Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Read online

  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 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 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 (both available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.

  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, (www.praxiscenter.ru), Greeman is the author of the Web site The Invisible International (bit.ly/invisible-international).

  OTHER BOOKS BY VICTOR SERGE PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

  The Case of Comrade Tulayev

  Conquered City

  Memoirs of a Revolutionary

  Unforgiving Years

  MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

  VICTOR SERGE

  Translated from the French and with an introduction by

  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 © 1939 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle

  Translation copyright © 1981 by Richard Greeman

  Introduction copyright © 2015 by Richard Greeman

  Illustrations copyright © 1981 by VLADY

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published in French as S’il est minuit dans le siècle by Éditions Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1939

  Portions of the introduction by Richard Greeman were published in “Messages: Victor Serge and the Persistence of the Socialist Ideal,” Massachusetts Review XXII, no. 3 (Autumn 1981).

  Cover photograph: Richard Davies, Podporozhye, Arkhangel Region, Church of St. Vladimir (1757); courtesy of the photographer

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Serge, Victor, 1890–1947.

  [S’il est minuit dans le siècle. English]

  Midnight in the century / Victor Serge ; translated by Richard Greeman.

  1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

  ISBN 978-1-59017-796-9 — ISBN 978-1-59017-770-9 (paperback)

  1. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Fiction. I. Greeman, Richard. II. title.

  PQ2637.E49

  843'.912—dc23

  2014014590

  ISBN 978-1-59017-796-9

  v1.0

  For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

  I. Chaos

  II. Black-Waters

  Dedication

  II. Black-Waters

  III. Messages

  IV. Directives

  V. The Beginning

  Glossary

  INTRODUCTION

  I. WRITER AND REVOLUTIONARY

  Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century is an authentic document grounded in the author’s personal experience of arrest, interrogation, and deportation by the GPU to Orenburg on the Ural from 1933 to 1936. Soon after the novel’s publication in Paris in 1939, however, Serge took pains to insist that although entirely “truthful” (in political and historical terms) his novel was a work of the imagination. Indeed, as a writer who placed himself “in the line of the Russian novelists,” Serge claimed for fiction a truth superior to that of history or the essay “combining internal vision with the knowledge of men and things.” He insisted that “to reconstruct reality with sufficient intensity of life requires literary creation and the intuition, passion and freedom it provides.”[1]

  The paradox of Serge the literary artist was that he was also a committed revolutionary. Always in the thick of action, his career united the roles of propagandist, organizer, journalist, pamphleteer, lecturer, theoretician, publicist, translator, militiaman, manual worker, occasional secret agent, and frequent prisoner (for more than ten years and under at least three different regimes). Serge was both an activist and an independent critical thinker whose political involvements evolved from anarchism through syndicalism, Bolshevism, and Trotskyism to a kind of socialist humanism. The child of anti-tsarist exiles, he came of age in a tradition of socialist culture which came to flower in figures like Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Stalin, Radek, Andrés Nin, Emma Goldman, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci—to mention only those with whom Serge was personally acquainted.

  Of all the left-wing writers who attempted, from the inside, to depict the truth of the Communist movement during the tragic decades of Stalin’s ascendancy—names like Orwell, Koestler, Regler, Malraux, and Silone come most readily to mind—Serge was perhaps the most authentic socialist, indeed the only professional revolutionary. A veteran, eventually lonely survivor, of revolutionary movements in half a dozen countries, witness-participant to several of the major victories and defeats of the revolutionary proletariat in the first half of the twentieth century, his “knowledge of men and things” was unequaled—as was his devotion to the truth.

  Yet it is above all as a literary witness and ultimately as an artist that Serge will be remembered—an artist speaking directly out of a vital socialist culture whose traditions and aspirations, successes and failures he distilled and preserved in his writing. As Erich Fromm wrote to me in 1964, “I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.”

  But it was in his novels (of which seven survive) that he best succeeded in re-creating the psychological, intellectual, and physical atmosphere (and above all the human dimension) of the tragic and heroic struggles in which he was so deeply involved. Serge conceived of writing as an act of witness, “as a means of expressing for people what most of them live without being able to express, as a means of communion, as a testimony about the vast life that flows through us whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us.” The values that inform his work are those of sincerity, solidarity, and truthfulness.


