Fiction, for Serge, is truth — the truth of self-transcendence, the obligation to give voice to those who are mute or have been silenced. He disdained novels of private life, most of all autobiographical novels. “Individual existences were of no interest to me — particularly my own,” he remarks in the Memoirs. In a journal entry (March 1944), Serge explains the larger reach of his idea of fictional truth:
