Midnight in the Century

by Victor Serge, Richard Greeman (Translator)

Captures the desperation, anguish, and hope of men and women sentenced to deportation in Siberia, in a story set during Hitler's rise in Germany and Stalin's triumph in the Soviet Union

Genres: Fiction, Russia, Russian Literature, Historical Fiction, 20th Century, Literature, Literary Fiction

284 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1939

About the author

Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) was born in exile in 1890 and died in exile in 1947. He is better known as Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919, and later worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the ideals of socialism until his death.

After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'

Reviews

[William2 · Rating 3 out of 5]

Though it’s not necessary to start, since there’s a fine glossary here, the more you know about the Russian revolution and events leading up to it, the more this book will resonate with you. Early on this novel’s reminiscent of Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon, though the writing is better and even blackly humorous at times. Published in Paris in 1939, the novel is about Stalin’s betrayal of the revolution. Actually, according to Richard Pipes (see The Russian Revolution)—and I think Serge would concur here—the revolution was not a revolution at all but a coup d’état which resulted in tyranny.

Victor Serge was the son of Russian political exiles who fled the Czar. He did not set foot in Russia in support the Bolshevik Revolution until 1919 at age 28. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, Serge had grown up in the democratic West where speech went for the most part unpunished, though even there he was jailed for his political activities. In 1928 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin's rule. André Gide was part of the international literary front that demanded his release. Fortunately Serge had been born in Brussels, which made him a foreign national. Yet as a Communist Party functionary for some nine years he came to know the workings of the Soviet government and its players well. Fortunately we have Robert Conquest's superb The Great Terror to corroborate Serge's vision in excruciating detail.

The novel starts light but graduates into a seething indictment of Stalin and his thugs. Serge reviews many of the accusations his fellow “counter-revolutionaries”—Trotskystes or “Left Deviationists”—were changed with. The general fault, it seems, was wrong thought. And if one espoused such thoughts to friends, or in a classroom as with Kostrov here, you were doomed, arrested, imprisoned and made to confess to the most absurd fabrications: that you were a class enemy; that you besmirched the reputations of the leaders of the revolution, and so on. Serge was himself arrested by the Cheka for questioning so he writes from intimate knowledge.

This may on it surface seem terribly boring but it’s not for two reasons: (1) the vivid police-state setting, and (2) Serge’s brilliant style. The novel is stylistically Modernist, but it is Serge’s astonishing ingenuity and élan, his eye for arresting description, that carry the day. It’s not a genre novel, but it does contain elements of espionage and prison-break tales. This is my third Serge novel. It is not my favorite but I recommend it, especially for those who have already read the five-star works, The Case of Comrade Tulayev and Unforgiving Years.

[Steven Godin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victor Serge's voice is one for those who were silenced, writing from the inside to those on the outside, highlighting the socialist movement in Europe, the product of Soviet States, and it's eradication through Stalin. Although based on Russian activities, Serge would dedicate "Midnight in the Century" to his Spanish comrades and dissident Communists who like the novels characters were victims of persecution. It's east to see why he was such a political writer, spending five years in a French penitentiary, expelled to Spain 1917 to be part of an uprising before heading to Russia to join the revolution, being expelled and arrested three times, deported to Asia 1933, living in exile, Brussels, Paris and Mexico City. Most of his best known work was released posthumously.

Using his own experiences and insider knowledge Serge speaks a great truth, but using fictional hero's and his imagination to write a passionate and altogether chilling vision of the revolution.
Exiled to the town of Chenor (or Black-Waters) for the most inconsequential propaganda, a band of civilians, Rodion, Varvara, Ryzhik, Elkin and Ivanovich try and make sense of the changing Russia and any hopes for an uprising. Constantly interrogated and offered deals to give up information, which would lead to breaking point and capitulation for some while others find the inner strength to never give in. The conditions of cells here are truly horrendous, cold black stone floors, straw for bedding, little light, the occasional piece of stale bread, and a pungent smell flaming their nostrils. Meetings for those who wish to revolt regularly take place on the outskirts of down, by the river, with the harsh landscapes beyond, as practically located in middle of nowhere any chance of escape would only lead to slow death. For Rodion, a highly intelligent young man he would always see a brightness in the squalor, and during a critical moment would reach a decision both brave and daring.

