Article
Unforgiving Years-Victor Serge
Unforgiving Years
by Victor Serge (Translated from the French and with an introduction by Richard
Greeman), NYRB Classics, 2008, 368 pp.
Michael Weiss
In the course of reviewing the memoirs of N.N. Sukhanov – the man who famously
called Stalin a ‘gray blur’ – Dwight Macdonald gave a serviceable description of
the two types of radical witnesses to the Russian Revolution: ‘Trotsky’s is a bird’seye
view – a revolutionary eagle soaring on the wings of Marx and History – but
Sukhanov gives us a series of close-ups, hopping about St. Petersburg like an earthbound
sparrow – curious, intimate, sharp-eyed.’ If one were to genetically fuse these
two avian observers into one that took flight slightly after the Bolshevik seizure of
power, the result would be Victor Serge.
Macdonald knew quite well who Serge was; the New York Trotskyist and scabrous
polemicist of Partisan Review was responsible, along with the surviving members
of the anarchist POUM faction of the Spanish Civil War, for getting him out of
Marseille in 1939, just as the Nazis were closing in and anti-Stalinist dissidents were
escaping the charnel houses of Eurasia – or not escaping them, as was more often
the case. Macdonald, much to his later chagrin, titled his own reflections on his
youthful agitations and indiscretions Memoirs of a Revolutionist, an honourable
if slightly wince-making tribute to Serge, who earned every syllable in his title,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary. And after the dropping of both atomic bombs on
Japan, it was Macdonald’s faith in socialism that began to flag, while his hounded
political and moral mentor took refuge in the ‘pessimism of the intellect, optimism
of the will.’ Or, as Serge famously described his outlook in ‘Constellation of Dead
Brothers,’ one of the many poems he composed in semi-captivity in Kazakhstan,
‘The ardent voyage continues, / the course is set on hope.’ (The second half of this
couplet provided the title for Susan Weissman’s 2001 biography of Serge.)
Life of a Revolutionist
The man born Victor Kibalchich in Belgium in 1890 to a family made up of
banished Russian intelligentsia first employed his nom de plume in Barcelona,
in an article defending Friedrich Adler, who had been condemned to death for
assassinating the Count Sturgkh in Vienna. Sturgkh was one of the Hapsburgs
responsible for starting the First World War, and thus the shockwave that led to
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the fall of the Romanovs – the subject, incidentally, of Serge’s next article under
that byline. He called his birth a matter of sheer ‘chance,’ given the torments and
uncertainties to which his line was subjected. Indeed, Serge would become one of
those wraiths of ideology that tend to get swept away in the clean-up operations
of history. If he avoided the infamous ‘dustbin’ entirely, it was due to his stoicism
and cosmopolitanism – he simply knew too many people in countries other than
his own to be got rid of quietly. Though he died in penury in Mexico, Serge’s
legacy was posthumously maintained and burnished by a small but vocal group of
near-obsessive admirers, namely Peter Sedgwick, who died in 1983, and Richard
Greeman, the translator of this superb and mercifully rediscovered novel. The two
scholars have Englished the bulk of Serge’s work, originally written in French, and
they seem to know everybody who has ever held an opinion on him, anywhere.
Their admiration would be wholly warranted if only because their subject shared
three fundamental traits with another great radical, man of action and marginalised
prophet, Thomas Paine: Serge went wherever barricades were being erected; he
was imprisoned on false charges yet used his time in captivity to better hone his
heretical and independent mind; and he categorically opposed the death penalty.
After joining the Belgian Social Young Guard at the age of fourteen and toiling
for its anarchist pamphlet The Rebel, Serge migrated to Paris where he became the
editor of the radical sheet L’anarchie. He proofread and translated Russian novels
to earn a living while pursuing his real passion: rallying the Parisian demimonde.
There were two formative episodes in pre-war France. The first was the capital
murder of a twenty-year-old French worker called Liabeuf – an event that united
the militant ranks of all tendencies in a chorus of outrage. The boy had been
arrested for trying to help a prostitute with whom he had fallen in love. After
being railroaded through a corrupt court system and having his name blackened
by a venal constabulary, he sought vengeance and ended up wounding a few police
officers. Liabeuf was guillotined after a night of frantic protests led by Jean Jaurès
and the charismatic Catalan Miguel Almereyda on the Boulevard Arago. For Serge,
the episode solidified his revulsion against mob justice and the tumbrel, ‘which
replies to the crime of the primitive, the retarded, the deprived, the half-mad or the
hopeless,’ he wrote, ‘by nothing short of a collective crime, carried out coldly by men
invested with authority, who believe that they are on that account innocent of the
pitiful blood they shed.’ It was a judgment that would return with its own special
vengeance and irony in subsequent decades, as would the one he formed at the
end of the second Gallic affair in which he was more personally involved. This was
the arrest of the so-called ‘Bonnot gang’ of anarchists, mainly fellow imports from
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Brussels, who held up banks using automobiles at a time when the constabulary still
travelled on bicycles. Though the 21-year-old Serge was only tangentially affiliated
with these outlaws – he knew a few from back home – he was nevertheless arrested
as a conspirator and confined to a small cell in La Santé Prison. He was interrogated
but refused to rat on his comrades, which fact infuriated one of the magistrates in
the subsequent trial: ‘A revolutionary at twenty! Yes – and you will be a plutocrat
at forty!’ ‘I do not think so,’ came the terse reply. Serge received five years solitary
confinement for his trouble, no doubt satisfied with the saving grace of having got
the editor of L’anarchie acquitted by his brilliant dynamiting of the prosecution’s
case. His forensic skill, even when judges, juries and executioners were stacked
solidly against him, would come to his rescue again later in life.
