Unforgiving Years

UNFORGIVING Years is at once the most bitter, the most cerebral, and the most poetic of Victor Serge’s seven novels. It was first published in France in 1971 — twenty-five years after the author’s death — and has never appeared before in English. The setting is World War II, and Serge pushes realism to the modernist limits of hallucination, presenting extravagant, terrifying, poetic visions of men and women prowling the debris of a self-destructing mechanical civilization. In Unforgiving Years Serge captured the surreal “twenty-fifth hour” atmosphere of World War II in a way that, according to the critic of Le Monde, “prefigured and preceded post-war German literature.”[1] The novel poses — without answering — the questions of political action, art, and human consciousness; or rather “answers” them through mysterious metaphors like “the central fire,” “funeral masks [that] lie preserved in the earth,” and the impudent, irresistible phallic power of a banana…

Unforgiving Years is divided into four sections, four symphonic “movements,” each of which evokes its distinctive time and place through its tone and atmosphere. The first movement, entitled “The Secret Agent,” expresses the sinister unreality of a Paris indifferent to the approach of war in a chill minor key. The second, “The Flame Beneath the Snow,” is discordant, heroic, and secret like one of Shostakovich’s wartime symphonies. It portrays a frozen, starving Leningrad during the “thousand days” of the Nazi siege. The third movement, “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs,” imagines the final days of Berlin under Allied bombardment in mode of Wagnerian Götterdämmerung, while the final movement, “Journey’s End,” is a tragic requiem set in the stark, volcanic Mexican selva where death and life repeat their endless cycle.

Against this panorama of planetary catastrophe, Serge poses his collective protagonist: a quartet of loyal, idealistic Soviet secret agents, veteran revolutionary fighters from the Russian Civil War period (1918–1921), now disillusioned. Operating in Europe where Hitler is triumphing and war looming, their faith in the Party is shaken by the Moscow Trials and the Stalinist totalitarian nightmare developing back in Russia. Caught in this “labyrinth of madness,”[2] torn between a heroic sense of duty and the recognition of a historical impasse, doomed to be eliminated by the GPU apparatus if the gestapo doesn’t get them first, they search for an escape from a “world without possible escape” while trying to make sense of history and of their individual lives.

Serge’s authentic depictions of character and place are based on his own experiences as a European Communist in the Russian Civil War and an agent of the Comintern in Central Europe. The locales of the novel — Paris, Leningrad, Berlin, Mexico — were the places where he had lived and struggled. Which leads us to the double question: Who was Victor Serge, and why do we still have to have to ask that question in 2007?[3]

A WRITER’S FATE

During his lifetime, Victor Serge (pseudonym for Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, 1890–1947) was admired (or persecuted) both as a French novelist and as a Russian revolutionary.[4] As distinct from many Western writers and intellectuals — for example Koestler, Malraux, Orwell, or Silone — who flirted at one time or another with revolution, Serge-Kibalchich was a revolutionary and an internationalist more or less from birth, and remained one to his death. The stateless son of exiled anti-Czarist Russian parents wandering Europe “in search of good libraries and cheap lodgings,” Serge was born “by chance” in Brussels, Belgium. Home-schooled by these penniless, idealistic exiled scholars, young Victor imbibed the heady traditions of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia while growing up poor on the streets of Brussels. So poor that at age eleven he watched horrified as his younger brother died of malnutrition, while he survived on the pilfered sugar soaked in coffee that little Raoul refused to eat. “Throughout the rest of my life,” he recalled, “it has been my fate always to find, in the under-nourished urchins of the squares of Paris, Berlin, and Moscow, the same condemned faces of my tribe.”

At age fourteen Victor is a militant Socialist Young Guard; at fifteen a member of a rebel gang of Brussels apprentices writing and printing their own radical anarchist sheet, The Rebel (pseudonym Le Rétif: “The Maverick”). At eighteen he is starving in Paris, devouring the contents of the Sainte-Geneviève library while editing L’anarchie, lecturing on anarcho-individualism, giving Russian lessons, and translating Russian novels to survive. At twenty-one Kibalchich is sentenced to five years in a French penitentiary for refusing to rat on his anarchist brothers from Brussels who, unwilling to be master or slaves, became bandits — the first ever to use automobiles to attack banks (the police had bikes). Known as “the tragic bandits,” most of them die in shoot-outs with the Paris police or on the guillotine. Released from prison in 1917, Victor is expelled from France and comes back to life in Barcelona, where he works as a printer, participates in a revolutionary workers’ uprising, and publishes his first article signed “Victor Serge.” The title: “The Fall of a Czar.”

