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  VICTOR SERGE (1890–1947) 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 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 books Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Notebooks, and Midnight in the Century, as well as his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (all available as NYRB Classics), were written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously.

  RALPH MANHEIM (1907–1992) translated more than one hundred books, primarily from German and French. His first major commission was Mein Kampf, which was published in the United States in 1943. Among his prizewinning translations are The Tin Drum by Günter Grass, Castle to Castle by Louis-Ferdinand Céline, and A Sorrow Beyond Dreams by Peter Handke. After Manheim’s death, the PEN Medal for Translation, which he won in 1988, was renamed in his memory.

  RICHARD GREEMAN has translated and written the introductions for five of Victor 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, he splits his time between Montpellier, France, and New York City.

  LAST TIMES

  VICTOR SERGE

  Translated from the French by

  RALPH MANHEIM

  with revisions 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 © 1946 by the Estate of Victor Serge

  Original translation copyright © 1946 by Ralph Manheim

  Translation revisions copyright © 2022 by Richard Greeman

  Introduction copyright © 2022 by Richard Greeman

  All rights reserved.

  Originally published by the Dial Press in 1946 under the title The Long Dusk.

  First published as a New York Review Books Classic in 2022.

  Cover image: André Masson, Fruits of the Abyss, 1942; Dallas Museum of Art; Artists Rights Society (ARS), New York/ADAGP, Paris; photograph: Bridgeman Images

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Serge, Victor, 1890–1947, author. | Manheim, Ralph, 1907–1992, translator. | Greeman, Richard, contributor.

  Title: Last times: a novel / Victor Serge; translation by Ralph Manheim; revised with a foreword by Richard Greeman.

  Other titles: Dernier temps. English

  Description: New York: New York Review Books, [2021] | Series: New York Review Books classics | Identifiers: LCCN 2020016147 | ISBN 9781681375144 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681375151 (ebook)

  Classification: LCC PQ2637.E49 D4713 2021 | DDC 843/.912—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020016147

  ISBN 978-1-68137-515-1

  v 1.0

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  Introduction

  A Note on the Translation

  LAST TIMES

  Dedication

  1. Menace

  2. Liquidations

  3. Encounters

  4. Simon Ardatov

  5. The Silence of Paris

  6. Dialogues

  7. Félicien Mûrier

  8. The Indifferent

  9. The Exodus

  10. The Mirage of the Loire

  11. We Are Betrayed

  12. Open City

  13. Inmates

  14. “Patience, Patience . . .”

  15. Small Destinies

  16. Chances

  17. Anton Cherniak

  18. French National Railway

  19. The Sower

  20. The Viper

  21. Trails

  22. The Inquisitors

  23. Justinien

  24. Solitudes

  25. The Skeptic

  26. The Suitcase

  27. Escapes

  28. Freedom Dear

  29. Dawns break Everywhere

  INTRODUCTION

  The panzers of the Wehrmacht were already in the northern suburbs of Paris when Victor Serge left the city. He was without papers and, as usual, nearly broke.

  Serge was accompanied by his young companion Laurette Séjourné, his teenage son Vlady, and a Spanish friend, Narciso Molins y Fàbregas. On the outskirts of Paris, they joined the huge southward exodus of refugees toward the unoccupied zone, a “flight,” he would write in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “accompanied by a sense of release bordering at times on gaiety.”

  The gaiety waned as they made their way through Vichy France. From the Dordogne, Serge wrote Nancy Macdonald, the wife of Dwight Macdonald, his editor at Partisan Review:

  We have been traveling in freight trains, spending nights in the fields. In a little village in the Loire country we were so tired that we lay down behind some stones and slept through an entire bombardment. Nowhere, in this completely chaotic world, were we able to find any asylum . . .

  Of all I once owned—clothes, books, writings—I was able to save only what my friends and I could carry away on our backs in knapsacks. It is very little, but fortunately includes the manuscripts which I have already begun. This letter is a sort of S.O.S. which I hope that you will also communicate to my known and unknown friends in America. I have no money for stamps; I will be able to send off perhaps one or two letters, but that is all. I must ask you to immediately undertake some action of material aid for me. I have scarcely a hundred francs left; we are eating only one meal a day and it is a very poor one at that. I don’t at all know how we are going to hold out.

  The Macdonalds responded to Serge’s call for help by setting up the Fund for European Writers and Artists. As to Serge himself, however, his past membership in the Communist Party made it impossible to bring him to the United States.

  After weeks of wandering, Serge finally arrived in Marseille. The harbor of Marseille had been officially closed, but the city was crowded with refugees of every political stripe competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last (hoped-for) boat to the New World (whose doors remained largely closed). There, in October 1941, Serge heard from Daniel Bénédite, who, from the Paris police prefecture, had helped him with French residence permits. Bénédite, a literature graduate and a left-wing socialist, was now working in Marseille with Varian Fry at the American Emergency Rescue Committee, or Centre Américain de Secours (CAS), as it was known in Fre
nch. This improvised organization snatched hundreds of political refugees—artists, intellectuals, left-wing militants—from the clutches of the Gestapo in the months following the fall of France.

  Bénédite had found an eighteen-room Second Empire house, the Villa Air-Bel, on thirty hectares and with a magnificent view just outside Marseille, which he hoped to turn into a phalanstery of radical thinkers and artists. Serge was the first person he invited to come live there, and Serge in turn pressed him to take in André Breton and his wife and daughter. Fry also moved into the dilapidated villa that Serge humorously renamed Château Espère-Visa (Castle Hope-for-Visa). Thus began the adventure of the “surrealist château” of Air-Bel, with its famous Sunday-afternoon fêtes to which Breton’s friends—among them Wifredo Lam, André Masson, Jean Arp, Marcel Duchamp, René Char, Max Ernst, and Benjamin Péret—came by tram from Marseille to play surrealist games.

  The safe haven of Air-Bel was too good to last, however. To protect the operations of CAS, Fry left, and Serge and his family, hounded by the police and the Communist Party, soon followed. They ended up living in a downtown hotel “on the advice of the Sûreté police because it was inhabited by a half-dozen German agents. For this reason it is heated in winter,” as he wrote the Macdonalds. The winter of 1940 was especially severe in Marseille, and it came just as the results of Nazi requisitions were felt most deeply. In another letter, Serge describes whole crowds gathering “in front of the window of a rotisserie just to watch a single chicken turning on a spit.”

  The Macdonalds in New York and Julián Gorkin in Mexico finally succeeded in arranging a passage to Mexico for Serge. On March 25, 1941, Serge and Vlady along with André, Jacqueline, and Aube Breton, and other refugees whom Fry’s CAS had helped to save, set sail from Marseille to Martinique on the SS Capitaine Paul Lemerle, a ship that Serge humorously described as “a sardine can with a cigarette-butt stuck on top.”

  •

  These experiences were to be the inspiration for Last Times, the novel that Serge began in Mexico early in 1943. Arriving in the New World, he had at first turned to finishing The Case of Comrade Tulayev, his novel about the Stalinist terror of the thirties that he had begun in France. He had also written Memoirs of a Revolutionary. Macdonald and George Orwell did their best to help Serge find publishers for these two great books, but their efforts were in vain. The Soviet Union was a wartime ally, and literature critical of the Soviet regime was unwelcome.

  Serge was by this time in desperate financial straits. With Last Times he bet his survival as a writer on the construction of an American-style novel of topical interest that, he hoped, would win a wide, popular readership. The book’s politics are accordingly uncontroversial, focused on the struggle against fascism, with discussions turning around broad themes of optimism versus pessimism, historical destiny, and the catastrophe of Western civilization; and though there is one Communist villain, when it comes to the villainy of Stalinism—silence. Formally, too, the novel presents few challenges. It is a straightforward story told by an omniscient narrator, with none of the stretches of stream of consciousness found in Serge’s earlier novels. Following the lead of Balzac and Zola, Serge aimed to present a panorama of Europe descending into war, while he looked to the movies for scenes of rousing drama. From Eisenstein, Serge took his epic description of the head-on collision of two monstrous locomotives, and I am nearly certain that Serge saw Casablanca in Mexico City and that the famous singing duel at Rick’s is the model for a similar contest that Serge stages in a French prison camp.

  Last Times begins on the eve of the fall of France, with a detailed description of a cheap Paris hotel in the Marais, not unlike Balzac’s immortal description of the Pension Vauquer at the start of Le Père Goriot. Serge uses this classic device to bring together the disparate characters whose intertwined destinies will work themselves out in the novel. From there he opens up on a description of Paris in her last days, from the sinister wall of the Santé Prison to the splendid silence of the empty Place de l’Opéra. This includes marvelous vignettes of a couple of philosophical winos under a bridge on the Seine and a tragic view of the old Jewish quarter on the eve of an inevitable pogrom.

  After the arrival of the Germans, Serge follows his characters to the South of France, where they fight for survival, escape, perish, or join the Resistance. His protagonists are to an extent types: the Jew, the Spanish refugee, the woodsman, his daughter the ingenue, the good bad guy, the rich eccentric poet, the tough young woman from the German underground, the bitter demoralized soldier. Together they form a kind of fictional family (similar to the multiethnic platoon in so many US war movies of the period) with which the reader can readily identify, though by today’s standards, Serge’s treatment of female characters seems unfortunately clichéd. There is a madonna (Angel) and a plethora of whores and abortionists. Hilda, the German revolutionary, does have an inner life and interesting backstory, but Serge fails to develop her.

  There is plenty of action in the novel, however: several sordid murders, a suicide, a torture scene, an aerial bombardment, a number of close escapes, skirmishes in the maquis, and those colliding locomotives. And there is a happy ending, sort of, since Serge provides alternative endings, one tailored to his own vision of the historical situation, the other meant to cheer his wartime audience. The dark and the light. On the dark side we have the fate of the two young good guys: Maurice Silber, the Jew, beaten to death, though defiant to the end, while the Spaniard Ortiga lives on, but only barely, in a Saharan work camp, dreaming of escape. Meanwhile the character who could be said to represent Serge himself, old Ardatov, miraculously saved from occupied Europe, is murdered on the ship to the New World by the Stalinist Willi Bart, a killing that symbolizes what Serge saw as the inexorable extermination of his whole generation of revolutionary militants and intellectuals, crushed between Nazism and Stalinism. It also draws on his continuing and entirely realistic worries for his own safety in Mexico, where Trotsky had not long before met his end at the hand of a Soviet agent.

  Such is the end of the tragic symphony. But then comes a coda: “Dawns Break Everywhere.” We are in the world of the Resistance, and the book ends with an optimistic flourish: “ . . . but nothing has ended.”

  A conventional novel, in many ways, though one to which Serge brought all his skills as a novelist. He sketched maps of his Marseille locales the better to imagine them; he blocked out his plot and characters scene by scene on a long roll of paper as in a screenplay. He did a professional job and took pride in doing it, coming to accept the compromise he had made in taking it on. “I prefer practical compromise with social censorship to a deliberate dive into despair,” he writes in his Notebooks, where he also records moments of creative exhilaration:

  Occupied these past days with Félicien Mûrier, I suddenly felt the need to return to Karel Cherniak. I knew, without being sure, that his fate was leading him to suicide. For several days I was tormented by the presence within me of Karel Cherniak, especially while falling asleep, and probably as I slept. He prevented me from seeing the other characters. I finally found a key phrase, insignificant and empty in appearance, “Cherniak opened the window,” and I knew that the solution was ready within me, that all that was left was to write, but I didn’t know what this solution was. It would have been impossible for me to recount it in advance.

  And yet he continued to have mixed feelings. Serge the writer held himself up to very high standards. His ideal was “literary creation that is free and disinterested,” and he dismissed writers who were “merely suppliers to the book trade.” He was ambitious, too, to break the mold of the “impoverished and outmoded” bourgeois novel, centered “upon a few beings artificially detached from the world.” And yet beset as he was by poverty, persecution, isolation, and ill health, he could hardly bring himself to, as he said to his friend Herbert Lenhof, “let myself go all the way, shake off the weight of external and internal censorship” needed
to truly make a novel live, and then there was yet another obstacle that made it “psychologically impossible” to transform his recent experiences—his “last times”—into a work of fiction. In December 1944, he writes:

  I am at the end of Last Times and experiencing extraordinary difficulty finishing this book . . . It is more that a novel—for me—ought to have an internal justification, internal to its characters and to its atmosphere, and that in reality all the men that I have tried to bring alive here strike me as condemned men walking through fog. They need a solution, I need a solution for them—and there is none. History can impose its solutions only by passing over their corpses.

  And yet Last Times, once finished, was the success Serge had hoped for. He had mastered the genre of the popular novel and won his bet. It was published in French as Les derniers temps by Les Éditions de l’Arbre in Montreal at the end of 1946 (it would not appear in France until 1952), and in Le Canada it received a rave review: “The Great Novel of 1946.” Other Canadian reviews unanimously praised Serge’s mastery of French style, and even the Catholic Revue Dominicaine, though deploring the book’s depiction of “the vices of the flesh displayed in all their impudicity,” concluded that it was a “masterpiece” of realism. Ralph Manheim’s English translation, entitled The Long Dusk, came out that same year from Dial Press in New York, and was extensively and more or less positively reviewed in The New York Times, The New Yorker, and The Saturday Review, as well as in daily papers across the country. Irving Howe in Partisan Review patronized Serge’s writing as “journalistic” but placed it well above Arthur Koestler. After the novel’s publication, on receiving a fan letter from an “indulgent” and “qualified” reader of Last Times, even Serge warmed to his book. He replied:

  You have felt the sincerity of my characters, and that’s the most important thing. Maybe I conceived my people a little bit stronger, more courageous, more complete, than they are in everyday life. It seems to me that the novelist has the right, if not the duty, to purify reality a bit, to look for the best and the purist in man—and that he thus serves the truth.