“… after all, there is such a thing as truth.”
THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV
How to explain the obscurity of one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes, Victor Serge? How to account for the neglect of The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a wonderful novel that has gone on being rediscovered and reforgotten ever since its publication, a year after Serge’s death in 1947?
Is it because no country can fully claim him? “A political exile since my birth” — so Serge (real name: Victor Lvovich Kibalchich) described himself. His parents were opponents of tsarist tyranny who had fled Russia in the early 1880s, and Serge was born in 1890 “in Brussels, as it happened, in mid-journey across the world,” he relates in his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, written in 1942 and 1943 in Mexico City, where, a penurious refugee from Hitler’s Europe and Stalin’s assassins at large, he spent his last years. Before Mexico, Serge had lived, written, conspired, and propagandized in six countries: Belgium, in his early youth and again in 1936; France, repeatedly; Spain, in 1917 — it was then that he adopted the pen name of Serge; Russia, the homeland he saw for the first time in early 1919, at the age of twenty-eight, when he arrived to join the Bolshevik Revolution; and Germany and Austria in the mid-1920s, on Comintern business. In each country his residence was provisional, full of hardship and contention, threatened. In several, it ended with Serge booted out, banished, obliged to move on.
Is it because he was not — the familiar model — a writer engaged intermittently in political partisanship and struggle, like Silone and Camus and Koestler and Orwell, but a lifelong activist and agitator? In Belgium, he militated in the Young Socialist movement, a branch of the Second International. In France, he became an anarchist (the so-called individualist kind), and for articles in the anarchist weekly he co-edited that expressed a modicum of sympathy for the notorious Bonnot gang after the bandits’ arrest (there was never any question of Serge’s complicity) and his refusal, after his arrest, to turn informer, was sentenced to five years of solitary confinement. In Barcelona following his release from prison, he quickly became disillusioned with the Spanish anarcho-syndicalists for their reluctance to attempt to seize power. Back in France, in late 1917 he was incarcerated for fifteen months, this time as (the words of the arrest order) “an undesirable, a defeatist, and a Bolshevik sympathizer.” In Russia, he joined the Communist Party, fought in the siege of Petrograd during the Civil War, was commissioned to examine the archives of the tsarist secret police (and wrote a treatise on state oppression), headed the administrative staff of the Executive Committee of the Third — Communist — International and participated in its first three congresses, and, distressed by the mounting barbarity of governance in the newly consolidated Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, arranged to be sent abroad by the Comintern in 1922 as a propagandist and organizer. (In this time there were more than a few freelance, foreign members of the Comintern, which was, in effect, the Foreign, or World Revolution, Department of the Russian Communist Party.) After the failure of revolution in Berlin and subsequent time spent in Vienna, Serge returned in 1926 to the USSR now ruled by Stalin and officially joined the Left Opposition, Trotsky’s coalition, with which he had been allied since 1923: he was expelled from the Party in late 1927 and arrested soon after. All in all, Serge was to endure more than ten years of captivity for his serial revolutionary commitments. There is a problem for writers who exercise another, more strenuous profession full-time.
Is it because — despite all these distractions — he wrote so much? Hyperproductivity is not as well regarded as it used to be, and Serge was unusually productive. His published writings — almost all of which are out of print — include seven novels, two volumes of poetry, a collection of short stories, a late diary, his memoirs, some thirty political and historical books and pamphlets, three political biographies, and hundreds of articles and essays. And there was more: a memoir of the anarchist movement in pre-First World War France, a novel about the Russian Revolution, a short book of poems, and a historical chronicle of Year II of the Revolution, all confiscated when Serge was finally allowed to leave the USSR in 1936, as the consequence of his having applied to Glavlit, the literary censor, for an exit permit for his manuscripts — these have never been recovered — as well as a great deal of safely archived but still unpublished material. If anything, his being prolific has probably counted against him.
Is it because most of what he wrote does not belong to literature? Serge began writing fiction — his first novel, Men in Prison — when he was thirty-nine. Behind him lay more than twenty years’ worth of works of expert historical assessment and political analysis, and a profusion of brilliant political and cultural journalism. He is commonly remembered, if at all, as a valiant dissident Communist, a clear-eyed, assiduous opponent of Stalin’s counterrevolution. (Serge was the first to call the USSR a “totalitarian” state, in a letter he wrote to friends in Paris on the eve of his arrest in Leningrad in February 1933.) No twentieth-century novelist had anything like his firsthand experiences of insurgency, of intimate contact with epochal leaders, of dialogue with founding political intellectuals. He had known Lenin — Serge’s wife Liubov Rusakova was Lenin’s stenographer in 1921; Serge had translated State and Revolution into French, and wrote a biography of Lenin soon after his death in January 1924. He was close to Trotsky, although they did not meet again after Trotsky’s banishment in 1929; Serge was to translate The Revolution Betrayed and other late writings and, in Mexico, where Trotsky had preceded him as a political refugee, collaborate with his widow on a biography. Antonio Gramsci and Georg Lukács were among Serge’s interlocutors, with whom he discussed, when they were all living in Vienna in 1924 and 1925, the despotic turn that the revolution had taken almost immediately, under Lenin. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev, whose epic subject is the Stalinist state’s murder of millions of the Party faithful as well as of most dissidents in the 1930s, Serge writes about a fate he himself most improbably, and just barely, escaped. Serge’s novels have been admired principally as testimony; polemic; inspired journalism; fictionalized history. It is easy to underestimate the literary accomplishment of a writer the bulk of whose work is not literary.