This could quite easily read as someone's memoirs, the attention to detail is thorough throughout, everything from the secret police, various counter organizations, members of rank within the establishment, planning of clandestine activities, and interrogations. It's a story of hope more than anything else, even in the most unprecedented of circumstances, a self-transcendence for those believers of old and that of the new young revolutionary battalions. His writing feels like being written not with ink but blood, not on paper but walls of confinement.

[E. G. · Rating 4 out of 5]

Introduction

--Midnight in the Century

Glossary

[Sean Wilson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victor Serge outshines all political novelists with his autobiographical Midnight in the Century. This is an outstanding work. The final 25 pages radiate with such poetic power, vivid imagery and revolutionary hope.

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Phew, this went on the back burner for a while. Anyway, yet another tale of the witchhunt by Stalin against the Trotskyist opposition during one of the several Five Year Plans in the 1930's, dealing with very similar themes to Victor Serges' other tales, such as The Case of Comrade Tulayav (which I consider his best). In fact, Midnight in the Century is a relatively short tale (but do not ask why it took me a month to finish it - sidetracked) compared to Tulayev, focusing on a small Left-Oppostion cell in a remote northern Russian village and how they met in secret whilst being hunted and monitored by the GPU (Stalins secret police). Privation bordering on famine, hard labour needing to fill certain daily quotas for the economic plans (just to get a livable ration of black bread) essentially describe what Solzhenitsyn did regarding the gulags, but with a much more revolutionary Socialist punch - the bureaucracy of the Soviet State is just full of deceit, terror, imprisonment against communist 'opponents' and so on - this characterise Serges' tale. There is really nothing that new here compared to say for instance Tulayev (which I recommend after reading this book - I think he re-uses and expands on some of the characters here), and Serge still has this amazing ability of painting all the little idiosyncrasies in the various characters he introduces us to - especially the GPU big boss Fedossenko who just flounders against the circles the Trotskyist suspects run around him (getting a nice little comeuppance at the end).

Good little tale, essential to read to gain some idea of the State-run Five Year Plans Stalin introduced and how much work (meaning more or less forced labour) per day was needed to fill the quotas, how much special treatment for the higher up echelons of the Communist Party they had, an increasing paranoia, not only against the Oppositionists, but also amongst the bureaucracy too. I recommend, as I have done on every Victor Serge I have a review for on GoodReads.

[Greg · Rating 5 out of 5]

There’s no group more practical, more cynical, more inclined to resolve everything by murder than the privileged plebeians who float to the surface at the end of revolutions, when the lava has hardened over the fire, when everybody’s revolution turns into the counter-revolution of a few against everybody. It forms a new petty-bourgeoisie with itching palms which doesn’t know the meaning of the word conscience, doesn’t give a damn about what it doesn’t know, lives on, lives on steel springs and steel slogans, and knows perfectly well it stole the old flag from us. It is ferocious and base. We were implacable in order to change the world; they will be implacable in order to hold onto their loot. We gave everything, even what wasn’t ours—the blood of others with our own—for an unknown future. They say that everything has been achieved so that no one will ask them for anything. And for them, everything has been achieved since they have everything. They will be inhuman out of cowardice. [emphasis added]

Particulars change. Nevertheless, history repeats. Over and over again. Always providing glimpses of seemingly improbable futures.

As I reflected on Alexei Navalny’s murder by the Putin regime, as I was pondering my tsonduku (thanks for that bit of concise brilliance, Ilse), Midnight in the Century was practically glowing to attract my attention, almost yelling that it was the right time to read it. Now. How could I resist?

Victor Serge’s dense classic is a somewhat biographical account of trying to survive under Stalin’s vicious, brutal, state-sanctioned totalitarianism. Set when the Russian Revolution was undergoing revolutionary change, after Trotsky’s banishment and the apex of Stalin’s consolidation of power, most remembered for show trials when millions of Soviet citizens were isolated, murdered, and terrified into submission. To fully appreciate and understand the plot—and I plead guilty to taking time to refresh myself with some Russian history I had long forgotten or misremembered—a knowledge of that era more than helpful. Thankfully, this NYRB edition contains a helpful glossary to help the reader along.

This is less a novel and more of five short stories connected by a thread; characters and stories that come together in exile through various deeds, suspicions, and paranoias. One is about an engineer sent on a tour of Europe to inspect electrical systems. He studied electrical grids in London, Paris, Berlin, and finally Warsaw. While touring Paris, his room was meticulously searched by agents of the GPU, the Soviet secret police. They find a treatise written by Trotsky hidden under folded clothing, photograph it, and then painstakingly replace everything to leave no evidence of their inspection. He disposes of it in the toilet on the train from Warsaw back to Russia, only to be arrested to begin his odyssey of exile of repression. His fate was sealed when the evidence of his crime of reading is circulated with administrative efficiency.