Serge was never fully a Bolshevik. ‘I was with them, albeit independently, without
renouncing thought or critical sense.’ This might have owed in part to his late arrival
to the city then known as Petrograd, later Leningrad, in 1919. (Serge was held
captive by the French authorities due to his insurrectionary activity in Barcelona.
They exchanged him along with a handful of Russians for French nationals being
held by Moscow as prisoners of World War I.) Almost concurrent with his touching
down on native soil – it was also alien soil since he had never before been to his
parents’ homeland – Serge felt the knout of dashed expectation:
In Petrograd we expected to breathe the air of a liberty that would doubtless
be harsh and even cruel to its enemies, but was still generous and bracing.
And in this paper we found a colourless article, signed ‘G. Zinoviev,’ on ‘The
Monopoly of Power.’ ‘Our Party rules alone… it will not allow anyone… The
false democratic liberties demanded by the counter-revolution.’ I am quoting
from memory, but such was certainly the sense of the piece. We tried to justify
it by the state of the siege and the moral perils; however, such considerations
could justify particular acts, acts of violence towards men and ideas, but not
a theory based on the extinction of all freedom.
A sign of things to come. Still, he was in good with the Leninists, who made him
the custodian of the Okhrana archives and therefore the secret and murderous
history of the czars. This no doubt furthered Serge’s commitment to October,
as well as catalysed some of his less impressive apologetics for ensuing atrocities,
such as the suppression of the Kronstadt rebellion in 1923. But it also made him
understand how the past had a nasty habit of intruding upon the present. To his
credit, Serge tried to represent the Kronstadt episode, ever the Damascene moment
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for many erstwhile Reds, as it actually occurred, not as the Kremlin propagandised
it in its partisan press, which, as he pungently stated it, was ‘positively berserk with
lies.’ Serge thought that his status as a fellow-travelling functionary could mitigate
the government’s excesses of violence, paranoia and hysterical incrimination. ‘The
telephone became my personal enemy,’ he recorded in his Memoirs. ‘At every hour
it brought me voices of panic-stricken women who spoke of arrests, imminent
executions, and injustice, and begged me to intervene at once, for the love of God!’
Serge participated in a kind of home front during the Russian Civil War, when the
White Army drove right up to Polkovo Heights in Petrograd, only to be beaten
back by brave partisan street fighters. He searched homes looking for arms and ran
across rooftops trailing enemy agents, all the while vowing that after the period of
la patrie en danger was at an end he would return to his more instinctive role as an
outspoken opponent of all forms of state repression.
At his worst, Serge was too dismissive during the Civil War of the misfit intellectuals
who ‘wept for their dream of an enlightened democracy, governed by a sagacious
Parliament and inspired by an idealistic Press (their own, of course),’ but even in this
he had a well-grounded fear of what might happen if the current regime fell. ‘Russia
would have avoided the Red Terror only to endure the White, and a proletarian
dictatorship only to undergo a reactionary one.’ No revisionist is entitled to
underestimate or diminish the cruelty and anti-Semitism of the czarist irredentists.
Yet the very dialectical keenness that made him wary of these what-ifs also outfitted
Serge with an arsenal for use against his own side. He understood that the founding
of the Cheka was ‘one of the gravest and most impermissible errors’ the Bolsheviks
committed in 1918, when fear of losing power made them forfeit any moral claims
on keeping it, because what was the new secret police but a recrudescence of the
old? His preferred term for describing the pathology that gripped the Politburo and
the rank-and-file henchmen was ‘psychosis.’ On the very same day that the Party
newspapers were heralding the end of the death penalty (it was later reinstated),
the Cheka succumbed to ‘occupational psychosis’ and murdered some 200 or 300
of its prisoners. Also loathsome to him was the Kremlin’s treatment of its former
facilitators, the many ‘Black’ anarchists who helped secure the Crimea during the
Civil War. At Pyotr Kropotkin’s funeral, Serge was the only Party member allowed
to circulate among the surviving left ultras, all awaiting their inevitable fates in the
nightmarish opposite of a stateless utopia for which they now felt partly responsible
for bringing into being.
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Unsurprisingly, then, for a man who lived solely by his wits and his pen, the
harassment and censorship of writers and poets anguished Serge like nothing else
– and here he did chart a course different from most oppositionists in that he was
highly attuned to the putrescence of Russian culture. He belonged to the Free
Philosophic Society, or Volfila, ‘the last surviving free-thought society’ in Russia,
where he mingled with many of the true artists and poets that flourished during
the New Economic Period (NEP), or that brief liberal interregnum (1921-1928)
between the Civil War and ‘Thermidor.’ He was on intimate terms with Andrei
Bely, Alexander Blok, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, and brought their emerging
talents to the attention of the French via Henri Barbusse’s journal Clarté. Then,
once the Soviet Writers Union, of which Serge was a member, became little more
than a second on the state dictatorship, his friend, and in many ways his American
counterpart, Max Eastman, decried the literary dogmatism of socialist realism; the
land of Tolstoy and Dostoevsky had now become, as Eastman phrased it, a paradeground
for ‘writers in uniform.’
