Midnight in the Century

VICTOR SERGE (1890–1947) was born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich to Russian anti-tsarist exiles, impoverished intellectuals living by chance in Brussels. A precocious anarchist firebrand, young Victor was sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary in 1912. Expelled to Spain in 1917, he participated in an anarcho-syndicalist uprising before leaving to join the Revolution in Russia. Detained for more than a year in a French concentration camp, Serge arrived in St. Petersburg early in 1919 and joined the Bolsheviks, serving in the press services of the Communist International. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge was expelled from the Party and briefly arrested in 1928. Henceforth an unperson, he completed three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) and a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), all published in Paris. Arrested again in Russia and deported to Central Asia in 1933, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936 after international protests by militants and prominent writers like André Gide and Romain Rolland. Using his insider’s knowledge, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and machinations in Spain, which went largely unheeded. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev (both available as NYRB Classics), were written for the desk drawer and published posthumously.

RICHARD GREEMAN has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge’s novels (including Unforgiving Years and Conquered City, both available as NYRB Classics). A veteran socialist and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, (www.praxiscenter.ru), Greeman is the author of the Web site The Invisible International (bit.ly/invisible-international).

OTHER BOOKS BY VICTOR SERGE PUBLISHED BY NYRB CLASSICS

The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Conquered City

Memoirs of a Revolutionary

Unforgiving Years

MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

VICTOR SERGE

Translated from the French and with an introduction by

RICHARD GREEMAN

NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

New York

THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

www.nyrb.com

Copyright © 1939 by Éditions Grasset & Fasquelle

Translation copyright © 1981 by Richard Greeman

Introduction copyright © 2015 by Richard Greeman

Illustrations copyright © 1981 by VLADY

All rights reserved.

Originally published in French as S’il est minuit dans le siècle by Éditions Bernard Grasset, Paris, 1939

Portions of the introduction by Richard Greeman were published in Messages: Victor Serge and the Persistence of the Socialist Ideal, Massachusetts Review XXII, no. 3 (Autumn 1981).

Cover photograph: Richard Davies, Podporozhye, Arkhangel Region, Church of St. Vladimir (1757); courtesy of the photographer

Cover design: Katy Homans

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Serge, Victor, 1890–1947.

[S’il est minuit dans le siècle. English]

Midnight in the century / Victor Serge ; translated by Richard Greeman.

1 online resource. — (New York Review Books classics)

ISBN 978-1-59017-796-9 — ISBN 978-1-59017-770-9 (paperback)

1. Soviet Union—History—Revolution, 1917–1921—Fiction. I. Greeman, Richard. II. title.

PQ2637.E49

843'.912—dc23

2014014590

ISBN 978-1-59017-796-9

v1.0

For a complete list of books in the NYRB Classics series, visit www.nyrb.com or write to: Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014.

CONTENTS

Biographical Notes

Title Page

Copyright and More Information

Introduction

MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

I. Chaos

II. Black-Waters

Dedication

II. Black-Waters

III. Messages

IV. Directives

V. The Beginning

Glossary

INTRODUCTION

I. WRITER AND REVOLUTIONARY

Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century is an authentic document grounded in the author’s personal experience of arrest, interrogation, and deportation by the GPU to Orenburg on the Ural from 1933 to 1936. Soon after the novel’s publication in Paris in 1939, however, Serge took pains to insist that although entirely truthful (in political and historical terms) his novel was a work of the imagination. Indeed, as a writer who placed himself in the line of the Russian novelists, Serge claimed for fiction a truth superior to that of history or the essay combining internal vision with the knowledge of men and things. He insisted that to reconstruct reality with sufficient intensity of life requires literary creation and the intuition, passion and freedom it provides.[1]

The paradox of Serge the literary artist was that he was also a committed revolutionary. Always in the thick of action, his career united the roles of propagandist, organizer, journalist, pamphleteer, lecturer, theoretician, publicist, translator, militiaman, manual worker, occasional secret agent, and frequent prisoner (for more than ten years and under at least three different regimes). Serge was both an activist and an independent critical thinker whose political involvements evolved from anarchism through syndicalism, Bolshevism, and Trotskyism to a kind of socialist humanism. The child of anti-tsarist exiles, he came of age in a tradition of socialist culture which came to flower in figures like Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, Bukharin, Stalin, Radek, Andrés Nin, Emma Goldman, Georg Lukács, and Antonio Gramsci—to mention only those with whom Serge was personally acquainted.