Soon Serge is attempting to reach revolutionary Russia via Paris, where he is arrested as a “Bolshevik suspect” and held for more than a year in a typhus-infested camp. There he meets his first Bolshevik. Exchanged for a French officer held by the Soviets, he arrives in St. Petersburg (then called Petrograd, later Leningrad) in January 1919. While crossing the frozen Baltic Sea in a prisoner’s convoy he falls in love with Liuba Russakova, the daughter of a Russian anarchist. Victor joins in the defense of the frozen, starving Red capital, besieged by Western-backed White armies. Twenty-odd years later, he will draw on this experience of Petrograd under siege to portray the Germans’ World War II siege of Leningrad in Unforgiving Years. Serge is drawn to the Bolsheviks’ heroic energy and participates in the creation of the Communist International (or Comintern). Despite misgivings about Communist authoritarianism, he joins the Party in May 1919 and writes favorable impressions of the Bolsheviks for the anarchist press back in France.[5]

However, by the spring of 1921 Serge’s loyalties were severely torn when anarchist and dissident Communist sailors rebel and seize the island fortress of Cronstadt. Serge joins in the thwarted attempt by the American anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman to mediate the conflict and then looks on in horror as the rebels and Communist volunteers massacre each other in a fratricidal combat across the melting ice floes.[6] After withdrawing briefly from politics, Serge accepts a Comintern assignment in Germany where the promise of a new revolution poses a last hope for saving the isolated Russian Soviets from smothering under increasing bureaucratic dictatorship. In Berlin Serge serves the Comintern both as a journalist and under various identities, as a militant or “agent” (in those days there was little distinction). Under the signature “R. Albert,” he sends reports to the world Communist press on galloping inflation, mass unemployment, mutilated veterans begging, strikes, and abortive putsches.[7] Serge’s familiarity with the world of secret agents and with the desperation of the German people living through the post–World War I crisis helped him re-create the atmosphere of Berlin at the end of World War II in the third movement of Unforgiving Years.

In March 1923, the German Communists are outlawed after the fiasco of their aborted Hamburg putsch, and Serge flees with his family to Vienna, where he works with Georg Lukács and Antonio Gramsci. In 1925, despairing of a renewal of revolution in the West, Serge makes the insanely idealistic decision to return to Russia and join in the last-ditch fight against Stalin as a member of the doomed Left Opposition led by Trotsky. Expelled from the Party in 1928, Serge turns to writing. In quick succession he produces three novels and a well-documented history (Year One of the Russian Revolution) and publishes them in Paris — before being arrested and deported to the Ural in 1933.

In a letter smuggled out of Russia for publication in case of his arrest, Serge defends democratic freedom as essential to workers’ socialism and describes Stalinist Communism as “totalitarian.” After months of interrogation in the notorious Lubianka prison, Serge is deported to the Ural, where he is joined by his teenage son, the future artist Vlady.[8] Serge’s wife, Liuba, driven insane by the Stalinist terror, is confined to an asylum. Protests by French trade unionists and writers (including André Gide and Romain Rolland) lead to the release of Serge and his family from Russia in 1936, but the two novels he completed in captivity (“the only ones I had time to polish”) are seized by the GPU at the Polish border.[9]

From precarious exile in Brussels and Paris, Serge struggles to support his insane wife and their two children while turning out books and articles furiously to unmask the “big lie” of the Moscow show trials and Stalin’s murderous intrigues in Republican Spain. His scrupulously documented, eyewitness books and articles are greeted with silence by complacent intellectuals hypnotized by the “anti-fascism” of Communist-manipulated popular fronts. Serge is obliged to fall back on his old prison trade of proof reader and find work in the print shops of socialist papers that boycott his articles. Meanwhile, Serge and his comrades are living in a “labyrinth of pure madness” as Stalin’s agents kidnap and murder Trotsky’s supporters in the middle of opulent, indifferent Paris. The first section of Unforgiving Years, “The Secret Agent,” is Serge’s eerie evocation of a doomed world capital paralyzed before the looming threat of war.