Serge’s pen-portraits of the various revolutionary and cultural luminaries he came
to know betray a Balzacian eye for the evocative detail – what was assailed in his day
as a dangerous ‘individualist’ tendency in writing. Bely, embarrassed by his glabrous
pate, wore a ‘skull-cap beneath which his great seer’s eyes, of a stony greenish-blue,
gave out a continual gaze.’ Trotsky was ‘all tension and energy… whose metallic voice
projected a great distance, ejaculating its short sentences that were often sardonic
and always infused with a truly spontaneous passion.’ Lenin had the vocabulary of
a ‘newspaper-article… here was a man of a basic simplicity, talking to you honestly
with the sole purpose of convincing you, appealing exclusively to your judgment, to
facts and sheer necessity.’ Gramsci in Vienna was ‘an industrious and Bohemian exile,
late to bed and late to rise.’ The barbarous Bela Kun of Hungary was ‘the incarnation
of intellectual inadequacy, uncertainty of will, and authoritarian corruption.’ And
Barbusse was ‘concerned above all not to be involved, not to see anything that could
involve him against his will, concerned above all to disguise opinions he could no
longer express openly, sliding past any direct questioning, scurrying off along all
conceivable tangents, his eyes vague, his slender hands circumscribing curves in the
air around obscure words like ‘immensity,’ ‘profundities,’ ‘exaltation’ – and all with
the real aim of making himself the accomplice of the winning side!’
Still, Serge could move easily from the pointillistic to the world-historic. He served
as an agent of the Communist International in Berlin, where he glimpsed not only
Russia’s arcane and half-baked program for exporting revolution to Europe, but
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also future troubles brewing in the Weimar Republic. ‘Everything was for sale, the
daughters of the bourgeoisie in the bars, the daughters of the people in the streets,
officials, import and export licenses, State papers, businesses in whose prospects
nobody believed.’ Was it any wonder that the German workers’ uprising of 1922,
confined to Hamburg and consisting of a mere 300 disorganised militants failed
in complete farce? It was around this time that Serge also caught wind of another
disturbing phenomenon in Europe: Fascism. The following belongs in some
vertebrae-rattling volume of quotations by the Cassandras of the vanquished left:
The march on Rome and the rise of Mussolini were understood by no one
in the International except a few isolated militants… The opinion of the
leadership was that this was a piece of reactionary buffoonery which would
soon die away and open the path to revolution. I opposed this view, saying
that this new variety of counter-revolution had taken the Russian Revolution
as its schoolmaster in matters of repression and mass-manipulation through
propaganda; further, it had succeeded in recruiting a host of disillusioned,
power-hungry, ex-revolutionaries; consequently, its rule would last for years.
Upon returning to Russia and joining the Left Opposition, of the Trotsky-Zinoviev-
Kamenev ‘bloc,’ Serge told Andres Nin, the future leader of the POUM in Spain,
‘If a madman were to shoot some satrap or other, there is a grave risk that we would
all be shot before the week was out’ – a throwaway remark that not only furnished
an immediate example, the murder of Sergei Kirov in 1934, which was the dambreak
of the Great Terror, but also gave Serge the subject of his masterpiece, The
Case of Comrade Tulayev (1948). That book, re-released in 2004 by NYRB Classics,
is seen as the high-water mark in the vast roman-fleuve of Serge’s collected fiction,
as well as the best historical novel ever published about the Stalinist Terror.
I’m not the first to suggest that the esteem for Serge’s literary gifts has overshadowed
the recognition of his skills as a real-time political diagnostician. Apart from
claiming to have first invented the word ‘totalitarian’ to describe the Soviet state –
he did so in a letter to Maurice and Magdeleine Paz and others in 1932, reaffirming
the need to defend ‘man,’ ‘truth’ and ‘thought’ from the forces of reactions that
were innate in socialism – Serge later predicted three ways that the U.S.S.R could
develop following the Second World War. If it didn’t yield to external or internal
pressures, it would be consumed by war, probably nuclear and therefore apocalyptic.
If it downplayed its brinkmanship due to external pressure but refused to reform
within, the chance of war was diminished but not erased completely. Finally, ‘[i]f
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under combined pressure of masses at home and of the international conflicts which
will arise in various ways, the regime may try and evolve towards a democratisation.
Upon the slightest relaxation of terrorist totalitarianism, immense possibilities are
opened out, which may cause the emergence in Russia of a Socialist-inclined or
Socialist democracy, and permit a peaceful collaboration with the world outside.
The nightmare of war is then removed.’ The two other thinkers to anticipate this
third and actual course were George Orwell and Robert Conquest.
A self-satisfied hindsight may deride as naïve Serge’s abiding faith that socialism
could be rescued from bureaucratic degeneration and that Stalinism could be
defeated from within. Even at the sorriest hour of the Left Opposition, he kept an
affi rming flame:
It is often said that ‘the germ of all Stalinism was in Bolshevism at its
beginning.’ Well, I have no objection. Only, Bolshevism also contained
many other germs – a mass of other germs – and those who lived through
the enthusiasm of the first years of the first victorious revolution ought not
to forget it. To judge the living man by the death germs which the autopsy
reveals in a corpse – and which he may have carried in him since birth – is
this very sensible?
This is not the conventional wisdom today, when almost all historians of 1917
– with the notable exception of Roy Medvedev – believe the whole ‘experiment’
went wrong at the start. What price counterfactual history in the face of so many
atrocities? It is not easy to take the measure of internal critics of Bolshevism,
who were right in their analyses and denunciations of Stalinism but had little or
not enough to say about the graver injustices being committed simultaneously
against the Russian people (the term for this sort of moral double bookkeeping is
Dvoeverye.) Many hung on hoping to change the system perhaps longer than they
should have done. But as against a wholesale indictment of those whose dissidence
may have come too late or been too narrow in scope, Conquest has sanely argued
that
courage and clear-headedness are admirable in themselves. And if they do
not rank high among the moral virtues, we can see in some of the Soviet
oppositionists something rather better. It is true that those who did not
confess, and were shot secretly, demonstrated not merely a higher courage,
but a better sense of values. In them, however touched by the demands of
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Party and revolutionary loyalty, loyalty to the truth and the idea of a more
humane regime prevailed.