…a confidential packet is sent to the GPU Special service…There typists will make several copies: 1st for the central file, 2nd for the political section (suspected Trotskyists), 3rd for the economic section (suspected saboteurs), 4th for the foreign section (suspected spies).

The connecting narrative thread is a conviction that a better world is possible, but hypocrisies of their contemporary world will do all they can to stymy the fulfillment and engagement of their lives, intellects, actions, or thoughts. As they do in ours.

“And thought?” asked Rodian. “Thought?”

“Ah! Right now it’s something of a midnight sun piercing the skull. Glacial. What’s to be done if it’s midnight in the century?”

“Midnight’s where we have to live then,” said Rodian with an odd elation.

In this excerpt, Serge asks nagging questions that lead to unsettling answers. With the murder of Navalny, a war in Ukraine threatening to widen into northern and central Europe, continued genocide in Palestine, impending dictatorship in the United States, tragedy and injustice fueled by unrelenting climate change ignored by policy makers everywhere, and countless other atrocities seemingly in every part of the world, what’s to be done if we might be living in the midnight of this century? Nothing provides hope we’re even aware of it, or even prepared to live in it. Much less, as with the characters in this novel, try to do something about it despite the personal investments they make and the costs they must pay. If we could,

“We would be quite dangerous if we existed in the political sense of the word."

[Tuck · Rating 4 out of 5]

oh so well written fictional accounts of the 'true left' and their troubles in ussr after stalin decides they are dangerous and need liquidating. you see, they wanted to take back the revolution from what turned into the ridiculous and obscene 'bourgeoisie bureaucracy" and still fight for the little guy, the peasant, who was getting screwed (once again) by the 'powers that be", in this case stalin and co, instead of czars and aristocracy.
so, big ideas, illustrated in little stories of 5 exiled troskyites who are tapped again for more severe prison terms or even perhaps death, or most likely, death. get your history through this most entertaining and deadly fiction, see the gulag archipelago that serge likened to stars in the sky rather than islands in a sea. but same idea.

[Daniel Polansky]

Victor Serge had it worse than you and wrote about it better, a professional revolutionary who’s unflinching moral honesty put him just below Trotsky on Stalin’s hit list. Inspired by the 8 months Serge spent in prison, and the two years he spent exiled to a distant eastern town, Midnight in the Century is about that moment when the early, heroic supporters of the Russian revolution began to realize they were defeated, that their extraordinary efforts would be wasted and worse than wasted in service of a totalitarian state. It is a grim book but not one without hope, and in that it was a worthwhile thing for me to read this month. My personal feeling is that Serge’s later, more stylistically complex work (particularly the truly, truly marvelous Unforgiving Years) are superior to this, but it is a question of degrees of excellence. Serge’s relevance as a writer seems to only grow with the passing of the years, and I can recommend him to anyone looking at a bad situation, knowing it will get worse, and trying to figure out their place inside of it. Which is to say, all of us.

[julieta · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was a challenge. The story jumps around a lot, you never follow just one character, but many. There are some great thoughts though, and at some parts humor. But in general it's all very grim, although I knew I would get that, the thing is, the story is too cut up and hard to follow. I was really looking forward to reading it, Serge actually lived in Mexico by the end of his life, (like Trosky) and he had an influence on Octavio paz. This book basically gives you his thoughts on Stalinism, but as a novel it was not my favorite to start reading him. I will be giving him another try though.

[Derek · Rating 5 out of 5]

I’ve liked all of Serge’s novels. I like his literary style, but also admire his global perspective on politics, and his commitment to making revolutionary movements “great again.” This novel is a relatively thinly veiled examination of revolutionaries who found themselves imprisoned by Stalin. It’s a novel of ideas and Serge’s prose style and rich descriptions are never dull.

[Nathaniel Flakin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victor Serge wrote this fictional account of his experiences as a Bolshevik in exile in Stalin's Soviet Union. Serge believed that fiction was the best way to present history as it was experienced by average people, and I think he might have been on to something. Stalinism never seemed quite so absurd as in this novel!

