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,
where he would spend the rest of his life. His years in Mexico were
marked by isolation, poverty, peril, and grief; his Notebooks,
however, brim with resilience, curiosity, outrage, a passionate love
of life, and superb writing. Serge paints haunting portraits of Osip
Mandelstam, Stefan Zweig, and “the Old Man” Trotsky; argues with
André Breton; and, awaiting his wife’s delayed arrival from
Europe, writes her passionate love letters. He describes the sweep of
the Mexican landscape, visits an erupting volcano, and immerses
himself in the country’s history and culture. He looks back on his
life and the fate of the Revolution. He broods on the course of the
war and the world to come after. In the darkest of circumstances, he
responds imaginatively, thinks critically, feels deeply, and finds
reason to hope.
Serge’s Notebooks
were discovered in 2010 and appear here for the first time in their
entirety in English. They are a message in a bottle from one of the
great spirits, and great writers, of our shipwrecked time.