Serge was never shot secretly, but he embodied every other cited characteristic. I
would add that his unsurpassed contribution to the cause of independent socialism
was made more remarkable still given his willingness to feud openly with his fellow
oppositionists on matters of principle and therefore risk censure and obloquy from
all quarters. He faulted Trotsky’s disdain for what the latter called a ‘military mutiny
within a Socialist regime;’ the founder of the Red Army was popular enough with
the soldiery and workers that he might have, with greater cunning, staved off the
monstrous triangulator of the Politburo. ‘Sometimes you finish like Liebknecht,’
he remarked to Serge, embracing a damned fate, ‘and sometimes like Lenin.’ But
haplessness is not a moral failure either, and of the three main issues at stake in the
battle of ideas – the agricultural policy, intra-Party democracy, and the bungled
Chinese Revolution – the Left Opposition would prove prescient and correct.
Serge remained at liberty far longer than he expected, almost certainly owing to
his international reputation. Had he only been a Russian militant, he remarked,
and not a French author, he’d have surely been ensnared in the nation-wide dragnet
for ‘counterrevolutionaries’ much earlier. When the inevitable arrest did come in
March 1928, following his expulsion from the Party, Serge seemed almost relieved.
His sister-in-law had implicated him in a ‘Trotskyist’ conspiracy, but drawing from
his experiences in La Sante, he knew to refuse the one thing his interrogators needed
most for an open-and-shut sham case: a confession. He was held for two months
without charges. Upon his release, he moved to Paris and wrote three novels – Men
in Prison (1930), Birth of Our Power (1931), and Conquered City (1932) – plus
a respected history, Year One of the Russian Revolution (1930). After returning
to Leningrad, which seemed a suicidal decision, and associating with the everdwindling
number of oppositionists there, Serge was rearrested in 1933. This time
he was deported to Orenburg, an exile camp in the heart of the Ural Mountains,
where he and his son lived in poverty and on the brink of starvation, and he nearly
died of an anthrax tumour (he worried about being murdered by the G.P.U. in the
local hospital that treated him). For all the good his continental fame did him, Serge
was still able to note bitterly that during the June 1935 International Congress of
Writers for the Defense of Culture, the entire guest list of Soviet writers claimed no
knowledge of him or his legal status except to say that he had somehow been involved
in the Kirov assassination, the all-purpose charge when none other could be readily
concocted. Serge is cutting in his recollection of such cowardice: ‘Kirshon did not
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suspect that two years later, he himself would disappear, in complete obscurity, into
the G.P.U. prisons… Ehrenburg forgot his flight from Russia, his banned novels, his
accusation against Bolshevism of “crucifying Russia.”’
Serge was only saved from execution by the intervention of the French left:
Romain Rolland (with whom he had previously quarrelled), André Gide, André
Malraux, Boris Souvarine and various trade unionists raised enough of a fuss about
his persecution that Stalin himself, when confronted by Rolland, signed off on
Serge’s safe conduct out of the Soviet Union. Tellingly, Serge was one of the few
oppositionists not implicated publicly at any point during the Moscow Trials –
yet another odd bit of good fortune that allowed Stalin to manumit him without
losing too much face.
Once back in Belgium, he had a few educational encounters with apparatchiks and
spies that clearly licensed material for his forthcoming fiction. He had planned
to meet the notorious agent Ignace Reiss, rumoured to have crossed over to the
opposition after the Zinoviev Trial. However, shortly before their scheduled
rendezvous, Reiss was murdered with poisoned chocolates. In another instance,
Serge and Trotsky’s son Leon Sedov spoke with Walter Krivitsky who would years
later wind up with a bullet in his head in a Washington, D.C., hotel room. Krivitsky
was responsible for the Reiss murder, but he, too, was said to be wavering in his
loyalty to Moscow Central by the time Serge agreed to meet him on a darkened
boulevard in Paris, near La Sante prison, by now something of an ominous lodestone
to which the stateless and hounded revolutionary kept returning. Whenever
Krivitsky reached in his pocket for a cigarette, Serge reflexively aped the gesture.
Unforgiving Years
So ends the real drama of the Memoirs. Unforgiving Years picks up pretty much
from this noir moment of clandestine continental intrigue. Serge’s final novel, here
translated into English for the first time, which he had written for the ‘desk drawer,’
drops us without prelude into the middle of a perspiring secret agent’s departure
from the ‘Organization.’ Completed in 1946, at the threshold of the atomic age
and the Cold War, the book has a frenzied, cosmic urgency to it. It’s written as a
kind of World War II epic in miniature, with poetry masquerading as prose, and the
apocalypse as an omnipresent theme. Serge described his own book as ‘terrifying’
and said its composition had caused him actual headaches for its exploration
of limits of human consciousness in an age where the state controlled people’s
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thoughts and war machines meted out ‘pan-destruction.’ Unforgiving Years is not
just a spy thriller; it’s a forerunner of the existentialist novel.
Don DeLillo somewhere refers to the ‘world-hum’ that postmodern fiction aims to
capture; Serge might be considered an early metronome for it. Indeed, the book is
divided, as Richard Greeman puts it, into four ‘symphonic movements,’ each with
its own ‘tone and atmosphere.’ Our protagonists are a quartet of Comintern agents
bound less by their mutual acquaintance with one another than by their shared
doubts as to the legitimacy of their shadow-bathed enterprise and the direction
history is headed. Serge makes brilliant use of his internationalism, giving us
evocative illustrations of pre-war Paris, Leningrad and Berlin under siege, and postwar
Mexico.