Is it because no national literature can entirely claim him? Cosmopolitan by vocation, he was fluent in five languages: French, Russian, German, Spanish, and English. (He spent part of his childhood in England.) In his fiction, he has to be considered a Russian writer, bearing in mind the extraordinary continuity of Russian voices in literature — one whose forbears are Dostoevsky, the Dostoevsky of The House of the Dead and The Devils, and Chekhov, and whose contemporary influences were the great writers of the 1920s, notably Boris Pilnyak, the Pilnyak of The Naked Year, Yevgeny Zamyatin, and Isaac Babel. But French remained his literary language. Serge’s copious output as a translator was from Russian into French: works of Lenin, Trotsky, the founder of the Comintern Grigori Zinoviev, the pre-Bolshevik revolutionary Vera Figner (1852–1942), whose memoirs relate her twenty years of solitary confinement in a tsarist prison, and, among novelists and poets, of Andrei Biely, Fyodor Gladkov, and Vladimir Mayakovsky. And his own books were all written in French. A Russian writer who writes in French — it means that Serge remains absent, even as a footnote, from the histories of both modern French and Russian literature.
Is it because whatever stature he had as a literary writer was always politicized, that is, viewed as a moral achievement? His was the literary voice of a righteous political militancy, a narrowing prism through which to view a body of work that has other, nondidactic claims on our attention. During the late 1920s and the 1930s, he had been a much-published writer, at least in France, with an ardent if small constituency — a political constituency, of course, mainly of the Trotskyist persuasion. But in the last years, after Serge had been excommunicated by Trotsky, that constituency had abandoned him to the predictable calumnies of the pro-Soviet Popular Front press. And the socialist positions Serge espoused after arriving in Mexico in 1941, a year after Trotsky was axed by the executioner sent by Stalin, seemed to his remaining supporters to be indistinguishable from those of the social democrats. More isolated than ever, boycotted by both the right and the left back in postwar Western Europe, the ex-Bolshevik, ex-Trotskyist, anti-Communist Serge continued to write — mostly for the drawer. He did publish a short book, Hitler versus Stalin, collaborate with a Spanish comrade in exile on a political magazine (Mundo), and contribute regularly to a few magazines abroad, but — despite the efforts of admirers as influential as Dwight Macdonald in New York and Orwell in London to find him a publisher — two of Serge’s last three novels, the late stories and poems, and the memoirs remained unpublished in any language until after, mostly decades after, his death.
Is it because there were too many dualities in his life? He was a militant, a world-improver, to the end, which made him anathema to the right. (Even if, as he noted in his journal in February 1944, “Problems no longer have their former beautiful simplicity: it was convenient to live on antinomies like socialism or capitalism.”) But he was a knowledgeable enough anti-Communist to worry that the American and British governments had not grasped that Stalin’s goal after 1945 was to take over all of Europe (at the cost of a Third World War), and this, in the era of widespread pro-Soviet or anti-anti-Communist bias among intellectuals in Western Europe, made Serge a renegade, a reactionary, a warmonger. “All the right enemies,” the old motto proclaims: Serge had too many enemies. As an ex-, now anti-, Communist, he was never penitent enough. He deplores but he does not regret. He has not given up on the idea of radical social change because of the totalitarian outcome of the Russian Revolution. For Serge — to this extent he agrees with Trotsky — the revolution was betrayed. He is not saying it was a tragic illusion, a catastrophe for the Russian people, from the beginning. (But might Serge have said this had he lived another decade or more? Probably.) Finally, he was a lifelong practicing intellectual, which seemed to trump his achievement as a novelist, and he was a passionate political activist, which did not enhance his credentials as a novelist either.
Is it because he continued to the end to identify himself as a revolutionary, a vocation that is now so discredited in the prosperous world? Is it because, most implausibly, he insisted on being hopeful…still? “Behind us,” he wrote in 1943, in Memoirs of a Revolutionary, “lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness.” And yet Serge declares that “those were the only roads possible for us. And insists, “I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.” Surely this could not have been true.
Is it because, embattled and defeated as he was, his literary work refused to take on the expected cargo of melancholy? His indomitability is not as attractive to us as a more anguished reckoning. In his fiction, Serge writes about the worlds he has lived in, not about himself. It is a voice that forbids itself the requisite tones of despair or contrition or bewilderment — literary tones, as most people understand them — although Serge’s own situation was increasingly grim. By 1947, he was desperately trying to get out of Mexico, where, by the terms of his visa, he was banned from all political activity, and, since an American visa was out of the question because of his Communist Party membership in the 1920s, to return to France. At the same time, incapable of being uninterested, unstimulated, wherever he was, he became fascinated by what he had observed on several trips around the country of the indigenous cultures and the landscape, and had begun a book about Mexico. The end was miserable. Shabbily dressed, ill-nourished, increasingly plagued by angina — worsened by the high altitude of Mexico City — he had a heart attack while out late one evening, hailed a taxi, and died in the backseat. The driver deposited him at a police station: it was two days before his family learned what had happened to him and were able to claim the body.
In short, there was nothing, ever, triumphant about his life, as much that of the eternal poor student as the militant on the run — unless one excepts the triumph of being immensely gifted and industrious as a writer; the triumph of being principled and also astute, and therefore incapable of keeping company with the faithful and the cravenly gullible and the merely hopeful; the triumph of being incorruptible as well as brave, and therefore on a different, lonely path from the liars and toadies and careerists; the triumph of being, after the early 1920s, right.
