Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Sightline Books) - Softcover

Serge, Victor

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0877458278 ISBN 13: 9780877458272

Publisher: University Of Iowa Press, 2002

Synopsis

Victor Serge (1890-1947), an anarchist and democrat who initially supported the Russian Revolution, was a writer of rare integrity. In his masterwork, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he describes his impoverished childhood, his idealistic days as an activist in the left-wing movements of Europe, his eventual expulsion from the Soviet Union, his escape from Nazi agents in Paris, and his flight to Mexico as a political refugee. More than a personal memoir, this insider's history fills in the human details that add to our understanding of how mass movements take place, how governments become corrupted, how individuals survive in the midst of struggles between ideologies.

About this title

About the Author

Victor Serge (1890–1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-Tsarist 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 to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St.
Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge 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 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 of 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 (both available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.

Peter Sedgwick (1934–1983) translated and wrote the introductions for Victor Serge’s Memoirs and Year One of the Russian Revolution. A lifelong activist and a founding member of the New Left in Britain, he wrote seminal essays on Serge. In addition to his journalism and political writings, he is the author of a book, Psycho-Politics.

Adam Hochschild has written for The New Yorker, Harper’s Magazine, The New York Review of Books, and The Nation. His books include King Leopold’s Ghost and, most recently, To End All Wars. He teaches at the Graduate School of Journalism at the University of California, Berkeley.

George Paizis is the author of Marcel Martinet: Poet of the Revolution, Love and the Novel: The Poetics and Politics of Romantic Fiction, and, with Andrew N. Leak, The Holocaust and the Text: Speaking the Unspeakable. He is a longstanding member of the Socialist Workers Party and until recently was Senior Lecturer in the French Department at University College London.

Richard Greeman has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge’s novels (including Unforgiving Years and Conquered City, both available as NYRB Classics). A veteran Socialist and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Russia (www.praxiscenter.ru), Greeman is author of Beware Of “Vegetarian” Sharks: Radical Rants And Internationalist Essays.

Review

"An extraordinary time capsule from the darkest hours of the twentieth century. Although often compared to Orwell, Serge is a more noble and irreconcilable figure. This book--written as the GPU was exterminating the last of the Bolshevik old guard--is a fiery testament to political conscience and revolutionary hope. Through Serge, we know something of those gigantic but largely forgotten figures: the anarchist and communist opponents of Stalin."

Edition details

• Publisher: University Of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0877458278
• ISBN 13: 9780877458272
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 446