The first chapter, ‘The Secret Agent,’ which was published separately in Le
Monde in 1971, involves ‘D,’ who is introduced as having already broken with the
‘Organization’ and plotted his escape from a life of double and triple identities. That
he has two other aliases, ‘Sacha’ and ‘Bruno Battisti,’ is apt in light of the fact that
he is clearly based on three real-life counterparts: Reiss, Krivitsky and Alexander
Barmine, the former Russian brigadier-general who defected to the United States
during the purges and went to work for the U.S. Army, and then the Office of
Strategic Services, which later became the C.I.A. Not that D, who has ‘travelled in
the past with a cyanide capsule glued to his scalp’ contemplates any similar career
jump; his resignation will be final, if not terminal. ‘He believed the Organization to
be infallible,’ Serge writes, ‘by virtue of its stability, its ramifications, its resources, its
power, its single-minded commitment – even by the complicity of its opponents,
who feed it, sometimes involuntarily, sometimes as a deliberate ploy. But from the
day he had begun to pull away from the Organization, he felt himself rejected by
it; and its power behind him, within him, became stifling.’ Should he join with the
oppositionists? He would only be formally associating with men he’s been spying
on for years, and confronting the agents provocateurs whom he helped infiltrate
those schismatic sects. Power is all that D has left to believe in, and he has already
swapped his ideologue’s certitude for a prematurely fashionable relativism: ‘Truth,
stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains,
quickly done! Then, goodbye truth. Power is against them, against me, there’s
nothing we can do about it. The torrent is washing us away.’
‘Hearts once full of enthusiasm,’ intoned Blok, ‘have nothing left but fatal
nothingness.’ But D isn’t quite the nihilist such tumults of hopelessness indicate.
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He’s still got enough of a survival instinct to obsess over making two of the same
mistakes Reiss did: he mails his letter of resignation before leaving the Organization,
and he informs a zealous young protégé, the French painter Alain, of his intention.
Serge sets no definitive date for the ‘The Secret Agent,’ but it is clear that the
liquidation of Lenin’s general staff has commenced in earnest because the constant
parade of so many unlikely traitors to the revolution is cited as a major cause of D’s
heresy.
One reason Stalin couldn’t stomach the advent of ex-Bolsheviks was that he knew
their defection would trigger latent or suppressed instincts for doubt and selfscrutiny
in the younger cadres, of which Alain serves as the novel’s main example.
Alain, too, will be tortured into truth by war, for now only the seeds of his future
disavowal are being planted. D’s confesses to him in the Paris Metro:
He was conducting an experiment on the boy, while operating alive on
himself. Putting friendship to the test by a display of futile bravado. D became
aware – odd, for such sentiments ought to have died out in him – of a wish to
be understood. After all, he had shaped this youth’s very soul; Alain couldn’t
fail to see that if he, D, was bailing out, if D himself couldn’t go along any
longer, if even D was giving it up, then serious things must be happening
which finally should be condemned. A man’s conscience is secondary in the
battle for such a great cause – but now it’s essential.
A wish to be understood by his interrogator is what confounds Rubashov in the
early pages of Darkness at Noon; how to profess his innocence when an auto-da-fé
is the greatest final act he can perform for the Party? Koestler’s tragic hero, who,
like D, predates the revolution, must re-learn the so-called ‘grammatical fiction’ of
individual conscience that had been snuffed from the hive brain of ideology. There
is no scene of inquisition in Unforgiving Years, but Serge puts D through same
motions of epistemic revolution: ‘Our unpardonable error was to believe what they
call soul – I prefer to call it conscience – was no more than a projection of the old
superseded egoism,’ he remarks at one point. ‘If I’m still alive, it’s because I realized
that we misrepresented the grandeur of conscience.’
One notes a slightly ethereal aspect to D’s conversion. Serge’s poetry was rife with
religious iconography – in one eyebrow-raising example he refers to himself as the
‘Son of man.’ Though it wasn’t the teleological similarities between Marxism and
Christianity that impressed him so much as the martyrological ones; was there not
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a biblical patina to the suffering and submission of so many friends and comrades
in so short a period? Consciousness is Serge’s profane replacement for ‘soul.’ His
son Vlady, who died in 2005 after having established himself as one of Mexico’s
foremost painters and muralists, once wittily termed his father’s underlying
philosophy ‘materialist spirituality.’
Not that the spirituality ever fully eclipsed the materialism. Some of Serge’s satiric
vignettes of a glutted but narcoleptic Paris of the thirties are minor classics of the
épater genre. A rootless cosmopolitan, he never nonetheless seems to have retained
a kind of citizenship of French impressionism. Serge’s finest minor character is
Monsieur Gobfin, the manager of a hotel in the rue de Rochechouart, where D
and Nadine hole up after leaving their previous and now compromised residence.
When he suspects that one of his guests, a nattily dressed black man, is a wanted
murderer, he confides his suspicion in D, who mistakes the allusions to cloak-anddagger
criminality as code for having been detected himself. The glitter and doom
of the interwar period fuse with la comedie humaine in Gobfin:
Guided by intuition alone, one night when business was slow and half the
rooms were free, Monsieur Gobfin put on his most ingratiating voice to
lament, to the giggly young lady in the expensive straw hat and her smallboned
gentleman friend with hair dyed the colour of flax, that there was
nothing available, and sent them to the competition: ‘You’ll find it very
comfortable there, Madame, Monsieur. They’re even a bit more modern
than we are!’ (Two days later he learned in Le Petit Parisien of the sudden
and suspicious demise of this industrialist from the Rhone, whose mistress
was being sought by the prosecutor’s office… It was one of the supreme
satisfactions of his life.) He likewise saw off the obese individual bursting
with commercial probity – a respected notary solicitor, company director?
– who turned up with a transvestite playing the part of the young mistress
to perfection; the competition found itself the scene of an uproarious farce,
kept quiet by a hefty sum of hush money. Monsieur Gobfin was only half
gratified by this outcome; he took pride in his perspicacity, but missing out
on a hefty sum because of it is galling, you have to admit.
The demimonde acts as a microcosm of ‘well-fed Europe, smugly wallowing
in its pleasures,’ as D later snarls, to somewhat diminished effect, and we know,
even if Monsieur Gobfin does not, that the burlesque of the purblind cannot
last very much longer. It is later than you think. But if D has any bulwark in this
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deteriorating landscape, it is not Nadine, or ‘Noémi,’ his naïve and timorous ‘wife’
in the underground; it is Daria, another conflicted Comintern agent, but one he
feels he can trust because he met her back when she was a fearless factory committee
secretary, and he a supplier of materials to manufacturers. In a flashback to 1919,
during the period of war communism, D remembers how Daria put herself at his
mercy by admitting freely that she was stealing from the state:
‘I burn moldy floorboards from the disused workshops. That’s illegal, I
don’t have the permit from the Nationalized Companies Conservation
Commission. I sell one-fifth of the output to the peasants, plus defective
items, which means I can provide potatoes for the workforce. That’s illegal,
too, Comrade. I pay for sixty percent of my raw-materials allowance in kind
– illegal. I provide a weekly ration of red or white wine to pregnant women,
convalescents, over forty-fives, and anyone who’s clocked in ten days running,
to everyone really. That’s probably illegal… And I send cases of cognac to the
president to the Special Repression Commission, to keep myself out of jail.’
Daria is an inversion of the gritty woman comrade of socialist realist propaganda
– her fortitude and industriousness are put to counterrevolutionary use. She is
also the most convincing female character dreamt up by an author not known
for his deft handling of the opposite sex (this was Susan Sontag’s sole criticism of
The Case of Comrade Tulayev). Even after her commitment to the Party calcifies
and she is recruited for intelligence work abroad, Daria is never conceivable as an
automaton or mere functionary. She is that original archetype of the anti-Stalinist
novel, a noble political fraud, who slowly, painfully, comes to terms with her own
fraudulence. She suffers a nervous breakdown in a cinema at the Champs-élysées
after learning of the execution of twenty-seven Old Bolsheviks back in Russia and
yet it is less fealty to the Kremlin than fatalism about the world that causes her
to refuse to join D and Nadine in their escape. She returns to the Motherland,
first to a remote, sand-swept outpost in Kazakhstan, then to the snow-capped
hell of embattled Leningrad, to do her part in the war against Fascism. Might it
be going too far to suggest that she reflects something of Serge’s own ambivalent
‘commitment?’ ‘The end justifies the means, what a swindle,’ Daria tells D. ‘No
end can be achieved by anything but appropriate means. If we trample on the man
of today, will we do anything worthwhile for the man of tomorrow?’ (Serge was
audience to Panaït Istrati’s animadversion on the ‘omelets and eggs’ excuse for the
mounting pile of corpses in the Soviet Union. ‘All right,’ Istrati said, ‘I can see the
broken eggs. Where’s this omelet of yours?’)
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Daria’s chapter is titled ‘The Flame Beneath the Snow,’ which has dual precedence
in Serge’s oeuvre – it’s the name of a prose-poem he wrote about Petrograd in 1921,
whose themes are echoed in a similar threnody, ‘City’: ‘City, city, vast city, / vast,
immobile city, / I know full well there are flames / devouring you beneath the snow.’
Daria channels Serge’s literary conscience: she keeps a self-censored journal ‘whose
carefully chosen words sketched out only the outer shapes of people, events, and
ideas: a poem constructed of gaps cut from the lived material, because – since it
could be seized – it could not contain a single name, a single recognizable face, a
single unmistakable strand of the past, a single allusion to assignments accomplished
(about which it is forbidden to write without prior permission).’ Thus Unforgiving
Years, which was finished two years before Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four saw
daylight, features a ‘book within a book,’ or rather a series of them. When the nosy
Major Ipatov inspects them, he can only bring himself to praise Daria’s lyric talent.
She burns all the journals ‘without a twinge of regret,’ starting first with her book
of bereavements. It’s a rite performed not just to evade the censor, it seems, but
to grow inured to death itself, which has become a pervasive industry in wartime
Leningrad, with its ‘gray flakes’ and ‘formless shadows.’ The penultimate stanza of
‘City’ runs: ‘You are not a cemetery, / you are an immense vessel – / the first one
bound / for the dawn or for death.’ And more unnerving than the frozen corpses
lying motionless on the ground are the ones that move toward you:
Each corpse was firmly tied to a sled pulled on a string by its next of kin; a
new breed of resourceful specialists earned their food by sewing discarded
sheets or squares of sackcloth around the remains: There, look, isn’t that nice,
almost as snug as a coffi n! Daria passed several such mummies on the street,
rigid pods floating just above the trodden snow. A living man or woman to
pull the string and sometimes a child behind, steering the mummy so as to
spare it too many knocks and jolts – a somewhat superfluous solicitude…
Children formulate a waste calculus for their dying parents and relatives: how much
food they require, how many months they have left, what their survival costs the
family. Even a night of fumbled intimacy with the well-meaning Klim, who agrees
to share his half-standing tenement apartment with Daria, can’t distract from the
morbidity. But we’re also meant to understand that some forms of scarcity are not
temporary and will outlast the blockade: ‘There were ways and ways of dying slowly
while remaining partly alive, getting dressed, walking down the street, doing the
day’s work, eating tasteless food, submitting to the ceaseless assaults of the belly
and its deliriums during sleep.’ Is this an elegy on war or peace in the Soviet Union?
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From such squalor and desolation, how can Russia be poised for a comeback?
Through formulaic art, for one, the literature of ‘hypnosis’ that fortifies the resolve
to win. In an officers’ club, Daria thumbs through some Soviet literary magazine,
at first seeing only a shabby infantry of commissioned writers exhibiting ‘as much
variation as you’d discover within a regiment on the march.’ But then she discerns
an irrepressible humanity breaking through thick crust of lies, as if to defy the
possibility of a mechanised prose. Man is the ‘atom of military power,’ and it takes
more than edicts from the Politburo to solidify the molecular bonds of nationality.
Serge puts a more optimistic gloss on the dire prognosis made by Max Eastman
about the interleaving of politics and literature in the 20’s: ‘So let the imagination
of poets and novelists put on a uniform and obey orders – but let each retain his
gnarled or stony visage, as each wages war in his own way.’ Is there no use for a
phalanx of writers, after all? Can crude propaganda have any redemptive value so
long as individual authors are responsible for it?
Another way Russians will beat Prussians is through bovine resistance. Captain
Potapov, Daria’s superior, sounds like a muzhik philosopher out of Chekhov
explaining the mass psychology and the dialectically arrived-at virtues of his
countrymen. Stalin was no fool, in his ‘Generalissimus’ mode, to lay aside class
antagonism in favor of the unifying myth of Russian patriotism:
You see, this old Mother Russia of ours is providentially blessed with a most
rudimentary organism. Cut her into six pieces, and the six will live on…
We cannot be invaded, and this is something intuited by the rudest yokel
of the Irtysh, confusedly and then with sudden clarity while defending a
wood with his trusty automatic rifle and nimble legs, always quick to run
away, but only so as to turn and charge again. His tactics are all in his nerves,
without quixotism or panache: only by killing the enemy can he lays hands
on enemy boots and vitamin pills, and thus our very deprivation becomes a
source of strength, a primordial strength as irrational as life, and imperfectly
understood by the strategists of the old industrial empires…
Meanwhile, Berlin is undergoing the opposite mass psychological transformation,
from a city of victory and triumphalism to a city of defeat and pathos. Serge takes
a marked risk by peopling the German chapter mainly with innocents who were as
manipulated and brainwashed by their government as the Russians were by theirs;
for him there is no such thing as ‘collective guilt’ for World War II, and this is at least
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partly why Le Monde concluded that Unforgiving Years ‘prefigured and preceded
post-war German literature.’ Brigitte, his central character in ‘Brigitte, Lightning,
Lilacs,’ is an enchanting naif, more impressed and terrified by the pyrotechnics of
Allied bombers than messianic notions of Anschluss or race theory. Her obsession,
and the cause of her impending madness, is the death of her fiancé at the front – he
was shot for returning alive after his tank unit had been ordered to sacrifice itself for
the good of Fatherland. Had he survived the charge of treason, he would still have
told his beloved of utter meaninglessness pushing their side deeper and deeper into
the abyss. Brigitte reads from his letters, in which he recounts watching Jews herded
into boxcars, emitting ‘asphyxiated howls’ as on-looking S.S. soldiers are plied with
good brandy. Brigitte’s fiancé is never given a name, and he comes to realise too
late that popular movements dependent on supposed ‘laws’ or tyrannical jurists can
only bring about their own demise, the ‘banality of chaos’:
Systems are such heavy chains that they exonerate the infinitesimal individual,
the thinking reed, the trampled reed. What would Pascal or Spinoza have
done in Dachau? Or at the front, under a helmet? The reed stops thinking,
becomes malleable matter, identifies with its chains.
The point holds if one replaces Dachau with Kolyma or Solovki. But Serge, unlike
Vasily Grossman in his war epic Life and Fate, never quite articulates the moral
equivalence between Fascism and Communism. Instead, Serge flirts with surface
resemblances in what Brigitte’s fiancé calls the ‘crime of all men’ in a more daring
and controversial way. The miserable survivors of liberated Berlin are, he writes,
like ‘larvae emerging from the soil – and they were indistinguishable, on the whole,
from the inhabitants of Chicago’s slums or any other poverty-stricken corner of the
world.’ Now that wasn’t the conventional wisdom in 1946.
Greeman is no doubt correct to suggest that Serge anticipates the vogue school of
German victimisation, which now calls attention to the immolation of Dresden
and the targeted bombings of heavily populated, mostly working-class and anti-
Nazi, neighbourhoods in cities like Hamburg. One might find a comparison
between Berlin and Chicago under the present circumstances unseemly, to say the
least. True, Serge partakes of a vulgar caricature in the coarse and fat American
journalist who pulls into the pulverised capital of the Third Reich with the U.S.
Army and starts immediately inquiring if any of the shell-shocked residents there
‘feel guilty.’ ‘No shame, no guilt, not a shred! These folks seem to think we come
over, leaving a hundred thousand of our boys underground along the way, just to
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sort out their next meal!’ One old lady claims that Dachau is a ‘pretty little town
in Bavaria, where they held interesting popular festivals in the old days…’ She
professes not to read the newspapers, not that those printed in German would
have done her any good. But if this opportunistic leader-writer is intended as a
prescient satire on the theory of Hitler’s willing executioners, it is an unsure one.