Because he was right, he has been punished as a writer of fiction. The truth of history crowds out the truth of fiction — as if one were obliged to choose between them…
Is it because the life was so steeped in historical drama as to overshadow the work? Indeed, some of his fervent supporters have asserted that Serge’s greatest literary work was his own tumultuous, danger-filled, ethically stalwart life. Something similar has been said of Oscar Wilde, who himself could not resist the masochistic quip, “I put all my genius into my life; I put only my talent into my works.” Wilde was mistaken, and so is this misguided compliment to Serge. As is the case with most major writers, Serge’s books are better, wiser, more important than the person who wrote them. To think otherwise is to condescend to Serge and to the very questions — How shall one live? How can I make sense of my own life? How can life be made better for those who are oppressed? — he honored by his lucidity, his rectitude, his valor, his defeats. While it is true that literature, particularly nineteenth-century Russian literature, is the home of these questions, it is cynical — or merely philistine — to consider as literary a life lived in their light. That would be to denigrate both morality and literature. History, too.
English-language readers of Serge today have to think themselves back to a time when most people accepted that the course of their lives would be determined by history rather than psychology, public rather than private crises. It was history, a particular historical moment, that drove Serge’s parents out of tsarist Russia: the wave of repressiveness and state terror that followed the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will), the terrorist branch of the populist movement, in 1881. Serge’s scientist father, Leon Kibalchich, at that time an officer in the Imperial Guard, belonged to a military group sympathetic to the narodnik (populist) demands, and barely escaped being shot when the group was discovered. In his first refuge, Geneva, he met and married a radical student from St. Petersburg of Polish gentry origin, and the couple was to spend the rest of the decade, in the words of their second-generation political-exile son, commuting “in quest of their daily bread and of good libraries… between London (the British Museum), Paris, Switzerland, and Belgium.”
Revolution was at the heart of the socialist exile culture into which Serge was born: the quintessential hope, the quintessential intensity. “The conversations of grown-ups dealt with trials, executions, escapes, and Siberian highways, with great ideas incessantly argued over, and with the latest books about these ideas.” Revolution was the modern tragic drama. “On the walls of our humble and makeshift lodgings, there were always the portraits of men who had been hanged.” (One portrait, surely, was of Nikolai Kibalchich, a distant relative of his father, who was among the five conspirators convicted of assassinating Alexander II.)
Revolution entailed danger, the risk of death, the likelihood of prison. Revolution entailed hardship, privation, hunger. “I think that if anyone had asked me at the age of twelve, ‘What is life?’ (and I often asked it of myself), I would have replied, ‘I do not know, but I can see that it means “Thou shalt think, thou shalt struggle, thou shalt be hungry.”’”
And it was. To read Serge’s memoirs is to be brought back to an era that seems very remote today in its introspective energies and passionate intellectual quests and code of self-sacrifice and immense hope: an era in which the twelve-year-olds of cultivated parents might normally ask themselves “What is life?” Serge’s cast of mind was not, for that time, precocious. It was the household culture of several generations of voraciously well-read idealists, many from the Slavic countries — the children of Russian literature, as it were. Staunch believers in science and human betterment, they were to provide the troops for many of the radical movements of the first third of the twentieth century; and were to be used, disillusioned, betrayed, and, if they happened to live in the Soviet Union, put to death. In his memoirs Serge reports his friend Pilnyak saying to him in 1933: “There isn’t a single thinking adult in this country who hasn’t thought that he might get shot.”
Starting in the late 1920s, the chasm between reality and propaganda widened drastically. It was the climate of opinion that made the courageous Romanian-born writer Panaït Istrati (1884–1935) consider withdrawing his truthful report on a sixteen-month stay in the Soviet Union in 1927–1928, Vers une autre flamme (Towards Another Flame), at the behest of his powerful French literary patron, Romain Rolland, which, when he did publish it, was rejected by all his former friends and supporters in the literary world; and that led André Malraux in his capacity as editor at Gallimard to turn down the adversarial biography of Stalin by the Russian-born Boris Souvarine (1895–1984; real name: Boris Lifchitz) as inimical to the cause of the Spanish Republic. (Istrati and Souvarine, who were close friends of Serge’s, formed with him a kind of triumvirate of foreign-born francophone writers who, from the late 1920s on, assumed the thankless role of denouncing from the left — therefore, prematurely — what was happening in the Soviet Union.) To many living in the Depression-afflicted capitalist world, it seemed impossible not to sympathize with the struggle of this vast backward country to survive and to create, according to its stated aims, a new society based on economic and social justice. André Gide was being only a bit florid when he wrote in his journal in April 1932 that he would be willing to die for the Soviet Union:
In the abominable distress of the present world, new Russia’s plan now seems to me salvation. There is nothing that does not persuade me of this! The miserable arguments of its enemies, far from convincing me, make my blood boil. And if my life were necessary to ensure the success of the USSR, I should give it at once … as have done, as will do, so many others, and without distinguishing myself from them.
As for what was actually happening in the USSR in 1932 — this is how Serge began “The Hospital in Leningrad,” a short story he wrote in Mexico City in 1946 that anticipates the narratives of Solzhenitsyn:
In 1932 I was living in Leningrad … Those were dark times, of shortages in the cities and famine in the villages, of terror, secret murder, and persecution of industrial managers and engineers, peasants, the religious, and those opposed to the regime. I belonged to the last category, which meant that at night, even in the depths of sleep, I never ceased to listen for the noises on the staircase, for the ascending footsteps heralding my arrest.
In October 1932, Serge wrote to the Central Committee of the Party appealing to be allowed to emigrate; permission was refused. In March 1933, Serge was arrested again, and after a term in the Lubyanka was sent into internal exile to Orenburg, a bleak town on the frontier between Russia and Kazakhstan. Serge’s plight was the subject of immediate protests in Paris. At the International Congress of Writers for the Defense of Culture, a stellar gathering held in Paris in June 1935, presided over by Gide and Malraux, which was the climax of Comintern-designed efforts to mobilize unaffiliated progressive-minded writers in defense of the Soviet Union — this just as Stalin’s program of framing and executing all the surviving members of the Bolshevik Old Guard was getting under way — “the case of Victor Serge” was raised by a number of delegates. The following year, Gide, who was about to leave, with entourage, for a triumphal tour of the Soviet Union on which great propaganda importance had been placed, went to see the Soviet ambassador in Paris requesting Serge’s release. Rolland, on a return state visit to Russia, brought up the case with Stalin himself.