Of all the left-wing writers who attempted, from the inside, to depict the truth of the Communist movement during the tragic decades of Stalin’s ascendancy—names like Orwell, Koestler, Regler, Malraux, and Silone come most readily to mind—Serge was perhaps the most authentic socialist, indeed the only professional revolutionary. A veteran, eventually lonely survivor, of revolutionary movements in half a dozen countries, witness-participant to several of the major victories and defeats of the revolutionary proletariat in the first half of the twentieth century, his knowledge of men and things was unequaled—as was his devotion to the truth.

Yet it is above all as a literary witness and ultimately as an artist that Serge will be remembered—an artist speaking directly out of a vital socialist culture whose traditions and aspirations, successes and failures he distilled and preserved in his writing. As Erich Fromm wrote to me in 1964, I believe indeed that to rescue the humanist tradition of the last decades is of the utmost importance, and that Victor Serge is one of the outstanding personalities representing the socialist aspect of humanism.

But it was in his novels (of which seven survive) that he best succeeded in re-creating the psychological, intellectual, and physical atmosphere (and above all the human dimension) of the tragic and heroic struggles in which he was so deeply involved. Serge conceived of writing as an act of witness, as a means of expressing for people what most of them live without being able to express, as a means of communion, as a testimony about the vast life that flows through us whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us. The values that inform his work are those of sincerity, solidarity, and truthfulness.

Paradoxically, Serge turned to literature at the very moment when Russian writers were being forced to deny these values. By 1930, the freedom and creative ferment of the Soviet literary renaissance of the 1920s, in which Serge had taken part as a critic and translator, had been crushed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Serge, however, although a Soviet citizen, wrote in French and published mainly in Paris. This circumstance allowed him to continue the literary experiments of his Russian friends and colleagues—Babel, Esenin, Gladkov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, and Pilniak, among others—whose voices were silenced by censorship, suicide, and deportation. His work thus represents a unique strand of continuity in Russian writing between the creative flowering of the 1920s and the post-Thaw dissidence in that it escapes the straightjacket of Stalinist socialist realism.

Serge is also unique in other ways: Although a committed Marxist with a long experience of the workers’ movement, he was also a literary modernist who was unafraid to borrow from decadent influences like Freud and Joyce. Moreover, Serge was at one and the same time a proletarian writer, who lived in poverty and worked with his hands (he was a printer by trade) throughout much of his life, and a mature, fully fledged literary artist. A born novelist, a man of universal culture who had long been aware of his literary vocation and had developed his craft through a long apprenticeship as a journalist, literary critic, translator, and publicist, Serge revealed himself as a writer of extraordinary power with his first novel, Men in Prison (1929).

It was his ambition to break the mold of the traditional novel in order to go beyond the limits of the individual self and reach out to that vast life that flows through us. He was thus led to abandon the singular I for the collective we and to replace the individual protagonist with a kind of collective hero. Borrowing techniques from Pilniak, Dos Passos, and the French Unanimists, he created a rapid, fluid style incorporating vernacular elements of slang, documentary journalism, and cinematographic realism. At the same time, the density of his writing, with its simultaneous presentation of external detail and interior monologue, tends to blur the boundaries between past and present, inner and outer life, permitting occasional flights of what can best be described as a cosmic lyricism.

Serge’s first three novels, Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City, were written in Leningrad, where he was living in semi-captivity, and published in Paris between 1929 and 1932. They comprise an informal trilogy chronicling the birth pangs of the revolution. Shortly after the publication of Conquered City, Serge was arrested and interrogated for months in the notorious Lubyanka GPU prison. As he steadfastly refused to confess and there was no evidence against him, he was administratively deported to Orenburg on the Ural River, where because of his unbending attitude of opposition, he was denied work and nearly starved to death.