[Daria · Rating 4 out of 5]

There’s no group more practical, more cynical, more inclined to resolve everything by murder than the privileged plebeians who float to the surface at the end of revolutions, when the lava has hardened over the fire, when everybody’s revolution turns into the counter-revolution of a few against everybody. It forms a new petty-bourgeoisie with itching palms which doesn’t know the meaning of the word conscience, doesn’t give a damn about what it doesn’t know, lives on steel springs and steel slogans, and knows perfectly well it stole the old flags from us. It is ferocious and base. We were implacable in order to change the world; they will be implacable in order to hold onto their loot. We gave everything, even what wasn’t ours—the blood of others with our own—for an unknown future. They say that everything has been achieved so that no one will ask them for anything. And for them, everything has been achieved since they have everything. They will be inhuman out of cowardice.

You need a little context about the author and his life, and Russian history in general, to fully understand and appreciate this novel. But then again, you don't, because much of this book is about love, nature, resistance, and survival in the face of all possible natural and human hostilities. And those are pretty universal things. A beautiful novel, though one that is, in many ways, hard to read.

[Tanroop · Rating 5 out of 5]

"They have seen the promised land, tasted of the new bread, gone through the trials of fire, hunger, and conviction: of the truth. These have marked them forever.
Too bad for us."

[John · Rating 3 out of 5]

Like his more cohesive The Case of Comrade Tuleyev, set a bit later during the show trials of Stalin, this account in the mid-1930s follows various dissenters caught in the web, not of the Gulags yet, but arrest and imprisonment, who in Midnight's case remain die-hard believers, Trotskyite branch.

It's intriguing to read how Serge and his fictional counterparts put so much fervor into their cause, and given that their leader, still to be spared the "Asiatic Bonaparte's" fatal blow for a few years, cast a spell that not only the author but the translator-annotator appears to have fallen under with dogged conviction, it's a time capsule from the period when the kulaks had been eliminated, but when the famines, unrest by the ungrateful workers and peasants, foreign entanglements with communists abroad, and internal power-struggles kept roiling. Party faithful from '04 let alone '18, therefore, find their past loyalties their present sentences, and Serge demonstrates how meticulous prove both the efforts of those clandestine deep-Red resisters emerge in their smuggled and coded communiques, but how they are in turn thwarted by the agents desperate to wipe out subversives.

However, as fast-paced fiction, this bogs down midway after a dramatic opening even as it regains its momentum in its penultimate pages. One of a band of those vowing to hold out against the Man of Steel's imposition of his iron fist manages to evade the Terror, at least long enough to hold tight to a mask of proletariat bonafides; perhaps managing to outwit, for now, forces of totalitarianism.

Comrades of this plucky individual rationalize, so committed are they to Marxist-Leninist dogma, to actually surrender to their incarceration rather than betray its deep-down ideals beneath their perverted current status a decade and a half after the (supposed) storming of the Winter Palace. As Serge numbers himself among this cadre, some of the material in the middle section may have been his attempt to articulate his fidelity amidst debates so long passed that even the editorial endnotes fail to register their details. This ideological attention to matters is understandable in the feverish context of their composition, but it slows the pacing and shows the turgid risks and brief shelf-life of politicized narrative. Yet this is carping, contrasted with the mortal dangers he and his "citizens" face under this version of jackboots stomping down faces and bodies in what seemed then forever.

[Maurizio Manco · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Non c'è nulla - e ciò pesa tonnellate." (p. 68)

"Il pensiero comincia dall’emozione. Tu stai di fronte a un paesaggio, c’è qualcuno accanto a te, tu tendi la mano e gli dici: guarda, perché vorresti offrirgli quello che vedi, ed è l’inizio di tutto: sei un pittore, un poeta, un romanziere, uno scultore, un drammaturgo, sei un uomo che fa saltare le proprie frontiere, tu vivi, perché siete in due a vivere… Il paesaggio più bello rattrista quando lo si guarda da solo." (p. 170)

[Jeffrey · Rating 4 out of 5]

The author lived a remarkable life, and writes engaging fiction based on his experiences. His masterful attention to the nuances of people‘s facial expressions, posture, twitches, and other details, yields rich characterizations of people and circumstances. That said, I would recommend someone reading VS for the first time would do better to start with The Case of Captain Tulayev or Unforgiving Years. If one enjoys those, this one is likely to satisfy as well.