In April 1936, Serge (with his teenage son) was taken from Orenburg to Moscow, stripped of his Soviet citizenship, reunited with his mentally fragile wife and their infant daughter, and put on a train to Warsaw — the sole instance during the era of the Great Terror when a writer was liberated (that is, expelled from Soviet Russia) as the result of a foreign campaign of support. Undoubtedly, it helped enormously that the Belgian-born Russian was considered a foreigner.
After reaching Brussels in late April, Serge published an “Open Letter” to Gide in the French magazine Esprit, thanking him for a recent approach he had made to the Soviet authorities to try to recover Serge’s confiscated manuscripts, and evoking some Soviet realities Gide might not hear about during his tour, such as the arrest and murder of many writers and the total suppression of intellectual freedom. (Serge had already sought contact with Gide in early 1934, sending him a letter from Orenburg about their shared conceptions of freedom in literature.) The two writers were able to meet secretly several times after Gide’s return, in Paris in November 1936 and in Brussels in January 1937. Serge’s journal accounts of these meetings provide a poignant contrast: Gide the consummate insider, the master on whom the mantle of the Great Writer had descended, and Serge, the knight of lost causes, itinerant, impoverished, always in jeopardy. (Of course, Gide was wary of Serge — of being influenced, of being misled.)
The French writer of the period whom Serge does resemble — in the starkness of his rectitude, his incessant studiousness, his principled renunciation of comfort, possessions, security — is his younger contemporary and fellow political militant, Simone Weil. It is more than likely that they met in Paris in 1936, shortly after Serge’s liberation, or in 1937. Since June 1934, right after his arrest, Weil had been among those committed to keeping alive “the case of Victor Serge” and making direct protests to the Soviet authorities. They had a close friend in common, Souvarine; both wrote regularly for the syndicalist magazine La Révolution prolétarienne. Weil was well known to Trotsky — the twenty-five-year-old Weil had had an evening of face-to-face debate with Trotsky on his brief visit to Paris in December 1934, when Weil arranged for him to use an apartment belonging to her parents for a clandestine political meeting — and figures in a letter to Serge in July 1936 in response to the suggestion that she collaborate on the new magazine Serge hoped to found. And, during Weil’s two months in late summer 1936 as a volunteer with an international militia fighting for the Spanish Republic, her principal political contact, whom she saw upon arriving in Barcelona, was the dissident Communist Julian Gorkin, another close friend of Serge’s.
Trotskyist comrades had been the most active campaigners for Serge’s freedom, and while in Brussels Serge gave his adherence to the Fourth International — as the league of Trotsky’s supporters called themselves — although he knew the movement did not advance a viable alternative to the Leninist doctrines and practice that had led to Stalinist tyranny. (For Trotsky, the crime was that the wrong people were being shot.) His departure for Paris in 1937 was followed by the open rift with Trotsky, who, from his new, Mexican exile, denounced Serge as a closet anarchist; out of respect and affection for Trotsky, Serge refused to return the attack. Unfazed by the obloquy of being perceived as a turncoat, a traitor to the left, he published more against-the-stream tracts and dossiers on the destiny of the revolution from Lenin to Stalin, and another novel, Midnight in the Century (1939), set five years earlier, mostly in a remote town resembling Orenburg to which persecuted members of the Left Opposition have been deported. It is the very first depiction in a novel of the Gulag — properly, GULAG, the acronym for that vast internal carceral empire whose official name in Russian translates as Chief Administration of Camps. Midnight in the Century is dedicated to comrades from the most honorable of the radical parties in the Spanish Republic, the dissenting Communist — that is, anti-Stalinist — Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista (POUM); its leader Andrès Nin, executed by Soviet agents in 1937, was a cherished friend of Serge’s.
In June 1940, after the German occupation of Paris, Serge fled to the south of France, eventually reaching the haven set up by the heroic Varian Fry who, in the name of an American private group calling itself the Emergency Rescue Committee, was to help some two thousand scholars, writers, artists, musicians, and scientists find an exit from Hitler’s Europe. There, in the villa outside Marseilles that its inmates and visitors — they included André Breton, Max Ernst, and André Masson — dubbed Espervisa, Serge continued work on the new, more ambitious novel about the reign of state murder in Soviet Russia he had begun in Paris in early 1940. When a Mexican visa finally came through for Serge (Breton and the others were all admitted to the United States), he set out in March 1941 on the long precarious sea voyage. Delayed for questioning, then jailed by Vichy government officials when the cargo ship stopped in Martinique, delayed again for want of transit visas in the Dominican Republic, where during the enforced sojourn he wrote a political tract designed for a Mexican public (Hitler versus Stalin), and delayed again in Havana, where, jailed once more, he went on with his novel, Serge did not arrive in Mexico until September. He finished The Case of Comrade Tulayev the following year.
At the beginning of the twenty-first century, nothing of the novel’s once controversial aura remains. No sane person now can dispute the toll of suffering that the Bolshevik system inflicted on the Russian people. Then, the consensus was elsewhere, producing the scandal of Gide’s unfavorable report on his trip, Return from the USSR (1937): Gide remained even after his death in 1951 the great left-wing writer who had betrayed Spain. The attitude was reproduced in Sartre’s notorious refusal to broach the subject of the Gulag on the grounds that it would discourage the just militancy of the French working class. (“Il faut pas faire désesperer Billancourt.”) For most writers who identified with the left in those decades, or who simply thought of themselves as against war (and were appalled at the prospect of a Third World War), condemning the Soviet Union was at the very least problematic.