Although a captive in Orenburg, Serge was free to write, and ironically he survived on the postal insurance payments he received for manuscripts sent to Paris that were mysteriously lost in the mail. He nonetheless completed two more novels of his cycle. The Lost Men depicted the tragedy of the 1911 anarchist bandits of Paris and would have preceded Men in Prison in the series. The Whirlwind, set in 1920, followed on Conquered City and was devoted to the year of the Russian revolution which was richest in hope and perhaps the greatest in energy deployed. Both were confiscated by the GPU and have not been recovered. As Serge wrote in 1940: They have shot all the men who made the greatness of those times: it is natural that they should kill the works in which that greatness was reflected.

In Orenburg, during the years before Stalin’s world-shaking blood purges of the Old Bolsheviks, Serge was thrown in with a group of exiled Trotskyites and revolutionary dissidents whose courageous struggle to maintain their socialist ideals in the face of Stalinist lies and persecutions later inspired what is perhaps Serge’s most poignant and moving novel, Midnight in the Century, to which we will turn in a moment. In 1936, after an international campaign in his favor, Serge was expelled from Russia (like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn some thirty years later).

From 1936 to 1940, he lived a precarious existence in Brussels and Paris, working in print shops and campaigning against the Stalinist persecution of revolutionary minorities in Russia and Spain. During this brief period of relative security (and despite severe material hardships, including a Communist campaign of slander that effectively closed the major media to him), Serge produced poetry, journalism, political essays, and fiction in profusion. He collaborated with Leon Trotsky (whose Revolution Betrayed he translated into French) and analyzed the Russian experience in three book-length essays (From Lenin to Stalin, Destiny of a Revolution, and Portrait of Stalin), which anticipate The Gulag Archipelago by their compelling fusion of authentic documentation, personal testimony, and historical irony, but which differ from Solzhenitsyn’s later novels in their consistent commitment to the ideals of socialism and freedom.

In 1938, having fulfilled his political duty by exposing Stalin’s betrayal of socialism in these nonfiction works, Serge felt free to return to fiction in order to re-create the full human dimension of this experience in Midnight in the Century, which was published by Grasset in Paris in 1939 and mentioned for that year’s Prix Goncourt. However, the onset of the Second World War soon destroyed Serge’s precarious hold on literary success along with his even more precarious Parisian exile. His books were suppressed and their author forced to flee to Marseilles and thence, after an excruciating battle for visas, to Mexico, where he died in 1947 in poverty and obscurity with three unpublished books in his desk drawer: among them his classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and two novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

II. MIDNIGHT IN THE CENTURY

The theme of the persistence of the socialist ideal runs like a red thread through all of Serge’s works, but nowhere is it more evident than in the novel that chronicles the eclipse of that ideal—Midnight in the Century. It is a novel about one of history’s darkest hours, the hour of Hitler’s triumph in Germany and Stalin’s apotheosis in Russia. It is a book about men and women in defeat, about Russian Communists whose fidelity to the liberating revolution of 1917 has landed them in the Gulag of 1934, and who must now ask themselves the question: What is to be done if it is midnight in the century?

It is also a book radiant with admiration of the courage, political integrity, and humanity of its Communist heroes, glowing with intellectual passion as it grapples with the essential questions of socialism, history, and human destiny at a time when thought itself is glacial . . . something of a midnight sun piercing the skull. Radiant, too, in its revolutionary faith in an unknown future dimly viewed across an abyss of foreseeable cataclysms, a future symbolized by the image of seeds germinating in the earth. Responding in 1940 to criticism that his novel was too dark, Serge declared: I did not wish it so. I wanted only to be truthful, I even made efforts to include all the muted, secret, tenacious light that I have never ceased to see among the men of the Russian soil. I would have liked to end it on a note of hope, and I believe it is there.

