enormously guilty about their sexual urges. In addition to this Wittgenstein was also homosexual, about which he would be forced to be secretive during the period he lived.

Both of them were obsessed with a religious belief in fundamental Christianity whose policies and practices they could not possibly maintain. Wittgenstein also knew that he was fundamentally Jewish, but tried to evade the fact. They were both intellectuals who railed against the intellectual establishment and preached the values of ‘the simple life’ and the moral dignity of manual labour – whilst keeping servants or being looked after by friends.

Both professed to yearn for a life in close proximity to simple peasants, but were appalled by the reality when they tried it. Both of them were misogynists; both of them affected workmen’s clothes; both were sceptical about scientific development, and both of them ended by repudiating their earlier works – Wittgenstein for intellectual reasons, Tolstoy for moral. This may not be a full explanation for his neuroses, but it suggests that they were not unique. Ray Monks’ magnificent biography is evasive on the issue of Wittgenstein’s homosexuality and it downplays the damaging effect of his peronality on the people who were attracted to him, but he presents a sufficiently comprehensive account of the life to enable us to make our own judgements on this very complex character.

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© Roy Johnson 2015

Ray Monk, Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius, London: Vintage Books, 1991, pp.654, ISBN: 0099883708

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Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness

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Secret Life and Shameful Death of the Classical Record

Norman Lebrecht is a writer and pundit specialising in classical music who often appears on Radio 3 taking phone-in commentaries on what the BBC supposes to be very controversial topics such as “Should government subsidise the Arts?” and “Is the Internet taking over from print journalism?”. He comes across in the spoken word as a pushy and self-aggrandising windbag, but I must say that in Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness the same approach makes for lively reading.

Maestros, Masterpieces and MadnessWhat he offers here is a history of recording classical music, from its faltering start at the beginning of the last century, to the present. His main argument is that what was at first perceived as a somewhat impure medium gradually took hold of the public imagination when the technology became affordable in the form of the LP record and then the CD. This led to an explosion of recording the classics which was fuelled by vainglorious recording companies and famous conductors alike. This accelerated until the whole system ground to a point of collapse brought on by their greed, by over-production, and a failure to see changes in mass media.

That’s the story in a nutshell, but it is told via a combination of detailed insider knowledge of how classical music works as a business, with celebrity vignettes, potted biographies, and what might be called lashings of The Higher Gossip.

Many of the principal conductors we think of as cultural icons and household names emerge from these pages as vain, self-seeking, and egotistical monsters – pocketing huge sums in secret deals behind the backs of their employers, and moving from one orchestra and city to another in a relentless search for more prestige.

This starts with figures such as the mercurial and dictatorial conductor Toscanini and the unscrupulous record producer Walter Legge, and then moves into more recent years with company takeovers which seem more motivated by whim and rivalry than any artistic or business logic.

He’s very well informed about all sorts of details. How Decca was a haven for gays (Britten, Tippett, Maxwell Davis) and how Deutsche Grammophon (owned by Siemens) had used slave labour from the death camps to keep its empire going.

The golden years are awash with lucrative record deals, and projects which replicate every popular classic known to man, ten times over. But then in the 1960s things begin to change. That’s because the record companies suddenly realise that they are making more money out of pop music.

By the end of 1956 Elvis had sold $22 million worth of discs and merchandise in the US, half as much as the whole of the classical market.

From this point onwards there was a struggle between pop and classical in the board rooms. One brought in the money, the other wasted it on a prodigious scale. Despite a temporary revival with early music, the end was in sight. And when it came there was lots of grief and pain for everyone. By the time we reach Internet downloads and Peer-2-Peer filesharing, the game is up.

You’ll love this story if you are interested in behind-the-scenes of the music world, and gossip about those people with high reputations but much lower levels of behaviour. It’s got schadenfreude by the bucketload. (Actually, that’s a fair example of Lebrecht’s style rubbing off on me.)

And yet for all his dirt-dishing on the famous, he actually supports a high patrician line of cultural conservatism. You get a strong sense of regret that things have turned out as they have. He doesn’t see the process he describes as one of change, fuelled by one technology after another, which probably has more people listening to classical music than ever before – as I am doing right now, over the Internet.

