After over a year of blogging, I realize I’ve never reviewed anything by my blog-namesake, Victor Serge.

Serge was a Russian revolutionary, born in Belgium to exiled parents, supporters of revolutionary terrorism on behalf of the peasantry (Narodniks). In his youth he was a socialist, then an anarchist, associated with the Bonnot Gang, anarchists who conducted urban bombings and kidnappings to finance their activities. He spent five years in prison for refusing to inform on his comrades, then worked as a printer in Barcelona, participating in an unsuccessful worker revolt in July 1917. Forced to leave, he attempted to go to Russia, was captured and spent over a year in a prison camp in France. Released after the war’s end, he made it to the new Soviet republic, where he helped defend Petrograd during the Civil War and worked for the Communist International. Early on he became an Oppositionist and associate of Trotsky, which led to his eventual exile to Siberia and from the USSR itself in the 1930s.


I give a brief biography because he wrote a trilogy based on his early life. Birth of our Power is the second book, covering the uprising in Barcelona and his imprisonment in France. It’s loosely fictionalized, but it’s written in the first person and, I suspect, a fairly close account. No revolutionary would set a book in which the protagonist spends the Russian revolution in prison, unless he had to.

Serge gives us a feel for the movement. During the first world war, Spain was neutral but produced arms for both sides. So business was booming, and everyone worked 12 hour shifts in the factories. He describes the café culture of Barcelona, how in the evenings the workers would gather to discuss politics: the local revolutionaries at one table, the ‘foreigns’ at another, and the police informers nearby. The life-like details make the book riveting and add to its authenticity. He describes how his comrades would pretend to discuss tactics to attract police attention, order coffee for the eager cops, then leave as soon as it arrived.

The Barcelona revolutionaries were anarchists, and Serge describes the doctrinal battles between those who proposed long-term organization, and those who insisted that smashing state power was enough. To non-politicos this may sound dry and technical, but the beauty of Serge’s prose lies in his ability to synthesize politics, the emotional life of participants and breath-taking descriptions. I kept having to put the book down and take it all in. Here he is at a bull-fight:

The beast turns about and the city turns around him, savage, with ten thousand fixed stares, all alike: those of the ragged beggars, the sweating proletarians, the well-dressed gentlemen, the charming senoras; of the elegant dandies, the officers in stiff corsets, the heavy businessmen, the overweight doctors; alike on the shady side and the sunny side – perfumes and perspiration, great furies simmering under momentary forgetfulness and carelessness with pretty white teeth, soft sensual looks, leaders whose calculations are as precise as the mechanism of machine guns – all turns around under the implacable umbrella of a blue marble sky, around the maddened bull who wants to kill and who will be killed. (77)

Colours, someone’s posture, smells – Serge makes needle-sharp observations and generalizes them. Abstract concepts like class and rebellion become concrete. Many authors record the human condition: Serge is the best author, by far, to show people in struggle: the reasons why we fight, the turmoil both internal and external, and its effects.

A prof of mine said that Ernest Everhard, The Iron Heel’s protagonist, was “the Howard Rourke of the left”. As much as I liked the novel, this is, unfortunately, an accurate statement. Just like Rourke, the far-right automaton of Ayn Rand’s trashy The Fountainhead, Everhard has the dynamism of a mannequin. His straw opponents wither before his solid, stolid pronouncements. Not so Serge, whose politics, when they’re stated openly, are simply political pieces of a social narrative:

… According to the latest news, the treason of the Bolshevik leaders is a proven fact: German agents. We know what that means: formulas of this type are as necessary as ammunition for the twelve rifles of the firing squad. If they did take money from Germany, well they were damn smart to do it, for they must have needed it, and the Germans are wasting their money. “Taking money,” says Dario, “being incorruptible… What is the point of being incorruptible if you don’t take money?” (100)

This is real; this is a conversation Serge could have had, and most likely did.

Apparently there's a movie about it, starring Ben Kingsley as Lenin

Here he is, en route to prison and probable death by disease and starvation, speaking of Chernyshevsky, the 19th century Russian revolutionary who’s put in stocks to be abused by the crowd:

They say that the seeds discovered in the tombs of the Pharaohs germinated. Nothing is ever lost. How many of us in the past, how many of us are there even now, in all the prisons of the world, lulling ourselves to sleep with this certainty? And this force too will not be lost…
“Chernyshevsky had only his life. Wouldn’t he have lost a good deal more had he ended up as an academician?”

This passage contains the key to Serge’s naturalism. Serge isn’t an academic: he’s a revolutionary. He risked death many times for his ideals. Artists (or, indeed, grad students) who try to capture social struggle generally fail, producing work that is wooden, facile or liberal. I believe this is because they’re artists, first and foremost. They observe struggle, and occasionally they participate. But they don’t live it. Their allegiance lies with their art. That alienation from others leads artists to think they’re creating unique perspectives, when actually they’re just reflecting, unconsciously, the prejudices of their times. Even with the most well-intentioned artists, you can’t attach the label ‘revolutionary’ to their consciousness and expect it to stick. Che Guevara said “A true revolutionary is guided by feelings of love” – he meant love for people, not love for inanimate objects concerning people. Commodity fetishism is still fetishism, no matter how pretty the commodity.

Serge, on the other hand, was a revolutionary first. He wrote his novels when he was banned from politics outright; and even then, he tried to express the beauty of struggle. Art was a means to politics, not a reflection on, or even of it. This is, in my opinion, the highest purpose of art – extremely hard to do, and immensely valuable when it’s done properly.

Uprising - Kathe Kollwitz, 1899

Though Serge is my favourite author, this isn’t a sweeping condemnation of all non-revolutionary artists. Both Serge’s writing and his heroism didn’t arise out of his personal qualities, though those were obviously essential. He was a product of a time when mass revolutionary change was on the horizon. Serge existed through those social movements, and they shaped his consciousness, expanding the limits of the possible, and deepening his understanding of the human condition. Were he alive today, he couldn’t write the same way, at least not in the imperialist world – nor could Dos Passos, Gorky or Brecht. This is why I keep reading early 20th century fiction, by the way, as a reflection of more turbulent, hopeful times. Only the experience of revolution could lead Serge to speculate:

We need technicians, not great men or admirable men. Technicians specialized in the liberation of the masses, licensed demolition experts who will have scorn for the idea of personal escapism because their work will be their life. To learn to take the mechanism of history apart; to know how to slide in that extra little nut or bolt somewhere – as among the parts of a motor – which will blow the whole thing up. There it is. And it will cost whatever it costs. (162)

When Serge gets to Russia, he’s struck by the struggle to survive. Lofty ideals come down to meagre things like getting enough bread to eat, making sure there’s gasoline for cars, heating a house. Yet it’s within those struggles that the new world is born. He writes of a refugee family, assigned to a bourgeois apartment requisitioned by the Bolsheviks. It’s winter, and the father goes to find fuel for the stove:

Old Levine’s footsteps echoed on the floor of the grand salon, plunged in darkness. He entered, his arms loaded with heavy green-covered books which he dropped softly next to the stove. Silent laughter illuminated his ruddy face.
“The laws are burning!” he said.
The friendly warmth in front of which the young woman was stretching out her hands came from the flames devouring Tome XXVII of the COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE. For fun, I pulled out a half-burned page, edged with incandescent lace. The flames revealed these words forming a chapter heading: CONCERNING LANDED PROPERTY… and, farther down: “ …the rights of collateral heirs…”

Warmth from the fire, and the destruction of bourgeois property rights – Serge’s brilliance lies in how he ties politics and everyday life together.