It is an authentic book that records—and transfigures—Serge’s ordeal of eighty days of solitary confinement and interrogation in the GPU prison in Moscow, his resistance during two years of deportation in Central Asia, and his unending opposition to the Stalinist betrayal of the revolutionary movement to which he had dedicated his life. Serge devoted a chapter of his Memoirs of a Revolutionary to his Years of Captivity: 1933–1936, and there left indelible portraits of his comrades among the deportees in Orenburg, revolutionary heroes and irreducible opponents of Stalinism like Fanya Upstein, Lisa Senatskaya, Vassily Pankratov, and Boris Eltsin, among whom it is possible to identify models for some of the protagonists of Midnight in the Century.[2] However, in the 1940 article cited above, Serge insists that "Midnight in the Century, because it is a novel, is a much truer more profound testimony than would be Memoirs, in which the author would only relate what he himself had lived. He adds: It is a mistake to try to recognize the author in his characters. Why would he create them if it were not to escape from himself, to break the rather stifling circle of the self, break with involuntary egocentrism, penetrate another being, incorporate oneself within him, and by a sort of communion attain a more general truth about man?"

Finally, it is an important book politically, for the main issue that Serge deals with—socialism versus barbarism—is more than ever fundamental to humankind’s survival. Serge’s genius lies in his ability to dramatize with clarity the problems that have been besetting revolutionaries for over two hundred years in a style that is moving and poetic. Through the anguish of his heroes, we are led to rethink the dilemma of the world’s first successful socialist revolution in the throes of transformation into its own opposite—from the activity of millions struggling to create a new world in the image of justice into a narrow, exploitative tyranny—and to pose the question anew for our own age. Serge’s development of the motifs of life’s renewal, of the passage of seasons and generations, and of the transmission of messages among the imprisoned, isolated, and persecuted revolutionaries raises his theme, the persistence of the socialist ideal, to the level of poetic vision. It is a vision that extends backward in time to connect with earlier traditions of revolt and dissidence while prefiguring, in the most explicit fashion, the struggles of Russian and East European socialist rebels that rose to the surface again during the years of glasnost. Indeed, Serge was one of the first Soviet dissidents to be eagerly rediscovered by the new left generation of Russian anti-totalitarian socialists during the 1980s and ’90s.[3]

During his years of deportation in Orenburg, Serge was keenly aware of belonging to a long tradition of persecuted Russian dissidents:

By one of those strokes of irony that are so frequent in Russia [he later recalled], the Soviet Press was, quite appropriately, commemorating an anniversary of the Ukrainian national poet Taras Shevchenko, who in 1847 had been exiled for ten years to the steppes of Orenburg, forbidden to draw or to write. He did, all the same, write some clandestine poetry that he concealed in his boots. In this report I had an overwhelming insight into the persistence in our Russian land, after a century of reform, progress, and revolution, of the same willful determination to wipe out the rebellious intelligence without mercy. Never mind, I told myself, I must hold on: hold on and work on, even under this slab of lead.[4]

The theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution is omnipresent in Midnight in the Century. It broods over Chernoe (Black-Waters), Serge’s fictional town on the steppe, which has hosted generations of exiles, refugees, sectarians, and heretics. The town, we are told, was founded by the semilegendary patriarch Seraphim Lack-Land, a seventeenth-century religious schismatic who led his people into the wilderness to escape the unholy power of the centralizing Orthodox hierarchy only to be dragged back to Moscow and a martyr’s fate. The image of the righteous, unrepentant old man chained in his dungeon, repeating, Lord, I will never deny thee, I will never deny thy people, reverberates through the entire novel.

Next in Serge’s line of apostolic succession is Lebedkin, the political deportee from Petersburg. Exiled under the tsarist regime, he welcomes the cleansing hurricane of the 1917 revolution in Chernoe—one thousand miles from the capital—and contemplates his lonely fate on the same hilltop where Seraphim had earlier meditated his martyrdom. Seventeen years pass and Chernoe is again populated by deportees, martyrs, and schismatics. Although the foreground of Serge’s novel is occupied by the Left Oppositionists, the heretics of the new Stalinist orthodoxy, the background is crowded with persecuted schismatics—religious sectarians, Old Believers, Zionists—who are also suffering for their faith. In the novel’s climactic scene, Rodion’s break from jail, there is a translucent moment of silent communion between the young Trotskyite and an Old Believer, which epitomizes the theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution in the tortured Russian land. This epiphany, for which Serge has carefully and lovingly prepared, takes place under streaming stars in a mystical atmosphere of biblical simplicity. It is a Marxist materialist’s homage to spirituality.