© Roy Johnson 2007

Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness Buy the book at Amazon UK

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Norman Lebrecht, Maestros, Masterpieces and Madness, London: Allen Lane, 2007, pp.324, ISBN: 0713999570

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Marcel Proust Illustrated Life

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biographical notes, charming illustrations, and photos

This short biographical study offers an introduction to Proust’s strange life, and his unrelenting devotion to creativity. It’s written by an expert, and presented in a very attractive manner with archive photographs on almost every page. Mary Ann Caws admits from the outset that with so many other excellent biographies of Proust available [by George Painter, Ronald Hayman, and William Sansom] there’s no point in writing another.

Marcel Proust Illustrated LifeInstead, she produces an account of Proust which takes themes and motifs from his life as a starting point for meditations upon them – some of them not much longer than a single page, and others stretching out in more leisurely fashion to make well-informed reflections on the social context which gave rise to his work.

For those who don’t know Proust well, she includes a sufficient number of tantalizing biographical details to whet any appetite for more. He slept between eight in the morning and three in the afternoon, then worked late into the night, fueled (like Balzac) by strong coffee and a variety of drugs. He turned up to the best restaurants in the middle of the night and paid for special dinners to be laid on. He left some of his best furniture to a male brothel which he frequented.

Caws is steeped in knowledge about Proust and his background, and her account moves easily from his personal life to cultural issues. Her most extensive chapter is a lengthy analysis of Proust’s relationship to music, and the influence of the Ballets Russes on Paris and London in the early years of the last century. She also discusses the influence of the English art critic Ruskin on Proust’s literary style, and notes in addition his enthusiasm for the work of Thomas Hardy.

The beginner expecting a chronological introduction to the main events in Proust’s life might be disappointed, but by way of compensation it is the photographs and illustrations which make this book such a charming experience. The images of late nineteenth century Paris which inspired so much of his work are surrounded by sketches from his notebooks, paintings of the people who inspired his characters, and photographs that you rarely see elsewhere.

© Roy Johnson 2005

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Mary Ann Caws, Marcel Proust: an illustrated life, New York: Overlook Press. 2005, pp.112, ISBN: 1585676489

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Mediactive

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new journalism, new publishing, new media

Mediactive is the latest stage in an argument that has been developing for some time now. In 2004 Dan Gillmor launched the notion of the ‘citizen journalist’ in his polemic We the Media. He argued that news is too important to be left entirely in the hands of professional journalists, and that bloggers (who were at that time a new phenomenon) had a corrective influence that should be encouraged. Since anyone with access to a computer and the Internet can start blogging within five minutes, it was in the power of ordinary people to create an additional and maybe an alternative voice to the established press and the broadcast media. They can also do this at virtually no cost, because the open source movement makes powerful software available to us free of charge. Since that time the sales of print newspapers have been plummeting, and bloggers have risen in importance and influence, to the extent that all major newspapers now have their own staff bloggers, having once ridiculed their very existence.

Mediactive Mediactive is Gillmor’s update to these arguments, in which he urges us all to become more active, sceptical, and open consumers of information – but also active participants in its creation. And he even provides the tools to do the job. In the past you needed to own printing presses, publishing companies, and distribution networks to make even the smallest item of information available to a wider audience. But now all that has changed. Because as he argues very persuasively (referencing Clay Shirky) – the barriers to entry are virtually zero. “You don’t need anybody’s permission, and you don’t need much money either”. In other words, individual entrepreneurs now have an entirely new opportunity to make information available to the public.

His book is in three parts: first, the arguments for becoming active in the creation of media (print, blogs, video, podcasts); second, the tools for engagement and how to use them; and third, the large socio-legal issues and conflicts in online advocacy and the realms of media literacy in education.

This is an interesting book in its own right as a physical object. Mediactive exists primarily as an on-going project, a web-based set of resources, of which this printed book is only one manifestation, which might well be called Version 1.0. Other manifestations already exist as web pages, and you can download the whole thing as a PDF file free of charge at Mediactive.com. In time, as new materials, updated evidence, modifications, and corrections are made, the version number will change – just as in the case of software at the moment.