The character of Serge’s secret agent, known as D or Sacha, reflects Serge’s Comintern experiences and his personal acquaintance with three important agents who defected during the 1930s. Serge was distantly related to the Soviet diplomat Alexander Barmin, whose One Who Survived Serge ghostwrote in Paris. Serge thought of Barmin, who died in 1988 in Darien, Conneticut, as “a perfect Soviet young American.” A more likely model for Sacha/D was Ignace Reiss, a secret agent whose break with Stalin’s Communist Party was motivated by sincere revolutionary internationalism and Trotskyist sympathies. Reiss was murdered in Switzerland on his way to a clandestine meeting with Serge, having made two fatal mistakes which Serge will attribute to D: Reiss mailed his letter of resignation before making his break, and he confided his intentions to a trusted colleague.[10] However, Sacha/D’s character owes more to Walter Krivitsky, the former head of Stalin’s Secret Service,[11] whom Serge had known in Russia and with whom he had several rather tense meetings in Paris after his defection. Krivitsky could never quite believe that Serge had been released from the Gulag as a result of a protest campaign, and suspected him of being a double agent. During one walk down a dark street, each time Krivitsky put his hand in his breast pocket, Serge did likewise. Yet according to a note in Serge’s FBI file, Serge was “deeply affected” by Krivitsky’s mysterious death in a Washington, D.C., hotel room in 1941 about which Serge wrote:

Perhaps Serge injected something of his own undefeated soul into his fictional Sacha/D, who does manage to resist demoralization.

By 1939, Serge is on the verge of recognition with Midnight in the Century, his novel about deported oppositionists, which was nominated for the Prix Goncourt. At the outbreak of the war, however, his books — considered subversive — are withdrawn from publication. When Paris falls to the Nazis, Serge, penniless, joins the exodus on foot — accompanied by his young companion Laurette Séjourné and his son, Vlady. They survive a Luftwaffe strafing attack on the Loire and eventually find refuge in a Marseille villa rented by Varian Fry of the American Refugee Committee and shared with André Breton and his family. Aided by Dwight Macdonald in New York and by exiled comrades of the Spanish poum who had settled in Mexico, Serge and Vlady board the last refugee ship out of Vichy France and end up in Mexico City in 1941, a year after Trotsky’s assassination. Here Serge finds himself politically isolated — cut off from Europe by the war, unable to publish, boycotted, slandered, and physically attacked by Stalinist agents.

Nonetheless, it is in Mexico that Serge completes his most enduring work: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. He also studies psychoanalysis, writes a manuscript on pre-Columbian archaeology, and meditates on consciousness and death. He explores the meaning of the war not only in theoretical and political “theses” but also in terms of dreams, earthquakes, volcanoes, and luxuriant vegetation. All these elements come together in Unforgiving Years, which he finishes in 1946. In 1947 his heart gives out, stressed by the altitude and exhausted by years of prison and privation. Penniless and stateless as usual, Serge is buried in a pauper’s grave and registered as a “Spanish Republican.” His posthumously published Memoirs of a Revolutionary concludes:

A NOVEL’S FATE

Serge’s books have had almost as hard a life as their author. At the end of World War II, when Serge began Unforgiving Years, he was painfully aware of writing “exclusively for the desk drawer” — in which his classic Memoirs and Comrade Tulayev were already languishing, unpublished. Little hope in postwar Paris, what with paper shortages and the influence of the Communists in publishing. No luck either in New York and London, even with the help of Dwight Macdonald and George Orwell. With at least one Stalinist and two conservatives in every publishing house, “I’m at the point where I wonder if my very name will not be an obstacle to the novel’s publication…”

Tulayev and the Memoirs have attained the status of “classics” (albeit neglected ones), but Serge the novelist has remained marginalized. Yet he is arguably as important a novelist in the political genre as Malraux, Orwell, Silone, Koestler, and Solzhenitsyn. On the one hand, Serge’s radical socialist politics are seen by many critics as having no place in a novel, while on the other such is his prestige as a revolutionary participant-witness, often quoted by historians and political scientists, that his work as a literary artist is then deemed of secondary importance. For example, political scientist Susan Weissman’s recent book on Serge takes the position that “writing, for Serge, was something to do only when one was unable to fight.”[13] Another reason for Serge’s neglect is his nationality, or lack thereof. As a stateless Russian who wrote in French, he apparently fell through the cracks between academic departments organized around national notions of “French” or “Russian” literature. As a result, there are as yet no Ph.D.s on Serge in any French university, nor will you find “Serge, Victor” listed in French biographical dictionaries and literary manuals.[14]

