by Victor Serge
The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Vie et Mort de Léon Trotski, 1951), by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Wildwood, 1975; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2012. Still the most concise, authentic, and well-written Trotsky biography, based on the two authors’ intimate knowledge of the man and his times and on Trotsky’s personal archives (before they were sealed up in Harvard).
Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941) Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951. Translated by Peter Sedwick. New York: NYRB Classics, 2012. Originally titled “Souvenirs of Vanished Worlds,” Serge’s Memoirs are an eyewitness chronicle of the revolutionary movements Belgium, France, Spain, Russia, and Germany studded with brilliant portraits of the people he knew. This is the first complete English translation and comes with a glossary.
The Serge-Trotsky Papers: Correspondence and Other Writings between Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky. D. Cotterill, ed. London, Pluto Press, 1994. Includes their personal letters and polemical articles as well as essays on Serge and Trotsky by various authors.
Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution. Translated and edited by Al Richardson. London: Francis Boutle, 2004. Includes Serge’s reports on Soviet Cultural life in the 1920s (published in Paris in Clarté), studies of writers like Blok, Mayakovsky, Essenin, and Pilniak as well as his highly original contributions to the debate on “proletarian literature” in the 1930s.
Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938. Oakland: PM Press, 2015. An original anthology of Serge’s writing on anarchism translated, edited, and introduced by Mitchell Abidor. Foreword by Richard Greeman.
BOOKS IN FRENCH:
Carnets, Expanded edition with newly discovered manuscripts presented by Claudio Albertani. Marseille: Agone, 2012. Notebook sketches and meditations dating from 1936 to 1947 on subjects ranging from Gide, Giraudoux, and Trotsky to Mexican earthquakes, popular wrestling matches, and death.
Le tropique et le nord. Montpellier: Maspero 1972; Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Four short stories: Mer blanche (1931), L’Impasse St. Barnabé (1936), La folie d’Iouriev [L’Hôpital de Léningrad, 1953] and Le Séisme [San Juan Parangarcutiro]
Retour à l’Ouest: Chroniques, juin 1936-mai 1940. Preface by Richard Greeman. Marseille: Agone, 2010. From the euphoria of Pop Front France in June 1936 to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, Serge’s weekly columns for a trade union-owned independent daily in Belgium provide a lucid panorama of this confused and confusing period.
MANUSCRIPTS:
The Victor Serge Papers (1936–1947), Beinecke Library, Yale University. Twenty-seven boxes of correspondence, documents, and manuscripts (mostly unpublished) on a wide variety of subjects from politics to Mexican anthropology. Catalog online:
http://drs.library.yale.edu:8083/fedoragsearch/rest?filter=&operation=solrQuery&query=Victor+Serge+Papers.
The Life of Victor Serge
1890 Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (Victor Serge) born on December 30 in Brussels to a family of sympathizers with Narodnik terrorism who had fled from Russia after the assassination of Alexander II.
1908 Photographer’s apprentice and member of the socialist Jeunes-Gardes. Spends a short period in an anarchist ‘utopian’ community in the Ardennes. Leaves for Paris.
1910–1911 Becomes editor of the French anarchist-individualist magazine, Anarchie. Writes and agitates.
1912 Serge is implicated in the trial of the anarchist outlaws known as the Bonnot Gang. Despite arrest, he refuses to turn informer and is sentenced to five years in a maison centrale. Three of his co-defendants were guillotined.
1917–1918 Serge is released from prison and banned from France. Goes to Barcelona where he participates in the syndicalist uprising. Writes his first article signed Victor Serge. Leaves Barcelona to join the Russian army in France. Is detained for over a year in a French concentration camp as a Bolshevik suspect.
1919 Arrives in Red Petrograd at the height of the Civil War. Gets to work organizing the administration of the Communist International under Zinoviev.
1920–1922 Participates in Comintern Congresses. Edits various international journals. Exposes Tsarist secret-police archives and fights in the defense of the city.
1923–1926 Serves Comintern as a secret agent and editor of Imprekor in Berlin and Vienna. Returns to the Soviet Union to take part in the last stand of the left opposition.
1927 Series of articles on the Chinese Revolution in which he criticizes Stalin’s complacence towards the Kuomintang and draws attention to the importance of Mao Zedong.
1928 Expelled from Communist Party and relieved of all official functions.
1928–1933 Barred from all other work, Serge takes up writing. He sends his manuscripts to France, since publication in the Soviet Union is impossible. Apart from many articles, he produces Year One of the Russian Revolution, 1930; Men in Prison, 1930; Birth of Our Power, 1931; and Conquered City, 1932.
1933 Serge is arrested and deported to Orenburg in Central Asia, where he is joined by his young son, Vlady.
1935 Oppositionists raise the ‘Case of Victor Serge’ at the Congress for the Defense of Culture in Paris. Paris intellectuals campaign for his freedom.
1936 Serge is released from Orenburg and simultaneously deprived of Soviet citizenship. His manuscripts are confiscated and his is expelled from the USSR. He settles first in Brussels, then in Paris. His return to Europe is accompanied by a slander campaign in the Communist press.
1937 From Lenin to Stalin and Destiny of a Revolution appear in which Serge analyses the Stalinist counter-revolution. He is elected a councilor to the Spanish POUM (Independent Marxist Party) and campaigns against the Moscow trials.
1940 Serge leaves Paris just as the Nazis advance. In Marseilles, he struggles for months to obtain a visa. Finally finds refuge in Mexico.
1940–1947 Serge lives in isolation and poverty. Writes The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Memoirs of a Revolutionary for his “desk drawer,” since publication was impossible.
1947 November 17: Serge dies and is buried as a “Spanish Republican” in the French section of the Mexico City cemetery.
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.
Richard Greeman has translated and written the introductions for five of Victor Serge’s novels. Cofounder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Greeman is the author of Beware of Vegetarian Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays.
David Gilbert is an anti-imperialist political prisoner at Auburn Correctional Facility and is the author of Love and Struggle: My Life in SDS, the Weather Underground, and Beyond (PM Press, 2011) and No Surrender (Abraham Guillen Press and Arm the Spirit, 2004).
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