Literature and Revolution Archives

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.

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

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novelist, historian, revolutionary

Victor Serge (1890-1947) (real name Victor Lvovich Khibalchich) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian-Polish exiles. His father was an officer in the Imperial Guard who fled the country after the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. His mother was a Polish aristocrat and a teacher. Serge’s father found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy in Brussels, and then moved to France where he became involved in the radical Russian emigre community. As a child he often went hungry, he never went to school, and his younger brother died at the age of nine. He began work at the age of 15 as an apprentice photographer, then went on to work as a designer and a typographist, learning this trade in an anarchist printing works. Serge suffered privation and hardship throughout his life and spent over ten years of it in prisons.

He was strongly influenced by the works of the Russian anarchist Kropotkin and became an active journalist and translator in the revolutionary press. In 1912 he was wrongly accused of participating in the Bonnot Gang, a group of bohemian bank robbers. Several of his comrades were executed: Serge was given a five year jail sentence in solitary confinement, followed by five year’s exile.

Freed in 1917, he went to Barcelona to work as a typographer, and also took part in the popular insurrection there. In 1918 he volunteered for service in Russia, but was arrested and imprisoned without trial in Paris, because of the ban on his staying there. Then he was exchanged for an officer of the French military mission being held in Russia.

The whole sweep of his life as a writer, intellectual, historian, and revolutionary is covered in his autobiographical Memoirs of a Revolutionary. This covers the period between 1900 and 1940 and includes his early affiliations with the anarchists, his participation in the Russian revolution, and his fight against Stalinism. But it is much more than just a historical chronicle. It follows his intellectual and artistic development, and his dealings with lots of the major figures of the Left during this period – Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Georgy Lukacs.

Arriving in Petrograd in February 1919, he joined the Bolshevik Party and worked on the executive of the Third Communist International with Gregory Zinoviev, travelling to Moscow, Berlin, and Vienna. Meanwhile he also worked as a journalist for L’Humanité and Le Monde in Paris.

In 1923 he took part in the communist insurrection in Germany. Around this time he became increasingly critical of Soviet government. He joined with Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to complain about the way the Red Army treated the sailors involved in the Kronstadt Uprising. A libertarian socialist, Serge protested against the Red Terror that was organized by Felix Dzerzhinsky and the Cheka.

Following this he joined the Left Opposition group along with people such as Leon Trotsky and Karl Radek. Serge was an outspoken critic of the authoritarian way that Joseph Stalin governed the country and is believed to be the first writer to describe the Soviet government as ‘totalitarian’. Because of this, Serge was expelled from the Communist Party in 1928.

He was now unable to work for the government and over the next few years he spent his time writing Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930) and two novels Men in Prison (1930) and Birth of Our Power (1931). These books were banned in the Soviet Union but were published in France and Spain. He wrote in French: besides being the preferred language of Russian intellectuals of his generation, French assured him an international audience.

Susan Weissmann’s The Course is Set on Hope is the first full-length biography of Victor Serge. It draws on some of the recently-opened Comintern archives and shows Serge’s principled struggle to maintain socialist principles in his fight against the grip of totalitarianism. This covers the period from 1919 when Serge first went to take part in the Russian revolution, until his death in poverty and exile in Mexico in 1947.

In May 1933, he was arrested by the secret police (the GPU) and sentenced without trial to three year’s exile in the village of Orenburg in the Urals – an early outpost of what would become the Gulag Archipelago. Most of his colleagues in the Left Opposition that were arrested were executed, but as a result of protests made by leading politicians in France, Belgium and Spain, Serge was kept alive.

Protests against Serge’s imprisonment took place at several International Conferences. The case caused the Soviet government considerable embarrassment and in 1936 Joseph Stalin announced that he was considering releasing Serge from prison. Pierre Laval, the French prime minister, refused to grant Serge an entry permit. Emile Vandervelde, the veteran socialist, and a member of the Belgian government, managed to obtain Serge a visa to live in Belgium.