Dan Gillmor is one of those people who believe that making books available as free downloads increases the sales of a print version. It has to be said that in this form of print on demand (POD) format these books are not very attractive. They have small page margins, the first lines of paragraphs are indented, typography is crude, and perhaps worst of all, underlining is used to show where hyperlinks exist in the online version.

It has no index, footnotes, or bibliography. All of these are available in the master copy which exists on line. It’s rather like a book that has been produced by an enthusiastic amateur using a desktop publishing kit. It’s also written in bite-sized chunks for reading on screen. What works in one medium doesn’t necessarily translate well without problems for another

However this is the Brave New World of publishing and distributing ideas, and I think we might expect a few rough edges in these emerging forms, just as I’m equally confident that production standards will rise as the form matures. If you don’t believe me, have a look at any document you produced twenty years ago.

Basically he wants us all to become more vigilant and active participants in using the new media tools at our disposal. His strongest argument in support of citizen media against traditional journalism and especially broadcast media is also its smallest and simplest elements – the hyperlink and the comment. If television news reports an event, we have no way of clicking through to check the source of the information or any alternatives there might be, and we have no way of offering corrective feedback or criticism.

Having urged participation, he then goes through the best known of the new media tools – blogs, YouTube, Flickr, and even content management systems (CMS), though like me, he drew the line at Drupal as a techie step too far.

All this creates an entirely new opportunity to the individual entrepreneur in any field of interest. That’s because the barriers to entry are virtually zero. “You don’t need anybody’s permission, and you don’t need much money either.”

He poses interesting questions and raises thought-provoking questions. For instance, the apparently simple query: “What is journalism?” If somebody documents arguments over a planning application to build a new factory in their neighbourhood on a blog – is that journalism? And if not, why not? His answer would be yes – because even though you are not paid for writing the article or employed by a newspaper, the article is performing the function of journalism by making information publicly available.

He also poses an interesting notion that is reflected in the very nature of the book itself. “When is a work complete?” Why shouldn’t a digital work live on and accrue to itself all the modifications, corrections, additions, and links to further information that become available over time? There is no reason why a book should not be like a Wikipedia entry – subject to constant updating and revision.

Of course this idea leads in turn to the question “What is a book?” – to which this production is an interesting answer. Of course we are accustomed to a book being a relatively static or fixed entity, existing in maybe at the most two or three editions. But there is no reason why we should not refer in future footnotes and references to Book Title, Version 3.1.5

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© Roy Johnson 2011

Dan Gillmor, Mediactive, Lulu.com, 2010, pp.183, ISBN: 0557789427

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Memoirs of a Revolutionary

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an extraordinary life in radical left politics 1905-1941

Memoirs of a Revolutionary the autobiography of one of the most remarkable writers in the first half of the twentieth century, and yet his work is hardly known outside a small coterie of admirers. He was a novelist, a poet, a historian, and a political activist. His parents were Russian emigrees; he was born in Belgium; he wrote in French; and he died in political exile in Mexico in 1947. Memoirs of a Revolutionary is a new edition of his political autobiography, which stretches from his youth in Brussels, Lille, and Paris, to his participation in the Russian revolution. It covers his days as a Left Oppositionist, and his eventual exile at the hand of Stalin, to his last desperate years searching for escape on a ‘planet without a passport’ until he was finally able to record this deposition of courage and fortitude.


Memoirs of a RevolutionaryThe first pages are filled with an account of his youthful ideals – mainly centred on a form of libertarianism and anarchism, though recollected from a politically mature point of view. There is remarkably little about his own personal life except his admiration for his father, the fact that he never went to school, and the poor life he eked out as a typesetter and a machine tool draughtsman.

His story really begins in Paris, where he lived amongst the poorest, giving language lessons, doing translation work, and writing articles for left-wing newspapers and magazines. It was 1909, and all sorts of political groups were active and (as was often the case) at war with each other – anarcho-syndicalists, Christian democrats, ‘illegalists’ (robbers) and exiled Russian revolutionaries, towards whom Serge felt drawn.