Serge wrote in French, but his work is best situated in the Russian intelligentsia traditions of his expatriate parents. He inherited his father’s scientific culture (physics, geology, sociology) while his literary culture came from his mother, who taught him to read in cheap editions of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and the Russian social realist Korolenko. His mother’s family was apparently connected with Maxim Gorky.[15] By his concept of the writer’s mission, Serge saw himself “in the line of the Russian writers.”[16] And although he borrowed freely from cosmopolitan influences like Joyce, Dos Passos, and the French unanimists, Serge developed as a writer within the Soviet literary “renaissance” of the relatively liberated period of the free-market New Economic Policy (1921–1928). Indeed, during the 1920s, Serge was the principal transmission belt between the literary worlds of Soviet Russia and France. Through his translations and regular articles on Soviet culture in Henri Barbusse’s Clarté he introduced French readers to the postrevolutionary poetry of Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Esenin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as to fiction writers like Alexis Tolstoy, Babel, Zamiatine, Lebidinsky, Gladkov, Ivanov, Fedin, and Boris Pilniak — his colleagues in the Soviet Writers Union.[17]

By the mid-1930s, many of Serge’s colleagues had been reduced to silence (suicide, censorship, the camps). “No PEN-club” wrote Serge in exile, “even those that held banquets for them, asked the least question about their cases. No literary review, to my knowledge, commented on their mysterious end.” Only Serge — because he wrote in French and was saved from the Gulag by his reputation in France — managed to survive. Only Serge had the freedom to further develop the revolutionary innovations of Soviet literature and to submit the world of Stalinism to the critical lens of fiction in novels like Midnight in the Century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years. As one Russian scholar put it: “Although written in French, Serge’s novels are perhaps the nearest we have to what Soviet literature of the 30s might have been…”[18]

Thus it was that Unforgiving Years remained unread for a quarter of a century. It was first published in Paris in 1971 by François Maspero, who was also bringing out many of Serge’s political books as the anti-Stalinist New Left developed in the 1960s. Praised by the critics at the time — Le Monde ran “The Secret Agent” as a serial and hailed the novel as Serge’s “political and literary testament”[19] — now, sixty years after it was written, it is appearing for the first time both in Russian and in English translation.

“A RATHER TERRIFYING NOVEL…”

Serge began writing Unforgiving Years (draft title Sands, Snows, Fire) in Mexico in September of 1945. In January 1946 he announced his subject in a letter to Daniel Guérin in newly liberated France: “in progress: a rather terrifying novel on the problems of consciousness in wartime which is giving me actual headaches.” And indeed, Unforgiving Years is the most pessimistic, the most inward, and the most contemporary of Serge’s novels. His 1946 characters are asking twenty-first-century questions: How to live if history no longer has a meaning? What remains of human consciousness if society has indeed entered a regressive era of ideological repression and technological pan-destruction?

These themes are developed through a series of encounters among a quartet of Comintern agents — dedicated, idealistic men and women coming to terms with the transformation of their struggle for historical progress into the nightmare of totalitarianism and mechanized war. The Moscow Trials — the physical and moral destruction of Lenin’s 1917 “general staff ” — have left them stunned. Yet they also understand the secret logic of these loyal old Bolsheviks confessing to the most absurd “crimes.” They feel bound by a similar iron loyalty to the Party. Unthinkable to break, much less betray, what with the capitalist democracies coddling Hitler in the hope he will rid them of Red Russia. Where to turn? Trotsky may well speak the truth, but his puny “Fourth International” is riddled with Stalinist agents. “I can believe in nothing now but power,” thinks Secret Agent D. “Truth, stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth.”

The death of consciousness is the central theme of Unforgiving Years, written at a time when Serge was meditating on his own death and on that of the planet — conceivable since the explosion of the “cosmic weapon” of August 4, 1945. “The most tragic thing about death, the most unacceptable thing for the mind,” Serge noted on the passing of his friend Fritz Frankel, the cultivated psychoanalyst and fellow Comintern veteran, “is the total disappearance of a spiritual greatness built out of experience, intellectual elaboration, knowledge, and understanding, much of it incommunicable.” Serge’s Notebooks continues: “The individual strives to gain enduring existence for himself by the fame of his activity (accomplishing a mission, pursuit of glory; for the writer and the reformer, the need to capture the moment, to express, to teach; the need to be integrated with history).”[20]

Serge and the protagonists of Unforgiving Years live by this ethos, inherited from the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionary intelligentsia and derived from the Hegelian (and Marxist) sense of “Consciousness” as a historically active thing in itself, the world spirit unfolding through time, the self-discovery of human intelligence as the dialectic of freedom, the meaning of life. “The sense of history,” noted Serge in 1944, “is the consciousness of participating in the collective destiny, in the constant becoming of men; it implies knowledge, tradition, choice, and finally, conviction, it demands a duty — for, once you know, once you have understood, once you have made out the possible courses, you must live (act) according to that understanding.”[21] How then to live outside of history, outside of the purposeful struggle, outside (for agents like D and his comrades) the Party?

