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From International Socialism, No.46, February/March 1971, pp.32-33.
Transcribed & marked up by Einde O’Callaghan for ETOL.
Victor Serge
Men in Prison
Gollancz 42/-
Birth of Our Power
Penguin 7/-
Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary is indispensable for an understanding of the context and conditions under which he produced his twenty or so books – political comment, history, novels, poems, autobiography. The Memoirs give the broad outlines of the major political events that drew Serge into activity and it is his searching and honest commentary on political movements and personalities which distinguishes the work. This quality is carried over into and strengthens his documentary fiction. The viewpoint from which he wrote the novels is also important – he speaks for the rank and file, the anonymous mass or the mute and suffering victims of a prison system. When Serge singles out a person to describe it is not to probe deeply into his individual psychology, but to relate him to a wider social or political movement. Thus the character of Lejeune in Birth of Our Power sums up failings and limits of the anarchist movement that Serge had been associated with, and Men in Prison is described by the author as having ‘no central character; its subject was not myself, nor this or that person, but simply men and prison’.
Men in Prison, published as Les Hommes dans la Prison in 1930, was his first novel. It describes in relentless detail the machine like nature of the prison system which demoralises and breaks the victims, and enfeebles the guards. The dominant image is of an infernal factory or mill:
‘Inmates serve out their sentences, then they leave these walls. Guards don’t leave until they are ready to retire, at sixty, only to finish out their days in some dismal impoverished wine stoop ... They are neither more powerful nor worse. Men are without power in the Mill, and the system is worse than the men.’
Always the day to day degradations of prison life are linked to a total view of prison as one aspect of a wider social repression.
‘The whole ambiguious duplicity of the chaplain’s calling was apparent to me here, as was the whole revolting sham of his calling. The guillotine, doubtless, is not Christian. But the guillotine is necessary to the Christians.’
Serge’s five years in prison (1912-1917) were ‘so heavy, so intolerable to endure’ that the effort to write the novel amounted to the drawing out of an ‘inward nightmare’. Certainly the novel has a pointed relevance to contemporary experience, where societies that promote and live by violence continue to preach the endless useless solution of ‘Law and Order’.
Birth of Our Power is the second novel in a trilogy dealing with Serge’s experiences between 1912 and 1919. It opens in Barcelona on the eve of an abortive uprising in 1917 as Spanish workers respond to the Russian revolutionary example. Attempting to get to Russia Serge is thrown together with a group of revolutionaries in an internment camp in France and finally in the winter of 1919 arrives in Petrograd amidst famine and the threat of counter-revolution.
The style of the novel is sharp and episodic, reflecting the rapidly changing circumstances that Serge found himself in, yet the keynote to the novel, and to all of Serge’s writing – the concern to describe what things were really like, the accumulated detail and observation, the condensed experience – all make him a spokesman and witness of exceptional force and integrity. Read him: he is part of our tradition, the revolutionary spokesman of one generation who wrote with an awareness that the experiences he described might not be heeded in his time. We should be grateful that he had such confidence and foresight to write for the ‘bottom drawer’ and the future.
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Last updated on 6.3.2008