A New York Review Books Original. Victor Serge is one of the great men of the twentieth century, anarchist, revolutionary, agitator, theoretician, historian of his times, and a fearless truthteller. He was also a great writer, the author of dazzling works of fiction, including the novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev, perhaps the finest book to emerge from the crucible of Stalinist terror, and of these no less extraordinary memoirs. Here Serge describes his upbringing in Belgium, the child of a family of exiled Russian revolutionary intellectuals, his early life as an activist, his time in a French prison, the active role he played in the Russian Revolution, as well his growing dismay at the Revolutionary regime's ever more repressive and murderous character. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, and barely escaped the Nazis to find a final refuge in Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary describes a thrilling life on the frontlines of history and includes brilliant portraits of politicians from Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin and of major writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Above all, it captures the sensibility of Serge himself, that of a courageous and singularly appealing advocate of human liberation who remained undaunted in the most trying of times.
Peter Sedgwick's fine translation of Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary was cut by a fifth when it was first published in 1963. This new edition is the first in English to present the entirety of Serge's book.
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This is a republication of the 1963 Oxford University Press edition prepared and translated by Peter Sedgwick from Serge's original French text, and the new edition retains Sedgwick's introduction, along with a post-Soviet essay on Serge by Adam Hochschild, a usefully expanded glossary of short biographies and a number of charming and accomplished pencil sketches of Serge and his friends by his artist son Vladimir.
(The Guardian )About the Author
Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Czarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living "by chance" in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving for Russia to join the Revolution. Arriving in 1919, after a year in a French concentration camp, Serge joined the Bolsheviks and worked in the press services of the Communist International in Petrograd, Moscow, Berlin, and Vienna. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and jailed in 1928. Released and living in Leningrad, he managed to publish three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history of Year One of the Russian Revolution. 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 like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider's knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin's Moscow show trials and machinations in Spain which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (the latter also published by NYRB Classics), were written "for the desk drawer" and published posthumously.
Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. His books include King Leopold's Ghost, a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist and and winner of Mark Lynton History Prize, and Bury the Chains, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history and the PEN USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction. His most recent book is To End All Wars. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley.
Peter Sedgwick (1934-1983) was a translator of Victor Serge, and author of a number of books including PsychoPolitics.
Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper's Magazine, The New York Review of Books, The New York Times Magazine and The Nation. His books include King Leopold's Ghost, a National Books Critics Circle Award finalist and and winner of Mark Lynton History Prize, and Bury the Chains, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize for history and the PEN USA Literary Award for Research Nonfiction. His most recent book is To End All Wars. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California Berkeley.
Peter Sedgwick (1934-1983) was a translator of Victor Serge, and author of a number of books including PsychoPolitics.
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Most Helpful Customer Reviews
14 of 16 people found the following review helpful
By A Customer
Format:Paperback
This book has been out of print for over a decade. It's great to see it back again. Serge was a stateless novelist and anarchist who saw the events of the Russian Revolution until about 1930. He wrote mostly in French. His point of view is largely non-political. While imprisoned in France he was exchanged for some French prisoners held in Russia. He knew the poets, painters and so-called "oppositionist" writers in the early days of the Soviet Union. He describes their descent into disillusionment and inevitable destruction. He is at the very centre of the group of people who tried to humanise communism and preserve independence of thought. The style is fast and furious. He stops to describe a snowy starlit night, then rushes on to a poetry reading or to visit a friend in jail. There are only two other serious literary contenders for this point of view - John Reed's "Ten Days that Shoot the World" and Trotsky's own "My Life". Serge was so impressed by Orwell's "Homage To Catalonia" that he posted the manuscript of "Memoires" ("Cahiers") to him and trusted to fate. Luckily Orwell did the right thing. We can read the last flickering descriptions of a thriving literary scene collapse and die.
13 of 15 people found the following review helpful
By T. Gee
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
This book sweeps you up in the excitement of the russion revolution, then slowly but surely watches the early hope slip away. The book explains why it happened, how it happened, then what happened after and why. It is a treatise against authoritarianism and careerist loyalists and an appeal for sticking to your principles, even when that is against your interests. An epic but accessible read for any historian or activist
11 of 13 people found the following review helpful
By N. Rogall
Format:Paperback
I first read this book aged 18 in 1968. It had a huge impact on my life - opening to me the world of the Russian Revolution not through Cold War propaganda from the USA/UK or Stalinist lies from Moscow but from the pen of a witness who knew all the key figures in Russia. But Serge was so much more: anarchist then Libertarian Bolshevik, then unorthodox Trotskyist; a novelist and poet of the highest order; a historian whose 'Year One of the Russian Revolution' is astonishing; a man of action who had fought in the Russian Civil War, a victim of the purges exiled to Siberia and released through an active literary campaign in the west. Try his 'Comrade Tulayev' & Midnight in the Century as well, or his writings on the German Revolution and the Russian Revolution.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
By jbroad
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
I very much enjoyed reading this complete edition of the Memoirs of Victor Serge; the previous version had been condensed, whereas this version missed nothing out. The transition of the writer from an anarchist in Belgium and Spain to the Bolshevik Party in Russia is fascinating, but even more stunning is the honest critique of the way in which the Bolsheviks came to believe that they were right and everyone else was wrong to such an extent that they began to eliminate all opposition to their ideas.