As if to confirm the anxiety on the left, those who had no problem denouncing the Soviet Union seemed to be precisely those who had no qualms about being racist or anti-Semitic or contemptuous of the poor; illiberals, who had never heard the siren call of idealism or been moved to any active sympathy with the excluded and the persecuted. The vice president of a major American insurance company, who was also America’s greatest twentieth-century poet, might welcome Serge’s testimony. Thus section XIV of Wallace Stevens’s magisterial long poem “Esthétique du mal,” written in 1945, opens with:
Victor Serge said, “I followed his argument
With the blank uneasiness which one might feel
In the presence of a logical lunatic.”
He said it of Konstantinov. Revolution
Is the affair of logical lunatics.
The politics of emotion must appear
To be an intellectual structure.
That it seems odd to find Serge evoked in a poem of Stevens’s suggests how thoroughly Serge has been forgotten, for he was indeed a considerable presence in some of the most influential serious magazines of the 1940s. Stevens is likely to have been a reader of Partisan Review, if not of Dwight Macdonald’s maverick radical magazine Politics, which published Serge (and Simone Weil, too). Macdonald and his wife, Nancy, had been a lifeline, financially and otherwise, to Serge during the desperate months in Marseilles and the obstacle-ridden voyage, and went on with their assiduous help once Serge and his family were in Mexico. Sponsored by Macdonald, Serge had begun writing for Partisan Review in 1938, and continued to send articles from this last, improbable residence. In 1942, he became Mexican correspondent of the New York anti-Communist biweekly The New Leader (Macdonald strongly disapproved), and later began contributing — on Orwell’s recommendation — to Polemic and to Cyril Connolly’s Horizon in London.
Minority magazines; minority views. Excerpted first in Partisan Review, Czeslaw Milosz’s masterly portraits of the mutilation of the writer’s honor, the writer’s conscience, under communism, The Captive Mind (1953), was discounted by much of the American literary public as a work of cold war propaganda by the hitherto unknown émigré Polish writer. Similar suspicions persisted into the 1970s: when Robert Conquest’s implacable, irrefutable chronicle of the state slaughters of the 1930s, The Great Terror, appeared in 1969, the book could be regarded in many quarters as controversial — its conclusions perhaps unhelpful, its implications downright reactionary.
Those decades of turning a blind eye to what went on in Communist regimes, specifically the conviction that to criticize the Soviet Union was to give aid and comfort to Fascists and warmongers, seem almost incomprehensible now. In the early twenty-first century, we have moved on to other illusions — other lies that intelligent people with good intentions and humane politics tell themselves and their supporters in order not to give aid and comfort to their enemies.
There have always been people to argue that the truth is sometimes inexpedient, counterproductive — a luxury. (This is known as thinking practically, or politically.) And, on the other side, the well-intentioned are understandably reluctant to jettison commitments, views, and institutions in which much idealism has been invested. Situations do arise in which truth and justice may seem incompatible. And there may be even more resistance to perceiving the truth than there is to acknowledging the claims of justice. It seems all too easy for people not to recognize the truth, especially when it may mean having to break with, or be rejected by, a community that supplies a valued part of their identity.
A different outcome is possible if one hears the truth from someone to whom one is disposed to listen. How was the Marquis de Custine, during his five-month tour of Russia a century earlier, able — prophetically — to understand how central to this society were the extravagances of despotism and submissiveness and indefatigable lying for the benefit of foreigners, which he described in his journal in the form of letters, Letters from Russia? Surely it mattered that Custine’s lover was Polish, the young Count Ignacy Gurowski, who must have been eager to tell him of the horrors of tsarist oppression. Why was Gide, among all the left-wing visitors to the Soviet Union in the 1930s, the one to remain unseduced by the rhetoric of Communist equality and revolutionary idealism? Perhaps because he had been primed to detect the dishonesty and the fear of his hosts by the intrusive briefings of the unimpeachable Victor Serge.
Serge, modestly, says it only takes some clarity and independence to tell the truth. In Memoirs of a Revolutionary, he writes:
I give myself credit for having seen clearly in a number of important situations. In itself, this is not so difficult to achieve, and yet it is rather unusual. To my mind, it is less a question of an exalted or shrewd intelligence, than of good sense, goodwill and a certain sort of courage to enable one to rise above both the pressures of one’s environment and the natural inclination to close one’s eyes to facts, a temptation that arises from our immediate interests and from the fear which problems inspire in us. A French essayist has said: “What is terrible when you seek the truth, is that you find it.” You find it, and then you are no longer free to follow the biases of your personal circle, or to accept fashionable clichés.
“What is terrible when you seek the truth…” A dictum to be pinned above every writer’s desk.
The ignominious obtuseness and lies of Dreiser, Rolland, Henri Barbusse, Louis Aragon, Beatrice and Sidney Webb, Halldór Laxness, Egon Erwin Kisch, Walter Duranty, Leon Feuchtwanger, and the like are mostly forgotten. And so are those who opposed them, who fought for the truth. The truth, once acquired, is ungrateful. We can’t remember everyone. What is remembered is not testimony but … literature. The presumptive case for exempting Serge from the oblivion that awaits most heroes of truth lies, finally, in the excellence of his fiction, above all The Case of Comrade Tulayev. But to be a literary writer perceived only or mainly as a didactic writer; to be a writer without a country, a country in whose literary canon his fiction would find a place — these elements of Serge’s complex fate continue to obscure this admirable, enthralling book.