As the editor of a left-wing newspaper he was asked to give evidence against an anarchist gang who carried out a series of desperate raids in 1910. He refused, and was sent to jail for five years. He summarises this next half decade, since the details of his incarceration were transformed into the content of his first documentary novel Men in Prison.

It cannot be stressed too strongly how almost all of Serge’s writing was produced under enormous constraints of time and resources. He wrote whilst in exile, in hiding, and in transit. There were few opportunities for revision, fact-checking, or the sort of re-drafting that most authors take for granted. Everything was produced white-hot – which might account for his direct, compressed, and telegraphic style.

On release from jail he went to Barcelona and took part in the 1917 uprising (something he documents in his second novel, Birth of our Power), but feeling that the real revolution was taking place in Russia, he volunteered for ‘repatriation’ to a country in which he had never set foot, arriving in Petrograd in 1919.

Almost immediately he was recruited into the services of the Third Communist International because of his language skills and knowledge of western Europe, even though at this time he was not a member of the Communist Party.

He committed himself to the Bolsheviks, whilst at the same time being aware of their weaknesses and mistakes – the greatest of which he believed to be the creation of the Cheka, the secret police or state-within-a-state which changed its name frequently but not its pernicious effects.

He paints an unflinchingly honest picture of the Revolution and its aftermath – the disjuncture between official propaganda and the reality of mass starvation, the black market, failed production, and an economy run on useless banknotes.

After a failed attempt to create a self-sufficient commune amongst the famine and poverty in the countryside, he decided that the future of the Revolution lay in the West, and moved to work secretly for the Communist International in Berlin.

Victor Serge - portraitHe worked as a secret agent, using multiple identities and the cover of a job as journalist and editor. His real job there was to assist the promotion of the German Revolution ‘planned’ for October 1923. This was a period when Marxist orthodoxy thought that revolutions could be planned and organised according to theoretical principles, without troubling to analyse or face any social facts. When the revolution failed to take place, he de-camped to Prague. However, even though conditions there were less severe, he felt unable to act effectively, and so, as a Trotsky supporting oppositionist and at the worst possible time, he loyally returned to Leningrad in 1926.

The number of famous people he knew personally is astonishing – political figures such as Zinoviev, Maxim Gorky, Lenin, Trotsky, and Georg Lukacs, but also artists and poets such as Anna Akhmatova, her husband Nikolai Gumilev, plus Alexander Blok and Sergei Yesenin – all of whom he wrote about in his Literature and Revolution.

At times his account reads like a novel, which is not surprising since the narrative is composed of vivid character sketches, scenes recounted from participants’ points of view, sparkling atmospherics and mise en scene, sensational episodes, sudden murders or suicides, and all the time a dramatic tension created by his efforts to survive when all around him are being imprisoned and shot.

If there’s a chapter that’s less briskly paced than the rest, it’s that dealing with the expulsion of the Left-Oppositionists from the Party into exile, jail, and (later) extermination. But Serge’s justification is that of writing as ‘testament’. He passionately wished to place on record the tragic ‘betrayal of the revolution’ exactly as it unfolded.

This period (1926-1928) was followed by the first of the show trials – fabricated crimes in which nobody believed which were used as an excuse to eliminate any traces of criticism of the executive. The punishment for pre-determined outcomes was imprisonment and a bullet in the back of the head.

All of this repression was taking place at the same time as the central committee was responsible for more or less criminal levels of mismanagement of the economy . Famines were created through deliberate stupidity; millions of people were displaced from their land; millions more starved to death. This is the period which forms the background to what many people believe is Serge’s greatest novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev

In 1933 Serge was finally arrested by the secret police, imprisoned, and when he refused to confess to his non-existent crimes was exiled to Kazakhstan for three years. He records this experience in the third volume of his first trilogy, Midnight in the Century.