1 of 1 people found the following review helpful
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Victor Serge's iconic autobiography was a book we used long ago to introduce students to the subject of literature and totalitarianism. It did two things: it gave us a lively and imaginative overview of 20th century history and politics from the Bolshevik Revolution to the death
of Trotsky; and it did this with a determined and delightful commitment to the cause of communist revolution, in spite of every betrayal, every atrocity, every degeneration of the workers' dream. And Serge was there in the thick of it, registering the poverty, crime and alcoholism within the would-be utopian Soviet Union, noticing that the Belgians were too fat and prosperous to make a revolution, and dying stateless, the ultimate outsider and internationalist, in a Mexican taxi.
This book has been out of print for ages. Now it has been reissued with some previously deleted passages, and some introductory material which for the first time benefits from the collapse of the Soviet Union and thereby signals the even greater relevance of Serge's work to a post-communist Russia and a globalised capitalism in crisis. Read this passionate memoir alongside Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, and you will get a real grip of that most bloody and radical era, the terrible 20th century with its dreams, nightmares, utopias, and its unfinished efforts to create liberty, equality and fraternity.
of Trotsky; and it did this with a determined and delightful commitment to the cause of communist revolution, in spite of every betrayal, every atrocity, every degeneration of the workers' dream. And Serge was there in the thick of it, registering the poverty, crime and alcoholism within the would-be utopian Soviet Union, noticing that the Belgians were too fat and prosperous to make a revolution, and dying stateless, the ultimate outsider and internationalist, in a Mexican taxi.
This book has been out of print for ages. Now it has been reissued with some previously deleted passages, and some introductory material which for the first time benefits from the collapse of the Soviet Union and thereby signals the even greater relevance of Serge's work to a post-communist Russia and a globalised capitalism in crisis. Read this passionate memoir alongside Eric Hobsbawm's Age of Extremes, and you will get a real grip of that most bloody and radical era, the terrible 20th century with its dreams, nightmares, utopias, and its unfinished efforts to create liberty, equality and fraternity.
By Germinal
Format:Paperback|Amazon Verified Purchase
Part autobiography, part memoir, part history book, part political analysis - total brilliance.
Amongst the heaps of garbage that are written about the Russian Revolution, the gems shine through and among the crown jewels stands Serge's 'Memoirs'.
Gone is the hackneyed lying about totalitarian conspiracies at the heart of Bolshevism, gone is the lie that the revolution wasn't a popular event, to be replaced by the memoirs of someone who was there and knew the truth: that the revolution was popular, that Bolshevism was not authoritarian and that the growth of authoritarianism was a consequence of events.
And superbly written.
Amongst the heaps of garbage that are written about the Russian Revolution, the gems shine through and among the crown jewels stands Serge's 'Memoirs'.
Gone is the hackneyed lying about totalitarian conspiracies at the heart of Bolshevism, gone is the lie that the revolution wasn't a popular event, to be replaced by the memoirs of someone who was there and knew the truth: that the revolution was popular, that Bolshevism was not authoritarian and that the growth of authoritarianism was a consequence of events.
And superbly written.
2 of 4 people found the following review helpful
By Dublin 4
Format:Paperback
Like any autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary is bound to be self-serving - and in this it is no different.
But that along with a swathe of philosophising towards the end are perhaps its only weaknesses.
Victor Serge was the archetypal `behind-the-scenes' operator. Born in 1890 in Brussels to exiled Russian revolutionaries, he was part of the left-wing milieus in his native city, Paris (where he was jailed) and Barcelona.
His life was interesting if not remarkable until the Russian revolution.
At this point, he decided to make his way to Russia - no easy task.
Once there, he was accepted by the Bolsheviks and given a plum job working under Zinoviev at the Comintern.
Serge claims in the book that he found the Bolsheviks' savagery hard to stomach but that the alternative was worse. He also claims that he was friendly with dissident left-wing factions, such as the Mensheviks and SRs, as well as liberals and conservatives - and that he did his best to save as many as possible from the firing squad.
Without doubt, the most interesting part is the period covered between his arrival in Russia in 1919 and the beginning (of the end!) of the `Oppositions' within the Party in the late Twenties. It's really astonishing how easily Stalin's opponents fell.
Kamenev was naïve, Zinoviev deluded, Trotsky arrogant and Bukharin greedy. These four men could have stopped Stalin but all decided to do so at the wrong moment - and never in unison.
By this stage, Serge was emasculated and victimised by the security services until imprisoned and exiled. But he wasn't executed; a fate shared by many of those who are mentioned in this fascinating book.... Read more ›
But that along with a swathe of philosophising towards the end are perhaps its only weaknesses.
Victor Serge was the archetypal `behind-the-scenes' operator. Born in 1890 in Brussels to exiled Russian revolutionaries, he was part of the left-wing milieus in his native city, Paris (where he was jailed) and Barcelona.
His life was interesting if not remarkable until the Russian revolution.
At this point, he decided to make his way to Russia - no easy task.
Once there, he was accepted by the Bolsheviks and given a plum job working under Zinoviev at the Comintern.
Serge claims in the book that he found the Bolsheviks' savagery hard to stomach but that the alternative was worse. He also claims that he was friendly with dissident left-wing factions, such as the Mensheviks and SRs, as well as liberals and conservatives - and that he did his best to save as many as possible from the firing squad.
Without doubt, the most interesting part is the period covered between his arrival in Russia in 1919 and the beginning (of the end!) of the `Oppositions' within the Party in the late Twenties. It's really astonishing how easily Stalin's opponents fell.
Kamenev was naïve, Zinoviev deluded, Trotsky arrogant and Bukharin greedy. These four men could have stopped Stalin but all decided to do so at the wrong moment - and never in unison.
By this stage, Serge was emasculated and victimised by the security services until imprisoned and exiled. But he wasn't executed; a fate shared by many of those who are mentioned in this fascinating book.... Read more ›
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