Fiction, for Serge, is truth — the truth of self-transcendence, the obligation to give voice to those who are mute or have been silenced. He disdained novels of private life, most of all autobiographical novels. “Individual existences were of no interest to me — particularly my own,” he remarks in the Memoirs. In a journal entry (March 1944), Serge explains the larger reach of his idea of fictional truth:
Perhaps the deepest source is the feeling that marvelous life is passing, flying, slipping inexorably away and the desire to detain it in flight. It was this desperate feeling that drove me, around the age of sixteen, to note the precious instant, that made me discover that existence (human, “divine”) is memory. Later, with the enrichment of the personality, one discovers its limits, the poverty and the shackles of the self, one discovers that one has only one life, an individuality forever circumscribed, but which contains many possible destinies, and … mingles … with the other human existences, and the earth, the creatures, everything. Writing then becomes a quest of poly-personality, a way of living diverse destinies, of penetrating into others, of communicating with them … of escaping from the ordinary limits of the self … (Doubtless there are other kinds of writers, individualists, who only seek their own self-assertion and can’t see the world except through themselves.)
The point of fiction was storytelling, world-evoking. This credo drew Serge as a fiction writer to two seemingly incompatible ideas of the novel.
One is the historical panorama, in which single novels have their place as episodes of a comprehensive story. The story, for Serge, was heroism and injustice in the first half of the European twentieth century, and could have started with a novel set in anarchist circles in France just before 1914 (about which he did finish a memoir, seized by the GPU). Of the novels Serge was able to complete, the time line runs from the First through the Second World War — that is, from Men in Prison, written in Leningrad at the end of the 1920s and published in Paris in 1930, to Les Années sans pardon (The Pitiless Years), his last novel, written in Mexico in 1946 and not published until 1971, in Paris. (It has yet to be translated into English.) The Case of Comrade Tulayev, whose material is the Great Terror of the 1930s, comes towards the end of the cycle. Characters recur — a classic feature of novels, like some of Balzac’s, conceived as a sequence — though not as many as one might expect, and none of them an alter ego, a stand-in for Serge himself. The High Commissar for Security Erchov, the prosecutor Fleischman, the loathsome apparatchik Zvyeryeva, and the virtuous Left Oppositionist Ryzhik of The Case of Comrade Tulayev had all figured in Conquered City (1932), Serge’s third novel, which takes place during the siege of Petrograd, and, probably, in the lost novel, La Tourmente (The Storm), which was the sequel to Conquered City. (Ryzhik is also an important character, and Fleischman a minor one, in Midnight in the Century.)
Of this project we have only fragments. But if Serge did not commit himself doggedly to a chronicle, like Solzhenitsyn’s sequence of novels about the Lenin era, it is not simply because Serge lacked the time to complete his sequence, but because another idea of the novel was at work, somewhat subverting the first. Solzhenitsyn’s historical novels are all of a piece from a literary point of view, and none the better for that. Serge’s novels illustrate several different conceptions of how to narrate and to what end. The “I” of Men in Prison (1930) is a medium for giving voice to the others, many others; it is a novel of compassion, of solidarity. “I don’t want to write memoirs,” he said in a letter to Istrati, who did the preface to Serge’s first novel. The second novel, The Birth of Our Power (1931), uses a mix of voices — the first-person “I” and “we” and an omniscient third person. The multivolume chronicle, the novel as sequel, was not the best vessel for Serge’s development as a literary writer, but remained a kind of default position from which, always working under harassment and financial strain, he could generate new fictional tasks.
Serge’s literary affinities, and many of his friendships, were with the great modernists of the 1920s, such as Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Sergei Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Daniil Kharms (his brother-in-law), and Mandelstam — rather than with realists like Gorky, a relative on his mother’s side, and Alexei Tolstoy. But in 1928, when Serge started writing fiction, the miraculous new literary era was virtually over, killed by the censors, and soon the writers themselves, most of them, were to be arrested and killed or to commit suicide. The broad-canvas novel, the narrative with multiple voices (another example: Noli me tangere by the late-nineteenth-century Filipino revolutionary José Rizal), might well be the preferred form of a writer with a powerful political consciousness — the political consciousness that was certainly not wanted in the Soviet Union, where, Serge knew, there was no chance of his being translated and published. But it is also the form of some of the enduring works of literary modernism, and has spawned several new fictional genres. Serge’s third novel, Conquered City, is a brilliant work in one of these genres, the novel with a city as protagonist (as Men in Prison had as protagonist “that terrible machine, prison”) — clearly influenced by Biely’s Petersburg, and by Manhattan Transfer (he cites Dos Passos as an influence), and possibly by Ulysses, a book he greatly admired.
“I had the strong conviction of charting a new road for the novel,” Serge says in the Memoirs. One way in which Serge is not charting a new road is his view of women, reminiscent of the great Soviet films about revolutionary ideals, from Eisenstein to Alexei Gherman. In this entirely men-centered society of challenge — and ordeal, and sacrifice — women barely exist, at least not positively, except through being the love objects or wards of very busy men. For revolution, as Serge describes it, is itself a heroic, masculinist enterprise, invested with the values of virility: courage, daring, endurance, decisiveness, independence, ability to be brutal. An attractive woman, someone warm, cherishing, sturdy, often a victim, cannot have these manly characteristics; therefore she cannot be other than a revolutionary’s junior partner. The one powerful woman in The Case of Comrade Tulayev, the Bolshevik prosecutor Zvyeryeva (who will soon have her turn to be arrested and killed), is repeatedly characterized by her pathetically needy sexuality (in one scene she is shown masturbating) and physical repulsiveness. All the men in the novel, villainous or not, have forthright carnal needs and unaffected sexual self-confidence.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev relates a set of stories, of fates, in a densely populated world. Besides the cast of supportive women, there are at least eight major characters: two emblems of disaffection, Kostia and Romachkin, lowly bachelor clerks who share a single room with a partition in a communal apartment in Moscow — they open the novel — and the veteran loyalists, careerists, and sincere Communists, Ivan Kondratiev, Artyem Makeyev, Stefan Stern, Maxim Erchov, Kiril Rublev, old Ryzhik, who are, one by one, arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to die. (Only Kondratiev is spared, and sent to a remote post in Siberia, by an arbitrarily benign whim of “the Chief,” as Stalin is called in the novel.) Whole lives are portrayed, each of which could make a novel. The account of Makeyev’s ingeniously staged arrest while attending the opera (at the end of Chapter 4) is in itself a short story worthy of Chekhov. And the drama of Makeyev — his antecedents, ascent to power (he is governor of Kurgansk), sudden arrest on a visit to Moscow, imprisonment, interrogation, confession — is only one of the plots elaborated in The Case of Comrade Tulayev.