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

I have not read anything by Victor Serge that was not scintillating. And this is scintillating. Quite how his intelligence and sensitivity endured through all he experienced is remarkable. Most people would have been utterly beaten down, one supposes; but Serge transforms his suffering into the insights of great art.

[Stan Debruyn · Rating 4 out of 5]

A serious book, unbelievable that this was written in 1938, pre WWII, 15 years before Stalin's death and so many of the observations still stand.

[Dale · Rating 4 out of 5]

This novel is based on the three years that Serge spent in "internal exile" in Orenburg Russia ("Chernoe" in the novel), near the border with Kazakhstan. The town is essentially a penal colony for political dissidents, designed to make life as difficult as possible, while offering maximum scope for surveillance and pressure to be applied.

This was the period of Stalinist ascendancy. The "left opposition", led by Trotsky, Radek, and others, had been purged from the party and were in exile, in prison, internal exile, or executed. Centralized planning of the economy was in full swing, with disastrous results. Decisions were made at the top, based on information that the top wanted to hear, rather than on actual data. Economic and policy decisions were justified at the top by supposed theoretical considerations; and if the policy this year is the opposite of the policy last year, then the old theoretical position must have been a left- or right-deviation and therefore heads must roll. And roll they did.

In the novel, spring is coming to Chernoe, and with spring the exiles know that a new set of policies will be imposed, in reaction to the disasters of last year's policies and so, therefore, there will be a great influx of new exiles: those that dutifully carried out last year's orders. And last year's policies were truly disastrous: livestock and agriculture output are dwindling; the peasantry has been decimated, with the most skilled and successful having their land confiscated - pity that their know-how could not be confiscated as well! Massive industrial projects are underway, to no visible purpose, based on tooling and components that are shoddy to the point of uselessness. Everywhere there are auditors, each afraid to report the truth, and so they report only the truth that the hierarchy wants to hear, which is no truth at all. Until, of course, reality intervenes: starvation stalks the land, as does the secret police.

Against this backdrop we are told the story of a small band of left oppositionists who meet in secret and have devised a way of secretly communicating with other such groups in other remote towns.

The novel begins with the arrest of a recanted left oppositionist named Kostrov, whom I presume to be modeled on Serge. He is arrested, interrogated, put in solitary confinement, and eventually shipped off to Chernoe. His arrival causes the local group some unease, because they believe him to be an informer. But the story soon shifts away from Kostrov (who doesn't appear again in the story until much later) to the other members of the group. One in particular, Rodion, is a bundle of contradictions. He tries desperately to understand the underpinnings of Marxism-Leninism, and to develop a sound theoretical line, but is stymied by his lack of education and by his undisciplined mind - defects which he is painfully aware of. But his revolutionary zeal is unquestioned, and his instincts are generally sound. In the course of the story both he and another member of the group are framed for crimes that they didn't commit, and Rodion is eventually imprisoned in a stable, from which he escapes almost immediately. But in the vast steppes of Russia there really is no escape, and the novel ends on pessimistic note.

But - not really. Serge himself was a solid Marxist and seems to have been reassured in the belief that the dialectic is always in play. So the rise of Stalinism, though a great blow, was a setback, but not a final defeat.

Despite the bleak setting and the terrible circumstances, Serge managed to make this a beautiful book. His descriptions of the vastness of the steppes and forests; the bright beauty of snow in springtime; the joy and excitement at the breaking of the ice on the Chernaya river; and the simple kindnesses of the people exiled in Chernoe: all these things break through the general darkness of the story and offer a kind of hope that I, at least, did not expect.

[Andrew Davis · Rating 3 out of 5]

A sad and tragic story of Russia in 1930's. It makes a slavery system iddillic when compared with an oppression, hunger and forced labour of Koba's workers' paradise, turned into a humanity grinder. Rightly compared with the thermidor period during the French Revolution.
It mentions Stalin's order to Chinese communists in Wuhan to end their resistance to Chiang Kasher troops, and when implemented they were promptly massacred then.
Also, in early thirties Stalin insisted that the Social Democratic leaders were the main enemies of revolution and ordered the German Communist Party to attack them, rather than Hitler.
In 1932, the Nazis obtained a plebiscite in Prussia for the purpose of overthrowing Otto Braun's Social Democratic Cabinet. The German Communist Party - on Stalin's personal recommendation - joined forces with the Nazis, calling this the "Red" Plebiscite.