  Paradoxically, Serge turned to literature at the very moment when Russian writers were being forced to deny these values. By 1930, the freedom and creative ferment of the Soviet literary renaissance of the 1920s, in which Serge had taken part as a critic and translator, had been crushed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Serge, however, although a Soviet citizen, wrote in French and published mainly in Paris. This circumstance allowed him to continue the literary experiments of his Russian friends and colleagues—Babel, Esenin, Gladkov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pilniak, among others—whose voices were silenced by censorship, suicide, and deportation. His work thus represents a unique strand of continuity in Russian writing between the creative flowering of the 1920s and the post-Thaw dissidence in that it escapes the straightjacket of Stalinist socialist realism.

  Serge is also unique in other ways: Although a committed Marxist with a long experience of the workers’ movement, he was also a literary modernist who was unafraid to borrow from “decadent” influences like Freud and Joyce. Moreover, Serge was at one and the same time a “proletarian” writer, who lived in poverty and worked with his hands (he was a printer by trade) throughout much of his life, and a mature, fully fledged literary artist. A born novelist, a man of universal culture who had long been aware of his literary vocation and had developed his craft through a long apprenticeship as a journalist, literary critic, translator, and publicist, Serge revealed himself as a writer of extraordinary power with his first novel, Men in Prison (1929).

  It was his ambition to break the mold of the traditional novel in order to go beyond the limits of the individual self and reach out to that “vast life that flows through us.” He was thus led to abandon the singular “I” for the collective “we” and to replace the individual protagonist with a kind of collective hero. Borrowing techniques from Pilniak, Dos Passos, and the French Unanimists, he created a rapid, fluid style incorporating vernacular elements of slang, documentary journalism, and cinematographic realism. At the same time, the density of his writing, with its simultaneous presentation of external detail and interior monologue, tends to blur the boundaries between past and present, inner and outer life, permitting occasional flights of what can best be described as a cosmic lyricism.

  Serge’s first three novels, Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City, were written in Leningrad, where he was living in “semi-captivity,” and published in Paris between 1929 and 1932. They comprise an informal trilogy chronicling the birth pangs of the revolution. Shortly after the publication of Conquered City, Serge was arrested and interrogated for months in the notorious Lubyanka GPU prison. As he steadfastly refused to confess and there was no evidence against him, he was administratively deported to Orenburg on the Ural River, where because of his unbending attitude of opposition, he was denied work and nearly starved to death.

  Although a captive in Orenburg, Serge was free to write, and ironically he survived on the postal insurance payments he received for manuscripts sent to Paris that were mysteriously “lost” in the mail. He nonetheless completed two more novels of his cycle. The Lost Men depicted the tragedy of the 1911 anarchist bandits of Paris and would have preceded Men in Prison in the series. The Whirlwind, set in 1920, followed on Conquered City and was “devoted to the year of the Russian revolution which was richest in hope and perhaps the greatest in energy deployed.” Both were confiscated by the GPU and have not been recovered. As Serge wrote in 1940: “They have shot all the men who made the greatness of those times: it is natural that they should kill the works in which that greatness was reflected.”

  In Orenburg, during the years before Stalin’s world-shaking blood purges of the Old Bolsheviks, Serge was thrown in with a group of exiled Trotskyites and revolutionary dissidents whose courageous struggle to maintain their socialist ideals in the face of Stalinist lies and persecutions later inspired what is perhaps Serge’s most poignant and moving novel, Midnight in the Century, to which we will turn in a moment. In 1936, after an international campaign in his favor, Serge was expelled from Russia (like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn some thirty years later).

  From 1936 to 1940, he lived a precarious existence in Brussels and Paris, working in print shops and campaigning against the Stalinist persecution of revolutionary minorities in Russia and Spain. During this brief period of relative security (and despite severe material hardships, including a Communist campaign of slander that effectively closed the major media to him), Serge produced poetry, journalism, political essays, and fiction in profusion. He collaborated with Leon Trotsky (whose Revolution Betrayed he translated into French) and analyzed the Russian experience in three book-length essays (From Lenin to Stalin, Destiny of a Revolution, and Portrait of Stalin), which anticipate The Gulag Archipelago by their compelling fusion of authentic documentation, personal testimony, and historical irony, but which differ from Solzhenitsyn’s later novels in their consistent commitment to the ideals of socialism and freedom.