No interrogator is a major character. Among the minor characters is Serge’s fictional epitome of the fellow traveler of influence. In a late scene, set in Paris, “Professor Passereau, famous in two hemispheres, President of the Congress for the Defense of Culture,” tells the young émigré, Xenia Popov, vainly seeking his intervention on behalf of the most sympathetic of Serge’s Old Bolshevik protagonists: “For the justice of your country I have a respect which is absolute … If Rublev is innocent, the Supreme Tribunal will accord him justice.” As for the eponymous Tulayev, the high government official whose murder sets off the arrest and execution of the others, he makes only the briefest appearance early in the novel. He is there to be shot.
Serge’s Tulayev, at any rate his murder and its consequences, seems obviously to point back to Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Party organization, whose assassination in his office on December 1, 1934, by a young Party member named Leon Nikolayev became Stalin’s pretext for the years of slaughter that followed, which decimated the loyal Party membership and killed or kept imprisoned for decades millions of ordinary citizens. It may be difficult not to read The Case of Comrade Tulayev as a roman à clef, though Serge in a prefatory note explicitly warns against doing just that. “This novel,” he writes, “belongs entirely to the domain of literary fiction. The truth created by the novelist cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of the historian or the chronicler.” One can hardly imagine Solzhenitsyn prefacing one of his Lenin-novels with such a disclaimer. But perhaps one should take Serge at his word — noting that he set his novel in 1939. The arrests and trials in The Case of Comrade Tulayev are fictional successors to, rather than a fictional synthesis of, the actual Moscow trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938.
Serge is not just pointing out that the truth of the novelist differs from the truth of the historian. He is asserting, here only implicitly, the superiority of the novelist’s truth. Serge had made the bolder claim in the letter to Istrati about Men in Prison: a novel that, despite “the convenient use of the first person singular,” is “not about me,” and in which “I don’t even want to stick too close to things I have actually seen.” The novelist, Serge continues, is after “a richer and more general truth than the truth of observation.” That truth “sometimes coincides almost photographically with certain things I have seen; sometimes it differs from them in every respect.”
To assert the superiority of the truth of fiction is a venerable literary commonplace (its earliest formulation is in Aristotle’s Poetics), and in the mouths of many writers sounds glib and even self-serving: a permission claimed by the novelist to be inaccurate, or partial, or arbitrary. To say that the assertion voiced by Serge has nothing of this quality is to point to the evidence of his novels, their incontestable sincerity and intelligence applied to lived truths re-created in the form of fiction.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev has never enjoyed a fraction of the fame of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), a novel with ostensibly the same subject, which makes the opposite claim, for the correspondence of fiction to historical reality. “The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials,” the prefatory note to Darkness at Noon advises the reader. (Rubashov is thought to be mostly based on Nikolai Bukharin, with something of Karl Radek.) But synthesis is exactly the limitation of Koestler’s chamber drama, which is both political argument and psychological portrait. An entire era is seen through the prism of one person’s ordeal of confinement and interrogation, interspersed with passages of recollection; flashbacks. The novel opens with Rubashov, ex-Commissar of the People, being pushed into his cell and the door slamming behind him, and ends with the executioner arriving with the handcuffs, the descent to the prison cellar, and the bullet in the back of the head. (It is not surprising that Darkness at Noon could be made into a Broadway play.) The revelation of how — that is, by what arguments rather than by physical torture — Zinoviev, Kamenev, Radek, Bukharin, and the other ruling members of the Bolshevik elite could be induced to confess to the absurd charges of treason brought against them is the story of Darkness at Noon.
Serge’s polyphonic novel, with its many trajectories, has a much more complicated view of character, of the interweaving of politics and private life, and of the terrible procedures of Stalin’s inquisition. And it casts a much wider intellectual net. (An example: Rublev’s analysis of the revolutionary generation.) Of those arrested, all but one will eventually confess — Ryzhik, who remains defiant, prefers to go on a hunger strike and die — but only one resembles Koestler’s Rubashov: Erchov, who is persuaded to render one last service to the Party by admitting that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Tulayev. “Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning” is the title of one of the chapters.
The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a far less conventional novel than are Darkness at Noon and 1984, whose portraits of totalitarianism have proved so unforgettable — perhaps because those novels have a single protagonist and tell a single story. One need not think of either Koestler’s Rubashov or Orwell’s Winston Smith as a hero; the fact that both novels stay with their protagonists from beginning to end forces the reader’s identification with the archetypal victim of totalitarian tyranny. If Serge’s novel can be said to have a hero, it is someone, present only in the first and last chapters, who is not a victim: Kostia, the actual assassin of Tulayev, who remains unsuspected.
