The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics)

by Victor Serge

Serge’s polyphonic novel, with its many trajectories, has a much more complicated view of character, of the interweaving of politics and private life, and of the terrible procedures of Stalin’s inquisition. And it casts a much wider intellectual net. (An example: Rublev’s analysis of the revolutionary generation.) Of those arrested, all but one will eventually confess — Ryzhik, who remains defiant, prefers to go on a hunger strike and die — but only one resembles Koestler’s Rubashov: Erchov, who is persuaded to render one last service to the Party by admitting that he was part of the conspiracy to assassinate Tulayev. “Every Man Has His Own Way of Drowning” is the title of one of the chapters. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a far less conventional novel than are Darkness at Noon and 1984, whose portraits of totalitarianism have proved so unforgettable — perhaps because those novels have a single protagonist and tell a single story.