Victor Serge

Victor Serge (1890–1947) was born to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles living in Brussels. As a young anarchist firebrand, he was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. In 1919, Serge joined the Bolsheviks. An outspoken critic of Stalin, he was expelled from the Party and arrested in 1929. Nonetheless, he managed to complete three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers such as André Gide and Romain Rolland. Hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947.

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Praise

“Victor Serge was a major novelist, a revolutionary, and a historical witness, so it is perhaps not surprising that his poetry has been overlooked. But his poetry is for real. It is as grounded in specifics as you might expect from a fighter in some of the twentieth century’s great struggles, and as visionary as you’d hope from a disciple of Rimbaud and a friend to the Surrealists. Reading it is like coming upon an unsuspected corridor in the house of literature. James Brook’s lucid translation does it full justice.”
—Luc Sante, author of The Other Paris and translator of Novels in Three Lines by Félix Fénéon

“In these dark times, the poetry of Victor Serge illuminates the deep continuum of revolutionary history. As all great work, it shows the power of both resistance & acceptance. Serge is noted for his prose but his poetry is in many ways more moving. It inspires the reader to stay true to the revolutionary spirit and will in its compassion, defiance, and outrage.”
—David Meltzer, author of San Francisco Beat: Talking with the Poets, When I Was a Poet, and Two-Way Mirror: A Poetry Notebook

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Praise

“One of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.”
—Susan Sontag

“I can’t think of anyone else who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge’s combination of moral insight and intellectual richness.”
—Dwight Macdonald

“To me he has seemed a model of the independent intellectual in Europe between the wars: leftist but not dogmatic, political yet deeply involved with issues of cultural life, and a novelist of very considerable powers.”
—Irving Howe

“I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.”
—Erich Fromm

“Victor Serge died in exile and obscurity, apparently no more than a splinter of a splinter in the Marxist movement. But with the passage of the years, he looms up as one of the great moral figures of our time, an artist of such integrity and a revolutionary of such purity as to overshadow those who achieved fame and power. His failure was his success. I know of no participant in Russia’s revolution and Spain’s agonies who more deserves the attention of our concerned youth.”
—I.F. Stone

“I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude toward the truth. . . . His life and its choices demonstrate an exemplary truth to which he was prophetically sensitive and which we should now accept as axiomatic. Institutions can be defended by lies, revolutions never.”
—John Berger, New Society

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Praise

“Nothing in it has dated. . . . It is less an autobiography than a sustained, incandescent lyric (half-pantheist, half-surrealist) of rebellion and battle.”
—Times Literary Supplement

“Surely one of the most moving accounts of revolutionary experience ever written.”
—Neal Ascherson, New York Review of Books

“Probably the most remarkable of his novels. . . . Of all the European writers who have taken revolution as their theme, Serge is second only to Conrad. . . . Here is a writer with a magnificent eye for the panoramic sweep of historical events and an unsparingly precise moral insight.”
—Francis King, Sunday Telegraph

“Intense, vivid, glowing with energy and power . . . A wonderful picture of revolution and revolutionaries . . . The power of the novel is in its portrayal of the men who are involved.”
—Manchester Evening News

“Birth of Our Power is one of the finest romances of revolution ever written, and confirms Serge as an outstanding chronicler of his turbulent era. . . . As an epic, Birth of Our Power has lost none of its strength.”
—Lawrence M. Bensky, New York Times

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Praise

“No purer book about the hell of prison has ever been written.”
—Martin Seymour-Smith, Scotsman

“There is nothing in any line or word of this fine novel which doesn’t ring true.”
—Publishers Weekly

“This is a remarkable book… Capable of Dostoyevskian intensity and power…”
—Francis King, Sunday Telegraph

“This novel, properly so called by its author, being truth worked up as art, is strongly recommended both as a document and as a powerful work of literature.”
—Robert Garioch, Listener

“Serge is a writer young rebels desperately need whether they know it or not. He does not tell us what we should feel, he makes us feel it.”
—Stanley Reynolds, New Statesman

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Book Events

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Reviews

• Men in Prison: An Anarchist Studies Review
• Anarchism, Marxism and Victor Serge on Counterpunch
• The Uncivil Servant: An International Poetry Tour
• Anarchists Never Surrender Reviewed on Anarchist Writers
• Anarchists Never Surrender: Review 31
• Men in Prison: An Anarchist Studies Review
• A Blaze in the Desert: A Review
• A Blaze in the Desert: A Review

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Interviews

• Uncontrollable Serge w/ Mitch Abidor on The Antifada Podcast
• An Interview with Mitchell Abidor in Bookslut

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Mentions

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Blog

• Uncontrollable Serge w/ Mitch Abidor on The Antifada Podcast

https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/

A reading by writers Luc Sante, Lawrence Joseph, Thomas Sleigh, Richard Greeman, Allan Graubard, Edwin Frank, and Harry Newman of the poetry of Franco-Russian writer and revolutionary Victor Serge at the Cornelia Street Cafe, New York, NY, October 25, 2017.