Murder, killing is in the air. It is what history is about. A Colt revolver is bought from a shady purveyor — for no particular reason, except that it is a magical object, bluish-black steel, and feels potent concealed in the pocket. One day, its purchaser, the insignificant Romachkin, a miserable soul and also (in his own eyes) “a pure man whose one thought was justice,” is walking near the Kremlin wall at the moment when a uniformed figure, “his uniform bare of insignia, his face hard, bristlingly mustached, and inconceivably sensual,” emerges, followed by two men in civilian clothes, a mere thirty feet away, then stops six feet away to light a pipe, and Romachkin realizes he has been presented with an opportunity to shoot Stalin (“the Chief”) himself. He doesn’t. Disgusted by his own cowardice, he gives the gun away to Kostia, who, out on a snowy night, observes a stout man in a fur-lined coat and astrakhan cap with a briefcase under his arm getting out of a powerful black car that has just pulled up in front of a private residence, hears him addressed by the chauffeur as Comrade Tulayev — Tulayev of the Central Committee, Kostia realizes, he of “the mass deportations” and “the university purges” — sees him sending the car away (in fact, Tulayev does not intend to enter his house but to continue on foot to a sexual assignation), at which moment, as if in a trance, a fit of absence, the gun comes out of Kostia’s pocket. The gun explodes, a sudden clap of thunder in a dead silence. Tulayev falls to the sidewalk. Kostia flees through the narrow quiet streets.
Serge makes the murder of Tulayev nearly involuntary, like the murder of an unknown man at the beach for which the protagonist of Camus’s The Stranger (1942) stands trial. (It seems very unlikely that Serge, marooned in Mexico, could have read Camus’s novel, published clandestinely in Occupied France, before finishing his own.) The affectless antihero of Camus’s novel is a kind of victim, first of all in his unawareness of his actions. In contrast, Kostia is full of feeling, and his acte gratuit is both sincere and irrational: his awareness of the iniquity of the Soviet system acts through him. However, the unlimited violence of the system makes his act of violence impossible to avow. When, towards the end of the novel, Kostia, tormented by how much further injustice has been unleashed by his deed, sends a written confession, unsigned, to the chief prosecutor on the Tulayev case, he, Fleischman — only a few steps from being arrested himself — burns the letter, collects the ashes and crushes them under his thumb, and “with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm” says half aloud to himself: “The Tulayev case is closed.” Truth, including a true confession, has no place in the kind of tyranny that the revolution has become.
To assassinate a tyrant is an accomplishment that may evoke Serge’s anarchist past, and Trotsky was not entirely wrong when he accused Serge of being more anarchist than Marxist. But he had never supported anarchist violence: it was his libertarian convictions that had made Serge, early on, an anarchist. His life as a militant gave him a profound experience of death. That experience is most keenly expressed in Conquered City, with its scenes of killing as compulsion, orgy, political necessity, but death presides over all Serge’s novels.
“It is not for us to be admirable,” declares the voice of a woeful encomium to revolutionary hardheartedness, “Meditation during an Air-Raid,” in Birth of Our Power. We revolutionaries “must be precise, clear-sighted, strong, unyielding, armed: like machines.” (Of course, Serge is totally committed, by temperament and by principle, to what is admirable.) Serge’s master theme is revolution and death: to make a revolution one must be pitiless, one must accept the inevitability of killing the innocent as well as the guilty. There is no limit to the sacrifices that the revolution can demand. Sacrifice of others; sacrifice of oneself. For that hubris, the sacrificing of so many others in revolution’s cause, virtually guarantees that eventually the same pitiless violence will be turned on those who made the revolution. In Serge’s fiction, the revolutionary is, in the strictest, classical sense, a tragic figure — a hero who will do, who is obliged to do, what is wrong; and in so doing courts, and will endure, retribution, punishment.
But in Serge’s best fiction — these are much more than “political novels” — the tragedy of revolution is set in a larger frame. Serge is devoted to showing the illogic of history and of human motivation and the course of individual lives, which can never be said to be either deserved or undeserved. Thus The Case of Comrade Tulayev ends with the contrasting destinies of its two lesser lives: Romachkin, the man obsessed by justice, who lacked the courage, or the absence of mind, to kill Stalin, and has become a valued bureaucrat (so far not purged) in Stalin’s terror state, and Kostia, Tulayev’s assassin, the man who protested in spite of himself, and has escaped into humble agricultural work in Russia’s far east, and mindlessness, and new love.
The truth of the novelist — unlike the truth of the historian — allows for the arbitrary, the mysterious, the undermotivated. The truth of fiction replenishes: for there is much more than politics, and more than the vagaries of human feeling. The truth of fiction embodies, as in the pungent physicalness of Serge’s descriptions of people and of landscapes. The truth of fiction depicts that for which one can never be consoled, and displaces it with a healing openness to everything finite and cosmic.
“I want to blow out the moon,” says the little girl at the end of Pilnyak’s “The Tale of the Unextinguished Moon” (1926), which re-creates as fiction one of the first liquidations of a possible future rival ordered by Stalin (here called “Number One”): the murder, in 1925, of Trotsky’s successor as the head of the Red Army, Mikhail Frunze, who was forced to undergo unnecessary surgery, and died, as planned, on the operating table. (Pilnyak’s subsequent cave-in to Stalinist literary directives in the 1930s did not keep him from being shot in 1938.) In a world of unbearable cruelty and injustice, it seems as if all of nature should rhyme with grief and loss. And indeed, Pilnyak relates, the moon, as if in response to the challenge, vanishes. “The moon, plump as a merchant’s wife, swam behind clouds, wearying of the chase.” But the moon is not to be extinguished. Neither is the saving indifference, the saving larger view, that is the novelist’s or the poet’s — which does not obviate the truth of political understanding, but tells us there is more than politics, more, even, than history. Bravery … and indifference … and sensuality … and the living creatural world … and pity, pity for all, remain unextinguished.
— SUSAN SONTAG