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Unforgiving Years

October 22, 2009 by Roy Johnson

revolutionary hopes betrayed

Victor Serge is one of the most undeservedly neglected writers of the twentieth century. In his introduction to this recent translation of Unforgiving Years, Serge scholar Richard Greeman speculates that this might be because he cannot be easily categorised into any national literary tradition. Serge was born of Russian emigré parents in Brussels. He travelled widely throughout Russia and Europe as a revolutionary, and he wrote in French. Indeed, this linguistic fact may well have saved his life, because he was one of the few Oppositionists in Stalin’s reign of terror who was given permission to leave the Soviet Union – largely as a result of an international protest organised in France.

Unforgiving YearsUnforgiving Years is one of his last great works, written in exile in Mexico around the same time as Memoirs of a Revolutionary and The Case of Comrade Tulayev. It covers the years 1939-1945 and is split into four distinct sections, each one of which illustrates a facet of ‘Midnight in the Twentieth Century’ as Europe was plunged into horrifying conflicts dominated (at first) by two conflicting forms of totalitarianism. The first section is set in Paris at an unspecified period just before the outbreak of war.

Two secret agents, Sasha and Nadine, decide they no longer believe in the infallibility of the Party and its policies, and they decide to escape – knowing that they will be hunted down and possibly assassinated by agents – as many people were at the time. Every move they make is fraught with danger, and they fear betrayal at every step – even from each other. The Spanish civil war has ended in defeat, the liberal democracies are capitulating before the threat of Nazism, and Stalin is purging everyone in his wake – even including leading intellectuals and his best military commanders, just when he will need them most.

In part two, one of their comrades is sent on a mission to a frozen Leningrad besieged by the Germans in 1941 – to endure unimaginable hardships in support of one corrupt regime resisting another. Although Serge’s sympathies are clearly with the Russian people and not with the Stalinist aparatchicks, he might not have known at the time of writing that Stalin turned out to be responsible for killing more Russians than Hitler.

Daria – the only character to appear in all four parts of the book – tries hard to be a loyal Party agent, but she cannot stop herself questioning the perverted logic of any means, no matter how corrupt, justifying some theoretical ends. She cannot rid herself of humane sympathies for the people she sees suffering around her. In a novelistic sense she stands in for Serge himself, desperately trying to locate a set of values which will accommodate both aspirations towards democratic socialism and a liberal humanism which she can hardly even admit to herself.

Part three takes place in a Berlin devastated by allied carpet bombing as the Reich nears its apocalyptic end. Daria has volunteered for a mission behind enemy lines, working as a nurse under an assumed identity. Serge’s skill in this section is to recount the events from the points of view of loyal (non-Nazi) Germans, their belief in the war almost at breaking point. All the official news is ridiculously optimistic propaganda, and the entire population is surrounded by officials with orders to root out and destroy the slightest signs of doubt in the Fuhrer’s omnipotent wisdom – just as was happening in the East.

Throughout all the horrendous conditions he describes, the Comrades all behave impeccably – with only their ideological doubts bringing them down to the level of normal human beings. Of course they reflect the intellectual journey which Serge had made himself. But it should be borne in mind that the saintly Daria/Erna, whilst sleeping with young men out of compassion and tending war-shattered enemies in her capacity as a spy behind the front line, is in fact reporting back to a regime which was systematically slaughtering its soldiers who had come back from fighting the Nazis because they might have been tainted with democratic ideas – and were actually accused of being German spies. The Comrades can be admired for their aspirations, but they clung on to their allegiances for too long – though of course it’s easy for us to say that now.

In part four Daria has finally broken ranks with the Party and escapes to the New World to start a new life. She eventually locates Sasha and Nadine, who have retired to run a plantation in rural Mexico – hidden away from everyone. Sasha has resolved his ideological dilemma by making a connection with the primitive forces of an almost prehistoric world, yet he still wonders ‘Where did we go wrong?’ Nadine has ‘retreated’ into a mild form of schizophrenia. But just as they have feared all along, the Party will not forgive recusants, and a visiting archeologist turns out to be a Stalinist agent. He infiltrates himself into their confidence, poisons Sasha and Daria, then moves on to his next assignment.

It’s possibly the bleakest of all Serge’s novels – and no wonder. He himself was still being pursued by Stalin’s agents when he died (of a heart attack) in Mexico in 1946. Anyone not used to his narrative techniques might find the story difficult to follow. He was trying to escape the form and the methods of the traditional bourgeois novel by downgrading the individual in favour of the mass – a theory he expounds in Literature and Revolution. Fortunately he never quite managed it, but since he also fused his narrative with a poetic lyricism, the results are magnificent.

Unforgiving Years Buy the book at Amazon UK

Unforgiving Years Buy the book at Amazon US

© Roy Johnson 2009


Victor Serge, Unforgiving Years, New York: New York Review Books, 2008, pp.341, ISBN 1590172477


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Victor Serge an introduction

May 13, 2010 by Roy Johnson

the life and work of a revolutionary and novelist

Victor Serge an introductionVictor Serge (1890-1947) wrote under the most 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 work was banned throughout the communist period in Russia, and it has only recently become available there. It also has to be said that his work goes in and out of print rather a lot in English-language publications. A gifted linguist, he chose to write in French. Besides being the preferred language of Russian intellectuals of his generation, French assured him an international audience.

He wrote in a great variety of literary forms – poetry, journalism, novels, and political history, as well as some very good literary criticism and an excellent autobiography. All his work is very political, but it is shot through with what might be called a militant humanism. That is, he never let political dogma over-rule his compassion for his fellow men.

Victor Serge an introduction -Memoirs of a RevolutionaryIf you have not read his work before, a good place to start is his autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary 1901-1941 written when he was in exile in Mexico. It outlines his astonishing life in the first four decades of the twentieth century. He was active first as an anarchist, then as a socialist militant, as a typographer, a journalist, and then as a professional revolutionary. He spent time in poverty, in jail, and in armed struggle. And he seemed to know everybody who was important – people such as Leon Trotsky, Lenin, and Georgy Lukacs.

The pages of this memoir are packed with events and people, and he writes in a vivid, sparkling style which holds you gripped. His life is almost unbelievably dramatic, and he is not in the slightest self-pitying as he endures poverty, political persecution, jail, and exile. And all the time, not matter what the circumstances, he is being creative as a novelist, a historian, or a journalist. It is truly amazing that he survived a period which he himself called ‘Midnight of the Century’, and it’s a tribute to his creativity that this is what saved him, because his fame as a writer had spread so wide. He was sent into ‘internal exile’ by Stalin because of his oppositionist views, but a campaign for his release was launched in western Europe, and was eventually successful.

Victor Serge an introduction - Men in Prison The novels of Victor Serge fall into two sets of trilogies. The first deals with his early prison experiences, the failed Barcelona uprising, and the successful Bolshevik revolution. Men in Prison (1930) is based on his own life as a prisoner of the French during the first world war. Politically, it deals with his early anarcho-syndicalist beliefs, but in literary terms it belongs to the very Russian tradition of prison literature. More than anything, it is a heartfelt plea of human sympathy for the underdog, and a call to arms in favour of rebellion and resistance to all forms of repression and tyranny.

Victor Serge an introduction - Birth of Our Power Birth of Our Power (1931) is losely basd on Serge’s own experiences following his release from prison. It is centred on the events of the Barcelona uprising in 1918 and then after its failure moves on to the immediate aftermath of the successful Russian revolution in St Petersburg. Politically, these events trace the development of his allegiance from that of an anarcho-syndicalist to that of a Bolshevik, but a communist in the old sense – one with liberal-humanist values and a respect for democratic values.

Differences of opinion with the Stalinists who took over in the USSR led to him being sent into ‘internal exile’, where 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, but they have still not been located.

Following a successful campaign in the west for his release, 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 a volume of poetry, Resistance (1938) about his experiences in Russia. there was also a voluminous exchange of correspondence with Leon Trotsky, though the two oppositionists eventually agreed to disagree.

Victor Serge an introduction - Unforgiving YearsWhen 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 Stalin’s agents – who had recently assassinated Leon Trotsky.

His last years were full of poverty, malnutrition, illness, police surveillance, slander and isolation. Yet he continued to publish novels such as The Long Dusk, Unforgiving Years, and his masterpiece, The Case of Comrade Tulayev. His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published in the United States in 1945. Serge’s health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia. However, he continued to write until he died of a heart-attack in Mexico City on 17th November, 1947.

© Roy Johnson 2010


More on Victor Serge
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Filed Under: Victor Serge Tagged With: Birth of Our Power, Cultural history, Literary studies, Men in Prison, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, The novel, Unforgiving Years, Victor Serge

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