Serge’s relatives were not so fortunate: his sister, mother-in-law, sister-in-law (Anita Russakova) and two of his brothers-in-law, died in prison. All of his writings and personal papers were confiscated by the secret police. There have been several attempts made to have these released, especially after the fall of communism in 1989. They have still not been located.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is without doubt Serge’s masterpeice, and the finest novel written about the Stalinist purges of the 1930s. A government official is shot at random by a disgruntled Moscow youth, and this sets in motion a repressive crack-down in search of a ‘political conspiracy’ which does not really exist but which gives the forces of repression an excuse to eliminate their rivals. The youth goes free, even though he confesses, whilst completely innocent officials are forced to ‘confess’ to crimes they have not committed. The story is closely related to Stalin’s organisation of the murder of Kirov, the popular head of the Leningrad party district.

He returned to France in 1936 and resumed work on two books on Soviet communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937). He also published several novels and a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia. there was a voluminous exchange of correspondence with Leon Trotsky, though the two oppositionists eventually agreed to disagree.

When the Germans invaded France in 1940, he left Paris and travelled to Marseilles, and in 1941 left on the same ship as Andre Breton and Claude Levi-Strauss. His destination was Mexico – the only place which would grant him a resident’s visa. As soon as he settled there he became the object of violent articles and threats to his life from refugee Stalinists – who had recently assassinated Leon Trotsky.

It is astonishing to realise that alongside all his political activities and his time spent as a historian and novelist, Serge also found time to write on literary theory. His Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution offer reflections on modernist literary theory, Russian experimental writing, and the nature of the relationship between literature and politics. It gathers together for the first time the bulk of his literary criticism from the 1920s to the 1950s, giving an invaluable contemporary account of the debates about the production of literature in a socialist society, the role of intellectuals, the theory of ‘proletarian’ literature, as well as assessments of Soviet writers: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Blok, and the less well known Korolenko, Pilnyak, Fedin, Bezymensky, Ivanov, amongst others.

His last years were full of poverty, malnutrition, illness, police surveillance, slander and isolation. Yet he continued to publish novels such as Unforgiving Years, The Long Dusk and his masterpiece, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945. He continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.

Victor Serge – web links

Victor Serge and The Novel of Revolution – an essay by Richard Greeman, Serge scholar and translator (1991).

Unforgiving Years – an extended book review by Roy Johnson of Serge’s last great novel (2009).

Men in Prison – a book review by Roy Johnson, originally part of an essay which appeared in Literature and History

The Cycle of Revolution: Men in Prison – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Red Petrograd: Conquered City – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an extended book review by Roy Johnson, (2010).

The Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev– an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Midnight in the Century – extended book review by Roy Johnson (2010).

The Zero Hour: Midnight in the Century – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

Memoirs of a Revolutionary – an extended book review by Richard Greeman of Susan Weissman’s The Course is Set on Hope. Originally published in Issue 94 of INTERNATIONAL SOCIALISM JOURNAL, Published Spring 2002 Copyright © International Socialism.

Victor Serge Papers – Yale University archive

Revolutionary & Novelist – a biographical sketch (2009).

Victor Serge – an introduction to his work – brief notes on Serge’s major fiction and non-fiction (2008).

Victor Serge at Wikipedia – biographical notes, political ideas, works available in English, and web links.

Victor Serge and Socialism – an essay by Peter Sedgwick, first published in International Socialism (1st series), No.14, Autumn 1963, pp.17-23.

A Requiem for Paris: The Long Dusk – an essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

The City as Protagonist: Birth of Our Power – essay by Adam David Morton, part of his series relating literature to space, geography, and the city (2012).

On Victor Serge as Vagabond Witness – a review by Adam Morton of Paul Gordon’s Vagabond Witness: Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope (2013).

Victor Serge: A Political Biography – a review by Roy Johnson of Susan Weissman’s study of Serge’s politics as an intransigent Left Oppositionist (2013).

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