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

by Victor Serge

Where did his will power end, where did his indifference begin? At certain dark moments he was so weak that he could have wept: This is what it means to be old, your strength goes, your mind flickers like the yellow lanterns trainmen carry up and down the tracks at unknown stations

“Life fleets like the wave, Pour me the wine of comfort…

If he had credited himself with the slightest poetic faculty, Ryzhik would have allowed himself to become intoxicated by the spectacle of that powerful collective brain, that brain which brought together thousands of brains to perform its work during a quarter of a century, now destroyed in a few years by the backlash of its very victory,

“First: Despite its internal regression, our state remains a factor of progress in the world because it constitutes an economic organism which is superior to the old capitalist states. Second: I maintain that, despite the worst appearances, there is no justification for classifying our state with fascist regimes. Terror is not enough to determine the nature of a regime, what is basically significant is property relations.

Ryzhik tried to call to mind books which, for him, were connected with his sense of being alive. The grayish newsprint of the papers left him only a memory of insipidity.

He went to the washroom to look at himself in the mirror and stood there before himself for a long moment, almost without thinking, in a forsaken immobility. Absurd, really, how interesting we are to ourselves! That tired man is myself, that sallow face, that ugly mouth, those rust-red lips tinged with gray, myself, myself, myself, that human apparition, that phantom in flesh!

He had stopped reading, his gray eyes were exploring the square with intense and idle attention. On the hunt, always prey to the same desolate bitterness? “In this distress and apathy, no one whose hand I can take,” says the poet, but the wandering Maxim the Bitter, Gorki, amends: “no one whose jaw I can break …”

10. And Still the Floes Came Down

And Quiet Flows the Don?

He clicked his tongue to hurry on the horses.

Horses?

“I have not had time to think about the universe, Comrade Filatov, because I have been tortured by injustice.” “The causes of injustice,” Filatov answered, “lie in the social mechanism.”

They have half a century before them, by the law of averages: perhaps they will see true justice, in the days of transparent machines. It takes a great deal of fertilizer to feed exhausted soil. Who knows how many more men must be executed to feed the soil of Russia?

“We are all dying without knowing why we have killed so many men in whom lay our highest strength

Capitalism at its apogee, rich with all the powers of industrial civilization, was planted in a great peasant country, a country of ancient culture, while a senile despotism moved year by year toward its end.

We grew up amid struggle, escaping two profound captivities, that of the old ‘Holy Russia,’ and that of the bourgeois West, at the same time that we borrowed from those two worlds their most living elements: the spirit of inquiry, the transforming audacity, the faith in progress of the nineteenth-century West; a peasant people’s direct feeling for truth and for action, and its spirit of revolt, formed by centuries of despotism.