  In 1938, having fulfilled his political duty by exposing Stalin’s betrayal of socialism in these nonfiction works, Serge felt free to return to fiction in order to re-create the full human dimension of this experience in Midnight in the Century, which was published by Grasset in Paris in 1939 and mentioned for that year’s Prix Goncourt. However, the onset of the Second World War soon destroyed Serge’s precarious hold on literary success along with his even more precarious Parisian exile. His books were suppressed and their author forced to flee to Marseilles and thence, after an excruciating “battle for visas,” to Mexico, where he died in 1947 in poverty and obscurity with three unpublished books in his desk drawer: among them his classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and two novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

  II. MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

  The theme of the persistence of the socialist ideal runs like a red thread through all of Serge’s works, but nowhere is it more evident than in the novel that chronicles the eclipse of that ideal—Midnight in the Century. It is a novel about one of history’s darkest hours, the hour of Hitler’s triumph in Germany and Stalin’s apotheosis in Russia. It is a book about men and women in defeat, about Russian Communists whose fidelity to the liberating revolution of 1917 has landed them in the Gulag of 1934, and who must now ask themselves the question: “What is to be done if it is midnight in the century?”

  It is also a book radiant with admiration of the courage, political integrity, and humanity of its Communist heroes, glowing with intellectual passion as it grapples with the essential questions of socialism, history, and human destiny at a time when thought itself is “glacial . . . something of a midnight sun piercing the skull.” Radiant, too, in its revolutionary faith in an unknown future dimly viewed across an abyss of foreseeable cataclysms, a future symbolized by the image of seeds germinating in the earth. Responding in 1940 to criticism that his novel was “too dark,” Serge declared: “I did not wish it so. I wanted only to be truthful, I even made efforts to include all the muted, secret, tenacious light that I have never ceased to see among the men of the Russian soil. I would have liked to end it on a note of hope, and I believe it is there.”

  It is an authentic book that records—and transfigures—Serge’s ordeal of eighty days of solitary confinement and interrogation in the GPU prison in Moscow, his resistance during two years of deportation in Central Asia, and his unending opposition to the Stalinist betrayal of the revolutionary movement to which he had dedicated his life. Serge devoted a chapter of his Memoirs of a Revolutionary to his “Years of Captivity: 1933–1936,” and there left indelible portraits of his comrades among the deportees in Orenburg, revolutionary heroes and irreducible opponents of Stalinism like Fanya Upstein, Lisa Senatskaya, Vassily Pankratov, and Boris Eltsin, among whom it is possible to identify “models” for some of the protagonists of Midnight in the Century.[2] However, in the 1940 article cited above, Serge insists that “Midnight in the Century, because it is a novel, is a much truer more profound testimony than would be Memoirs, in wh
ich the author would only relate what he himself had lived.” He adds: “It is a mistake to try to recognize the author in his characters. Why would he create them if it were not to escape from himself, to break the rather stifling circle of the self, break with involuntary egocentrism, penetrate another being, incorporate oneself within him, and by a sort of communion attain a more general truth about man?”

  Finally, it is an important book politically, for the main issue that Serge deals with—socialism versus barbarism—is more than ever fundamental to humankind’s survival. Serge’s genius lies in his ability to dramatize with clarity the problems that have been besetting revolutionaries for over two hundred years in a style that is moving and poetic. Through the anguish of his heroes, we are led to rethink the dilemma of the world’s first successful socialist revolution in the throes of transformation into its own opposite—from the activity of millions struggling to create a new world in the image of justice into a narrow, exploitative tyranny—and to pose the question anew for our own age. Serge’s development of the motifs of life’s renewal, of the passage of seasons and generations, and of the transmission of messages among the imprisoned, isolated, and persecuted revolutionaries raises his theme, the persistence of the socialist ideal, to the level of poetic vision. It is a vision that extends backward in time to connect with earlier traditions of revolt and dissidence while prefiguring, in the most explicit fashion, the struggles of Russian and East European socialist rebels that rose to the surface again during the years of glasnost. Indeed, Serge was one of the first Soviet dissidents to be eagerly rediscovered by the “new left” generation of Russian anti-totalitarian socialists during the 1980s and ’90s.[3]

  During his years of deportation in Orenburg, Serge was keenly aware of belonging to a long tradition of persecuted Russian dissidents: