Victor Serge (1890–1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona; a Bolshevik in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central Europe; a comrade of Trotsky’s; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely, Boris Pilnyak, and André Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico...Like Serge’s extraordinary novels, ...

Like Serge's extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the 'immense shipwreck' of Stalin's ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean and Mexico, Serge composed elegies for the fallen - as well as prospective elegies for the living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in t...

In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin’s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century, Serge’s searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution.Among the exiles gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black-Waters, are the granite-faced Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic ...

A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France.Last Times, Victor Serge’s epic novel of the fall of France, is based—like much of his fiction—on firsthand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris in June 1940 and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a pers...

Available for the first time, Victor Serge's intimate account of the last decade of his life gives a vivid look into the Franco-Russian revolutionary's life, from his liberation from Stalin's Russia to his "Mexico Years," when he wrote his greatest works.In 1936, Victor Serge—poet, novelist, and revolutionary—left the Soviet Union for Paris, the rare opponent of Stalin to escape the Terror. In 1940, after the Nazis marched into Paris, Serge fled France for Mexico, ...

Anarchists Never Surrender provides a complete picture of Victor Serge’s relationship to anarchism. The volume contains writings going back to his teenage years in Brussels, where he became influenced by the doctrine of individualist anarchism. At the heart of the anthology are key articles written soon after his arrival in Paris in 1909, when he became editor of the newspaper l’anarchie. In these articles Serge develops and debates his own radical thoughts, arguing the f...

Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge’s final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Pa...

“Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.”The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of F...

Birth of Our Power is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917–1919. Serge’s tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is “burning at both ends.” Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it....

Anarchists Never Surrender anthologises Victor Serge's previously unavailable texts on anarchism and fleshes out the portrait of this brilliant writer and thinker, a man who legendary American journalist I.F. Stone called one of the moral figures of our time.' It provides a complete picture of Victor Serge's relationship to anarchism. The volume contains writings going back to his teenage years in Brussels, where he became influenced by the doctrine of individualist anarchism.'

Serge's tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the trenches of WWI. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is burning at both ends.' Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge's 'tale of two cities' is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city 'we' could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered cap...

Victor Serge served five years in French penitentiaries (1912-1917) for the crime of 'criminal association' - in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous 'Tragic Bandits' of French anarchism. 'While I was still in prison,' Serge later recalled, 'fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of desc...