Victor Serge - Notebooks: 1936-1947

VICTOR SERGE (18901947) 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 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 briefly arrested in 1928. Henceforth an unperson, he completed three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), all 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 Andr Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insiders knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposs of Stalins 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 (both available as NYRB Classics), were written for the desk drawer and published posthumously.

MITCHELL ABIDOR is a historian and translator of French, Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, and Esperanto. Among the books he has edited and translated are an anthology of Victor Serges anarchist writings, Anarchists Never Surrender; Jean Jaurss Socialist History of the French Revolution; and May Made Me: An Oral History of the 1968 Uprising in France. He was born in Brooklyn, New York, where he still lives.

RICHARD GREEMAN has translated and written the introductions for five of Serges 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 (www.praxiscenter.ru), Greeman is the author of the website the Invisible International (bit.ly/invisible-international).

NOTEBOOKS

19361947

VICTOR SERGE

Edited by

CLAUDIO ALBERTANI and CLAUDE RIOUX

Translated from the French by

MITCHELL ABIDOR and RICHARD GREEMAN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright 2012 by ditions Agone, Marseille, France

Translation copyright 2019 by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman All rights reserved.

Cover image: Gunther Gerzso, Lcartel (El descuartizado), 1944; John Michael Gerzso. Collection of John and Sandy Fox.

Cover design: Katy Homans

The introduction to the present volume, originally published in the French edition of the Notebooks, is copyright 2012 by Claudio Albertani and Jean-Guy Rens. It appears here in edited form.

Cet ouvrage a bnfici du soutien des Programmes daide la publication de lInstitut Franais.

This work, published as part of a program of aid for publication, received support from the Institut Franais. It also received support from the Mission Culturelle et Universitaire Franaise aux Etats-Unis, a department of the French Embassy in the United States.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Serge, Victor, 18901947, author. | Albertani, Claudio, writer of introduction. | Rens, Jean-Guy, 1946 writer of introduction. | Abidor, Mitchell, translator. | Greeman, Richard, translator.

Title: Notebooks : 19361947 / by Victor Serge ; introduction by Claudio Albertani and Jean-Guy Rens ; translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman.

Description: New York : New York Review Books, [2019] | Series: New York Review Books classics.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018029769 (print) | LCCN 2018054439 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681372716 (epub) | ISBN 9781681372709 (alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Serge, Victor, 18901947TravelMexico. | Serge, Victor, 18901947Notebooks, sketchbooks, etc.

Classification: LCC PQ2637.E49 (ebook) | LCC PQ2637.E49 A2 2019 (print) | DDC 813/.54dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018029769

ISBN 978-1-68137-271-6

v1.0

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M EMOIRS of a Revolutionary, generally considered to be Victor Serges masterpiece, is a work of ambiguous literary character, existing on the borderline between history and individual testimony. As a record of their authors itinerary, the memoirs cannot be taken entirely at face value. Serges Notebooks are more intimate in character. They introduce us to the cultural and aesthetic universe of his everyday life, while forming the first stratum of his whole body of work, literary and historical, the foundation of a writing that strives throughout to establish direct contact with reality. Here the authenticity of the man, with all his passions and obsessions, emerges with clarity and in complete contrast to the accusations of duplicity that have been leveled against him. Serge was an anarchist, a Bolshevik, and, finally, a Left Oppositionist. He was close to Trotskyism but never, properly speaking, a Trotskyist: Safeguarding individual freedom within the revolution remained too important to him. He walked a political razors edge with his eyes wide open. It came at the price of his well-being and, on several occasions, his freedom. Serges work as a writer remains credible because it was never in the service of an ideology or any kind of preestablished solution.

The Notebooks are the laboratory in which Serge elaborated the universe of an I in permanent relation with the we that surrounds it, furnishing a glimpse of the tragic stage of revolutions continually betrayed and reborn. Central to them are the contradictions between the fragility of the subject and the demands of collective action. If Serge speaks constantly of himself, it is not to air his personal difficulties but rather to make clear his perspective as a narrator, his place on the global chessboard. On page after page, the Notebooks demonstrate a stubborn fidelity, a total allegiance, and a passionate attachment to the revolutionary project. This places Serge in the company of George Orwell; it makes him the complete opposite of Arthur Koestler. I hate the role of victim, Serge often said. A necessity that resembles complicity often binds a victim to his torturer, the man on the scaffold to his executioner, he wrote in his novel Unforgiving Years. Far from bemoaning his fate or denigrating his persecutors (and God knows he had them), he sought on an ongoing basis to deepen the knowledge required to enrich socialist culture. In the Notebooks, for example, we see how seriously Serge studies Mesoamerican cultures, Mexican geology, even psychoanalysis.

The Notebooks begin in Marseille in 1940, in the immediate aftermath of the Nazi occupation of France. Serge has been taken in hand by Varian Frys Emergency Rescue Committee. His first plan was to emigrate to the United States, but his anarchist and Bolshevik past constituted a major hindrance, and in spite of having the support of John Dewey, Max Eastman, and Sidney Hook, he was denied a visa. At this point, the Mexican option emerged, Mexico being one of the few countries still granting asylum to political refugees. Julin Gorkin, the leader of the Spanish Partido Obrero de Unificacin Marxista (POUM, or Workers Party of Marxist Unification), was in exile in Mexico where he sought to handle the administrative formalities necessary to gain entry for Serge and his family. In the United States, Dwight and Nancy Macdonald were in touch with Frank Tannenbaum, a former union activist and an adviser to the Mexican president Lzaro Crdenas.