[Stephen Coates · Rating 3 out of 5]

The fictional account of a group of Russian men and women living in village in the interior living outwardly normal lives yet meeting clandestinely to discuss their grievances about the regime and life in general is very plausible given what I'd read in Sheila Fitzpatrick's "Everyday Stalinism" and Nadezhda Mandelstam's "Hope Against Hope". Yet, while I enjoyed the book, it was not as good as Serge's "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" and the narrative was not as straightforward as was Tulayev and the ending was, to say the least, abrupt, almost as if the last page or two was lost en route to the publishers.

[Timothy Frasca · Rating 5 out of 5]

This made me want to track down all the rest of his books. The subject matter (the Gulag) is grim as usual, and yet there is an underlying thread of passion for the lost vision of the Russian Revolution's promising start, the affection for the Siberian landscape, and just the recognizable humanity of the (mostly doomed) victims.

[Fred Dameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

As I read this I'm thinking, "Is this what we here in the U.S. have to look forward to?" I say this as I watch the party of hate try to do the simplest thing, elect the speaker of the house. Could V. Serge be telling us that this is our future? Well see and it's a great read.

[Randy Hendrickson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I made my way through this interesting book, but wasn't compelled until Rodion escapes towards the end. I really wanted the book to continue at that point.

[David · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recommended reading for former Corbynites who want to know what a real political defeat looks and feels like: 'Midnight's where we have to live.'

[Differengenera · Rating 5 out of 5]

novel about victims of Stalin's crackdown on opposition factions whether real and imagined. we track their thoughts, debates, lives and transgressions - whether real or imagined - primarily in exile or prisons. this being a Victor Serge novel it's unbelievably good, perfectly accomplished work of art, genius etc.

reading Serge takes me back to having those first transporting experiences with poetry and prose which, for me anyway, were derived from works which by my own standards now were far too rich in sentiment and yearning and glorifications of nature; tempering this essential tendency with the devastating encounters utopian politics had with the twentieth century seems to be the winning artistic formula for me.

'But of what matter now the rhythm of that bygone language. The precision and ardour of that thought, bound to events in order to force them, ceaselessly invoking history in order to make it? The old text lives because it expresses a fidelity, a necessity. It is necessary that someone not betray. Many may weaken, retract, fail themselves, betray. Nothing is lost if one man remains erect.* Everything is saved if he is the greatest. This man has never yielded, will never yield, either to intrigue or fear, to admiration or to slander, even to fatigue. Nothing will separate him from the revolution - victorious or defeated, covering crowds with songs and red flags, heaping its dead in common graves to the sound of funeral hymns, or preserved in the hearts of a handful of men in snow-covered prisons. And if after that he is wrong, if he is intractable and imperious, it hardly matters. The essential thing is to remain true'.

*bit of subtext here does get at the one problem with VS which is he can't really write women. we're unerringly told when even the serious party workers or put-upon peasants are sexy, what can you do

[Terence · Rating 3 out of 5]

I have to admit that I was turned on to this book by my pal Josh's old band Blacklist who named an album after this - and it's printed by NYRB. As a novel it is an insanely grueling story with very little hope, but some amazingly beautiful passages of horrible things. It hits a rhythm half way through where the characters and their arrests and situations. Not what I typically would pick up but there's some excellent writing here and a decent glossary section in the end to help a non-Russian understand all the complex references to Russian history and political organizations.

[Ivan Josic · Rating 5 out of 5]

An encapsulation of the power of the revolutionary spirit inherent to human nature. These exiles, no matter how often betrayed, hang on to their ideals, continue to fight, love, hope. Life moves onward. It reminds me of the ending of "Come and See," where the partisans march on to an unknown fate, sure of their cause. And Serge's prose is beautiful, delicate, all-encompassing. This is a novel I know I will often return to.

[Jeffrey · Rating 5 out of 5]

The poetic language of this novel (in translation, no less) and the powerful themes/motifs of idealism in the face of oppression drew me along for an affecting story about exiles of the Russian Revolution. The atmosphere was wonderfully drawn and the descriptions of nature as a motif were an excellent ingredient in this short novel full of images and themes that resonate with my interests. Amazing surprise to like this novel as much as I did, will certainly re-read in future.

[Roberto Padilha · Rating 5 out of 5]

Amazing! It has the power to disillusion you from pretty much every ideology, not only political ones.
It shows how we can so easily and, maybe sometimes, without realising lose ourselves in ideas promoted by people that have no intention of bringing them to life. Easily one of the best reads of the year so far.