Nature, too, is intimately related to Serge’s theme of suffering and resistance. Although primarily a man of cities—Paris, Barcelona, Moscow, and Petrograd were his places of predilection and the setting of much of his fiction—Serge had a deep awareness of man’s place in the natural order. For him, the dialectic of human history is an outgrowth of the dialectic of nature, and in Midnight in the Century the rhythms of nature are at once the physical setting and the consistent metaphor against which the action develops.

The Chernoe section of the novel opens with a heartrendingly bittersweet evocation of the return of spring to the frozen steppe. The breakup of the ice on the river, greeted with joy by the villagers after the long, barren winter, is emblematic of the renewal of human hopes. The exiled Trotskyites are also touched by the spectacle. Their clandestine meeting on the riverbank becomes the occasion for a lyrical celebration of the northern spring on the part of the granite-faced Old Bolshevik, Ryzhik, and even the sarcasms of the cynical Elkin fail to dampen his ardor:

Ryzhik, you missed your calling. You should be turning out octosyllables at three roubles a line. Why did you have to get mixed up in the Revolution? Today, you would be an official of the Pastoral Poets’ Division of the Union of Soviet Writers. You would be inundating the gazettes with organized, ideologically correct, and profitable lyricism. Pushkin would turn green with envy on his pedestal.

Go to Hell. I would never have seen the amazing flowers of the North. And you see, nothing in the world would make me want to cross them out of my life.

The joy of nature’s renewal is more deeply undercut by the irony of the political situation: Spring . . . means sowing-time. Sowing time means repression. The logic of events demands that in order to squeeze a grain surplus out of the sullenly resisting, newly collectivized peasantry, Stalin will take a new political tack, necessitating a new purge. The political exiles understand this process as a sign of the weakness of the regime. They have predicted it. The villagers, equally prescient in their resignation, accept it as one more seasonal cataclysm to be endured. Yet such is the power of nature’s spectacle of death and rebirth that neither group can resist the temptation to embrace life and hope. Life is struggle. Life goes on.

The central action of the novel unfolds in this brief moment between the breakup of the winter ice and the onset of the political freeze that will deprive Serge’s heroes of the semi-freedom of deportation and send them back to prison. During this interval there is time to take stock of their lives, to choose how they will resist the inevitable, to exchange significant messages, to fall in love, and to pass the living flame of revolution from one generation to the next. Thus the seasonal pattern of death and rebirth, destruction and continuity is intimately related to the theme of the generations, of the human forces who will carry on the struggle against oppression from one generation to the next.

Serge the Marxist believed that the Russian Revolution was not dead but only sleeping. He felt that as industry developed and Russia emerged from backwardness, the socialized system of production would inevitably come into contradiction with the oppressive system of bureaucratic privilege and control. A new proletariat, self-confident and schooled in this new industry, would then pick up the struggle where the vanquished vanguard of the 1920s and ’30s had gone down in defeat. This, however, might take generations (especially if war intervened, which it did) and until then the germ of revolutionary thought would be kept alive by minorities. Serge found a metaphoric expression for this vision in the related natural images of the spring thaw and of seeds germinating beneath the soil and in the traditional Russian theme of fathers and sons. A concrete, historically grounded political perspective thus develops as a structuring element in the novel.

The final section of Midnight, significantly entitled The Beginning, focuses on the character of the youngest of the political exiles, Rodion, a semi-educated, semi-alcoholic worker whose brain is befuddled by half-understood quotes from Hegel and whose spirit is obsessed with the problem of fate. As for so many before him, jail and exile have been the universities in which the revolutionary traditions of the fathers have been passed down to this rather unpromising son. It is Rodion who represents the new generation that will carry on the revolutionary idea and assure the continuity between the great but doomed generation of Old Bolsheviks and the unknown future.

Yet, to do this, he must break