He was saved from extinction by the reputation as a writer he had built up in western Europe – particularly France. In the literary conferences called in 1935 and 1936 his case was raised and calls made for his release. Eventually Romain Rolland made a personal appeal to Stalin, and Serge was released.

The police stole his manuscripts and his belongings, but he was deported to Belgium. Even there he was pursued by lies and slander propagated from Moscow. This vilification was accepted by European left-wing parties which were in the process of setting up the Popular Front in co-operation with Stalin against fascism.

Stalin repaid this gullibility with cynical betrayal in the Hitler-Stalin pact of 1939 (and its secret protocols) which was rapidly followed by the Nazi invasion of France. Hundreds of artists and intellectuals (as well as refugees from the Spanish Civil War) crowded into southern France hoping to gain visas for the Americas. Serge was in the company of people such as Alma Mahler, André Breton, Marcel Duchamp, Max Ernst, Leon Feuchtwangler, and Walter Benjamin (who committed suicide on the Spanish border).

Serge made it to Mexico in 1941 – and that’s where his memoir ends, though he was to live another six years in Mexico city – persecuted and shot at by the same agents of Stalin who had murdered Trotsky with an ice pick in 1940. Serge kept on writing until the very end, producing political analyses and also his two greatest novels The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years. He died of a heart attack in 1947.

If you have never read this classic memoir before, make sure you get this new edition. When it was first released by Oxford University Press in the 1960s one eighth of it was cut on economy grounds. The missing sections have now been restored and the whole of Peter Sedgwick’s remarkable translation is now presented in its entirety for the first time.

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© Roy Johnson 2012

Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, New York: New York Review Books, 2012, pp.521, ISBN: 1590174518

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Men in Prison

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the forging of revolutionary consciousness

In common with many other revolutionary writers, Victor Serge turned to fiction as a result of being excluded from active political life when he was expelled from the Communist Party as a Left Oppositionist in 1927. Writing in exile under extremely difficult conditions, he set himself the task of presenting in fictional form an account of revolutionary developments during the first three decades of the twentieth century – in most of which he had been personally involved. Men in Prison is the first volume in two separate trilogies he created to cover this historical period.

Men in Prison It’s a fictionalised account of his own experience of having been imprisoned by the French authorities between 1912 and 1917 because of his sympathies for a group of anarchists. Its form is the traditional one for jail memoirs of overcoming a lack of possibilities in terms of plot by splitting the material into separate chapters dealing with the common tropes of imprisonment — its topography, warders, fellow inmates, survival, resistance, food, work, and the prisoner’s endless problem of dealing with passage of time.

The prisoners spend long, poorly paid hours in workshops – ‘the rule is work and silence’ – with severe punishments for infractions of rule and discipline. The weak and poor are driven into the ground, bad conditions create bad health, men expire horribly after a lifetime of work, misery, and deprivation, and any possibilities of resistance or rebellion are crushed between very narrow limits. It requires colossal efforts of will and self-discipline merely to stay human and survive.

All of this is an accurate reflection of life in the outside world – particularly that prior to 1914. The world, that is, seen from a proletarian point of view. In his attempt to create a new kind of novel Serge not only allies himself with the working class politically, but tries to reflect much of its consciousness and culture in his literary method.

the form of the classical novel seemed to me impoverished and outmoded, centring as it does upon a few beings artificially detached from the world … My first novel had no central character; its subject was not myself, nor this or that person, but simply men and prison.

Men in Prison is densely studded with the portraits and potted biographies of his fellow prisoners, rich in illustrative anecdote, in analysis of human behaviour, and in factual accounts of the details of penal regulations and their practical effects on the lives of inmates. Using a fast, vigorous style Serge populates his novel with everything from the thumbnail sketch, through silhouettes, to the condensed biography which will offer the essential facts of someone’s life. Not what they think they are, what their motives might be, or what extenuating circumstances they might plead, but what they have done – manslaughter, fifteen years penal servitude, learnt five languages, robbed banks, or written a book on Goethe.