How curious, after all, that the reporter’s question is first directed at Herr Schiff,
the mannered and one-dimensional schoolteacher, who pays the Yank back in his
own coin: ‘And do you… do you feel guilty for this?’ Schiff may delicately tend his
garden amid the rubble – the ‘lilacs’ of this chapter’s title belong to him – but he
is anything but uninformed about National Socialism, or blameless himself. We’re
earlier told that he greets his classes of ten- to fourteen-year-olds ‘with martially
outstretched arm and a resounding Heil Hitler! that could complete with the great
rallies in Nuremberg,’ which I daresay is more than just a pantomime to appease the
Gestapo. Is it sloppiness or boldness that allows Serge to put his humanist critique
on pan-destruction and what would we now callously call ‘collateral damage’ in the
mouth of an Aryan supremacist?
Our author may be in the company of W.G. Sebald on the question of aggressor’s
suffering, but he does not ever flirt with the lower forms of revisionism being
trafficked today either credulously or sinisterly by the likes of Nicholson Baker
and Patrick J. Buchanan. After all, Grossman, a Soviet Jew who lost his mother
to the Nazi abattoir in his Ukrainian hometown of Berdichev, and could claim to
have seen the worst of both fanatical regimes up close, allowed his most trenchant
comparison between Fascism and Communism in Life and Fate to be made by the
Obersturmbannfuhrer Liss, who interrogates the Old Bolshevik Mostovskoy in a
concentration camp:
A red workers’ flag flies over our People’s State too. We too call people to
national Achievement, to Unity and Labour. We say, “The Party expresses the
dream of the German worker”; you say, “Nationalism! Labour!” You know
as well as we do that nationalism is the most powerful force of our century.
Nationalism is the soul of our epoch. And “Socialism in One Country” is the
supreme expression of nationalism.
The Holocaust, the vaporisation of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the disclosures about
the gulag – after such knowledge, what forgiveness? And what certainty? Serge’s
only definitive conclusion is that something life-affi rming could be excavated from
the brutal aftermath of world war, starting with the physical ruins themselves.
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Alain, who has been stationed in Berlin, and has eluded the Gestapo by posing as a
‘prisoner-of-war-cum-voluntary-worker-on-sick-leave,’ discovers Brigitte strangled
to death in her small apartment, her lifeless body resembling nothing so much as
a slender-necked figure out of Botticelli. Alain’s begun ideological moorings have
begun to loosen, just as we knew they would from his earlier encounter with D. A
French-speaking ex-sailor has escaped from the Kamatchka penal colony and has
educated him on the horrors of the Soviet slave economy. Then he notices the grim
beauty of destroyed Berlin,
the shuttered prow of a house in a badly damaged neighbourhood; the
tradesmen’s entrance was masked by a pair of tall thin walls, leaning toward
each other like parodies of the Tower of Pisa, the sparse bricks sagging until
the tops nearly touched, a truly comic sight… No imagination, however wild
or drunk, could ever conceive the wealth of fantastical architectural effects
to be found in bombed-out cities. Kids growing up in them may someday, as
these visions mature within them, create a new art that will be neither realistic
nor surrealistic, for destruction nurtures a special reality basically close to the
unreal. The bog reality of civilization reverted back to first principles, violent
death, the dissolution of beings and works, the anxious persistence of a life
force free of justification…. Paintings of individual psychological terrors
would seem ridiculous here. Start expressing the Great Authentic Terror, or
buzz off…
This return to first principles constitutes an artistic revolution in itself, one certified
in Mexico, to which Daria repairs after toiling under a secret identity in Germany, to
join D and Noemi, now owners of a coffee plantation. She’s been reading Whitman’s
Leaves of Grass on the ocean liner to the Americas, and that’s as good a primer as any
on the naturalist catechism D will impart once she arrives. Now permanently called
Bruno, he disdains contemporary literature, preferring scientific works for their
greater ‘imagination’ and their ‘dizzying precision,’ and he takes botany, evolution,
and meteorology as his sources of poetic inspiration:
The fire in the sky first blesses the sap, the loves of insects and birds, the
euphoria of the herds, and darting quickness of tadpoles in the ponds…
Then the fire in the sky turns to a burning hardness, as though the gods were
reminding creation that no euphoria can last and that existence is not just the
exultation of being; existence is also ordeal, courage, blind tenacity, hidden
resourcefulness.
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Death be not proud, for you are always followed by rebirth. ‘We observe that true
power is not that of darkness, of barrenness, but of life,’ Bruno tells Daria, finally
over his exasperation. ‘All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never
despair, for true death does not exist.’ I don’t know that Serge would ever push
his own heterodox worldview that far, but his tough-mindedness joined with his
hopefulness in the closing staves of his Memoirs:
I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated
in seven countries, and written twenty books. I own nothing. On several
occasions a press with a vast circulation has hurled filth at me because I spoke
the truth. Behind us lives a victorious revolutionary gone astray, several
abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great number as to
inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be
done with this digression. Those were the only roads open to us. I have more
confidence in humankind and in the future than ever before.
Pessimism is the predominant emotion in men who suffer a fraction of the torments
that this permanent revolutionary did throughout his life. His body of work, still
relevant and moving more than a decade after the fall of the regime he helped
bring to power, and to whose fiercest opponents he was a moral and intellectual
lighthouse, is the strongest rebuttal to the idea that ‘History to the defeated / May
say Alas but cannot help nor pardon.’
Michael Weiss is a writer living in New York. His work appears frequently in Slate,
The Weekly Standard, and The New Criterion. His essays on Edmund Wilson and
Alfred Kazin appeared in Democratiya 12 and 13.
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