Victor Serge Book order

A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France. Last Times, Victor Serge’s epic novel of the fall of France, is based—like much of his fiction—on firsthand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris in June 1940 and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941. Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience. The book begins in a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government, the suburbs already noisy with gunfire. Serge’s anti-fascist protagonists join the flood of refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas, and finally make their way to wartime Marseille. Last Times offers a vivid eyewitness account of the city’s criminal underground and no less criminal Vichy authorities, of collaborators and of the growing resistance, of crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last—hoped-for—ship to the New World.

"Victor Serge's Notebooks provide an intensely personal account of the last decade of the legendary Franco-Russian writer and revolutionary. They evoke Popular Front France, the fall of Paris, the 'Surrealist Château' in Marseilles, and the flight to the New World. They are replete with vivid life portraits (Gide, Breton, Saint-Exupéry, Lévi-Strauss), and moving evocations of fallen revolutionary comrades (Gramsci, Nin, Radek, Trotsky) and of doomed colleagues among the Soviet writers (Fedin, Pilniak, Mandelstam, Gorky). Serge's Mexican notebooks provide a fascinating account of his exploration of pre-Columbian cultures and portray political and cultural figures in Mexico City, from the exiles' psychoanalytic circle, to painters like Dr. Atl and Leonora Carrington and poets like Octavio Paz. These writings paint a vivid self-portrait and convey the intense loneliness Serge also felt in these years, cut off as he was from Europe, deprived of a political platform, prey to angina attacks, and anxiously in love with a younger woman"-- Provided by publisher

A biography of Leon Trotsky by two of his close friends and collaborators

"Providing a complete picture of Victor Serge's relationship to anarchist action and doctrine, this volume contains writings going back to his teenage years in Brussels, where he became influenced by the doctrine of individualist anarchism. At the heart of the anthology are key articles written soon after his arrival in Paris in 1909, when he became editor of the newspaper 'l'anarchie.' In these articles Serge develops and debates his own radical thoughts, arguing the futility of mass action and embracing 'illegalism.' Serge's involvement with the notorious French group of anarchist armed robbers, the Bonnot Gang, landed Serge in prison for the first time in 1912. The book includes both his prison correspondence with his anarchist comrade Émile Armand and articles written immediately after his release. The book also includes several articles and letters written by Serge after he had left anarchism behind and joined the Russian Bolsheviks in 1919. Here Serge analyzed anarchism and the ways in which he hoped anarchism would leaven the harshness and dictatorial tendencies of Bolshevism. Included here are writings on anarchist theory and history, Bakunin, the Spanish revolution, and the Kronstadt uprising. Anarchists Never Surrender anthologizes Victor Serge's previously unavailable texts on anarchism and fleshes out the portrait of this brilliant writer and thinker, a man I. F. Stone called one of the 'moral figures of our time'"--From Amazon.com

Brimming with the honesty and passionate conviction for which he has become famous, Victor Serge's account of the first year of the Russian Revolution--through all of its achievements and challenges--captures both the heroism of the mass upsurge that gave birth to soviet democracy, and the crippling circumstances that began to chip away at its historic gains. Year One of the Russian Revolution is Serge's attempt to defend the early days of the revolution against those, like Stalin, who would claim its legacy as justification for the repression of dissent within Russia.

Victor Serge served five years in French penitentiaries (1912-1917) for the crime of 'criminal association' - in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous 'Tragic Bandits' of French anarchism. 'While I was still in prison,' Serge later recalled, 'fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it.'

In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin’s police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for Midnight in the Century, Serge’s searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution. Among the exiles gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black-Waters, are the granite-faced Old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic yet gentle Varvara, and Rodion, a young, self-educated worker who is trying to make sense of the world and history. They struggle in the unlikely company of Russian Orthodox Old Believers who are also suffering for their faith. Against unbelievable odds, the young Rodion will escape captivity and find a new life in the wild. Surviving the dark winter night of the soul, he rediscovers the only real, and most radical, form of resistance: hope.

Serge's tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the trenches of WWI. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is burning at both ends.' Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge's 'tale of two cities' is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city 'we' could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites.'