Ex-Captain Meslier, accountant … an intelligent, ageless face ravaged by fever, struggle, debauchery, and alcohol. The Indo-Chinese and Sahara campaigns. Alcohol. Left for dead, riddled with javelin wounds, one night of battle in the African jungle. Legion of Honour. Alcohol. Wild nights in Paris. Alcohol … had written to his mistress, a demi-mondaine infatuated by this mad hero: ‘Fifty francs tonight, or I’ll kill you’ … paid only thirty month’s imprisonment for that slit throat … In the lines he used to bow to passing buddies, then he let fly at them with horrible insults behind a friendly glance. In church on Sunday, he would sometimes sit down at the organ and play amazing pieces by Bach or Handel by heart.

The characters come off the page thick and fast – a dazzling cast list of humanity – all treated quite fairly according to character as manifest through acts in the material world. Captain Meslier has participated in France’s imperial plunder, but he is not to be reduced to a military caricature and is credited with his playing of classics – which says far more about the psychology of colonialism than a naively committed piece of propagandist fiction.

Serge’s form of narrative address presents an interesting example of the way in which political attitude is given an aesthetic formulation. Instead of selecting and sticking to a single mode (the first person singular would have been the most obvious) he uses all possibilities, swinging freely from one to another. From the first person – ‘I was no longer a man, a man in prison’ – to the impersonal third – ‘man imprisoned differs from man in general, even in his outward appearance’ – to the personal – ‘He is still wearing the cause of his good or bad fortune … an ordinary beige overcoat’ – and back to the second – ‘Yesterday you had a thousand worries’. Sometimes in this mode, from within the narrative itself, a person is given hortatory encouragement and addressed personally – ‘Defend yourself Legris, show you’re a man like the others’. But undoubtedly the most significant is his use of the first plural, the collective voice – we:

I have not lost the years it has taken from me. We have committed great errors comrades. We wanted to be revolutionaries: we were only rebels. We must become termites, boring obstinately, patiently, all our lives. In the end, the dyke will crumble.

This is a fresh and an ideological approach to narrative that he was to develop in the novels that followed. Men in Prison is the initial volume of Serge’s first triptych that documents his political move from anarcho-individualism towards revolutionary organisation, patience, and planning. He started from that new position in his next novel, Birth of Our Power.

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Victor Serge, Men in Prison, London: Pluto Press, 1978, pp.260, ISBN: 090461350X

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Midnight in the Century

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revolutionaries face betrayal and defeat

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. He wrote under extremely difficult conditions, much of the time whilst living in exile – in his adopted homeland Russia, in France, and in Mexico. He frequently had to write in secret and he smuggled his work out of the Soviet Union to be published in France and Spain. His writing was banned throughout the communist period in Russia, and it has only been available there quite recently. Midnight in the Century is the third volume in his first trilogy documenting the struggle for left wing ideals against the tyranny and totalitarian power of Stalin and all he stood for.

Midnight in the Century His novels are presented in the form of self-contained chapters that sometimes appear to have very little connection with each other. Characters are developed, then suddenly seem to disappear, only to pop up again later in a different context. What Serge was doing was trying to capture the chaotic state of a world in political flux, and create representative figures rather than outstanding individuals – though in the end what he produced turned out to be not unlike the traditional European novel.

He was writing as a witness to history – putting on record the terrible events and dilemmas faced by those who wished to keep a radical political view of the world alive. when it was faced by two totalitarian nightmares at the same time – Nazism and Stalinism. That’s why this novel is called Midnight in the Century. Loyal communist party members who had fought to free their country from Tsarist oppression were confronted by a government which betrayed their revolution, and the slightest criticism they made of the Stalinist regime was interpreted as an act of sabotage, aiding the Nazis. [It is no accident that those two systems of terror eventually united to fight on the same side.]

These grave diggers were born to understand each other. Enemies and brothers. In Germany, one is burying an aborted democracy, the child of an aborted revolution. In Russia, the other is burying a victorious revolution born of a weak proletariat and left on its own by the rest of the world. Both of them are leading those they serve – the bourgeoisie in Germany, the bureaucracy here at home – towards a catastrophe.

Serge’s central figures are the idealists, the left-oppositionists who believe in the revolution and work in a self-sacrificing manner for its success. But they are surrounded on all sides by members of the corrupt bureaucracy who are the agents of its betrayal. Of course it is easy to see with seventy years’ hindsight that these left oppositionists, for all their honour, bravery, and discipline – were still searching for a version of the ideological myth that had been imposed on the entire Soviet state – the notion that there was a single, unifying theory which would explain world history and allow the future to be planned.

Midnight in the Century is set in the 1930s, in the period of Stalin’s consolidation of power and his elimination of all opposition. Mikhail Kostov, a university lecturer in Historical Materialism is a left oppositionist sympathiser. He is arrested, thrown into a horrible prison, and left there until he is so demoralised that he writes the ‘confession’ required of him. This results in his being exiled to a remote outpost which is a squalid backwater of the Soviet state. Even there, official diktats and target production quotas are used to oppress the ragged bunch of exiles, peasants, and prisoners who live a pitiful existence of what Marx called ‘rural idiocy’ without even enough to eat.

Stalin’s so-called planned economy is shown to be a complete disaster, based as it is on a combination of wish-fulfilment, lies, and official propaganda. Those few people still capable of any independent thought keep their spirits alive by sending secret messages to their colleagues in similar circumstances. All of them are surrounded by spies, informers, and willing agents of a duplicitous state. Official government policies are based on a form of what we would now call Political Correctness – a series of policies completely out of touch with the reality of people’s lives.

As Stalin manoeuvers the Central Committee into yet another bout of oppression launched in the name of preserving democracy, its waves of terror are shown rippling throughout the archipelago of the GULAG. The regional governor has his quota of detainees to produce, but is driven to distraction because they will not confess to crimes they did not commit. As the oppositionists are all rounded up for yet another spell in prison, the youngest of them escapes, and the novel ends with him in a far flung corner of the Soviet empire, working on a construction site that is building a new Secret Police headquarters.

The novel was written in France between 1936 and 1938 when Serge was finally exiled from the USSR. It lacks the dramatic intensity of his two final masterpieces, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years which he wrote in Mexico. But in it he was honing his style, which is his own special brand of literary modernism. The narrative passes from one character to another with seamless transitions, and as it does so he is very fond of entering the point of view of the character on whom the narrative rests, and showing events from that character’s point of view – often using the second person ‘you’. This can sometimes be seen as an outer narrator commenting on the character, and other times the character reflecting on him or herself. Kostrov reflects on the failures of his past and his present ill health as he endures solitary confinement:

You knew very well that you were breaking her heart. Now this pale memory is breaking your heart. For your life is over. You’re still attached to it since your flesh still remembers these feelings. Of no importance. You think you’re unique and that the universe would be empty without you. In reality you occupy in the world the place of an ant in the grass. The ant moves along carrying a louse-egg – a momentous task for which it was born. You crush it without knowing, without being aware of it. Without the ant itself being aware of it. Nothing changes. There will be ants until the end of the world who will bravely carry louse-eggs through the tunnels of the city. Don’t suffer on account of your nullity. Let it reassure you. You lose as little when you lose yourself – and the world loses nothing. You can see very well from up in an aeroplane, that cities are ant hills.

Serge also has what might be called a supra-continental viewpoint from which to depict events. No matter how anguished and personally tragic a character’s situation, we are repeatedly reminded that all of us are specs of dust in any Great Scheme of Things. Not that there is any great scheme – even that psychologically consoling idea is kept at bay. There is only struggle, and the will to be rational and try to understand things. These are the small crumbs of comfort he offers us from this, the bleakest moment in Europe’s history.

Despite the fact that many people might find the subject matter of this novel somewhat specialised or esoteric, the central issues Serge dramatises are fundamental to a full understanding of the ideological and political history of the twentieth century. The sad fact is that in some parts of the world they are still being played out – now, in the twenty-first.

Midnight in the Century Buy the book at Amazon UK

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© Roy Johnson 2010

Victor Serge, Midnight in the Century, London: Writers and Readers, 1982, pp.246, ISBN: 090461395X

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