Each of Serge’s four protagonists tries to answer (or to avoid) that question in his or her own way. In Paris we are first introduced to secret agent D (alias Sacha, alias Bruno Battisti) on the verge of his “resignation” from the Service; then we meet D’s lover and protégée Nadine (alias Noémi); both are connected with a young French Communist, a painter named Alain. Finally, we catch a glimpse of Daria — D’s female alter ego — a comrade he has known since she was a girl fighter in the Russian Civil War. The plot, which is not easy to follow, is woven through their various encounters in the four sections of the novel.

In the Paris segment, “The Secret Agent,” D and Nadine prepare their escape to parts unknown while Daria refuses D’s offer to escape with them, preferring to return to Russia and probable arrest. In the second section, “The Flame Beneath the Snow,” Daria is called back to wartime intelligence service (after deportation to Kazakhstan) during the siege of Leningrad. In the final pages of the German section, “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs,” Daria resurfaces (along with Alain) working for the Berlin underground as a nurse under the name of Erna. In the last, tragic movement, “Journey’s End,” Daria finds her way to Mexico where she is reunited with D and Nadine/Noémi.

Daria is thus the central protagonist connecting the four sections of the novel. She is also the only character in this oddly allusive novel for whom one can construct an actual “biography” (albeit only by patching together allusions and flashbacks scattered throughout the work). If D, the introspective male protagonist, poses the “problems of consciousness” in the first and final chapters of the novel, Daria is Serge’s active protagonist. She is the hero who struggles against fate, the warrior who fights for humankind, the traveler whose quest takes her across war-torn Europe from Russia to Mexico. She is also the lover who experiences passion and grief, the great-souled woman who is granted a rich inner life. Daria’s diary and soliloquies explore erotic love, grief, and anger from the viewpoint of a distinctly female sensibility. Indeed, Daria represents a creative breakthrough for Serge the novelist, whose previous novel, The Long Dusk, was marred by somewhat clichéd female characters generally seen from without and in relation to male heroes (as wife, daughter, sister, lover).

In the opening pages of Unforgiving Years, we sense rather than understand the futility of prewar Paris. Defeat is in the air. In this sinister atmosphere, everything seems base and livid: the light, the hotels, the streets, the people. Serge’s secret agent is ambivalent about the doomed French capital, admiring the freedom, the easy way of life, even the decadence and cynicism. Crossing place de la République, D looks up at the statue: “a solitary, decorative, and disarmed Marianne, stood ignored by the streams of people following their interwoven pathways around her feet. And no one gives a shit! That’s one way — perhaps the most genuine way — of being republicans…” This self-absorbed Paris will soon join Serge’s other cities — Barcelona, Leningrad, Berlin — as “fissured icebergs drifting toward naked dawns” in the poem that adorns the title page of the second movement.

Readers of Serge’s earlier novels will find it surprising that the characters in Unforgiving Years rarely discuss politics, and there are few precise allusions to contemporary events. Do we even know the date of the Paris episode? Has Franco already won the Spanish Civil War? Are we before or after the Munich crisis and the Stalin-Hitler Pact? Whereas Serge’s earlier novels may be read as witness-chronicles of the revolutionary struggle, this last novel is denuded of political and historical specifics. If Serge seems to have deliberately set aside chronicle to concentrate on symbol and atmosphere, perhaps he is inviting us to read the novel on the level of meta-politics, of the history of consciousness seen from a geological, biological, evolutionary perspective.

Serge hints he is up to something of the kind through the device of a “book within a book.” Deported to a tiny Kazakh village, Daria keeps a journal, which she knows will be studied by the local GPU chief. To protect herself and her comrades, she must censor out all compromising names, dates, places, and events, and this “literary constraint” obliges her to focus on her feelings and sense impressions as she relives the memories of her life with physical intensity. The lyrical texts that result express her intimate feelings of erotic love, anger, and grief recollected in tranquillity. The author then slyly pats himself on the back for this fictional tour de force when the cynical GPU chief compliments Daria on the literary qualities of her journal — before advising her to burn it. It is difficult not to see Daria’s journal as a metaphor for Serge’s self-censored novel. In his Notebooks he remarks: “Curious to observe that I am writing at the present moment, in this free country of America, like the Russians were writing around 1930 when the last spiritual freedom was expiring there.”

As Serge was writing Unforgiving Years, the dark shadows of Hiroshima, Auschwitz, and the Gulag were casting question marks over the future of civilized human society, indeed of the planet itself. Serge, like Gramsci, responded to this radically new historical situation with “pessimism of the intellect, optimism of the will.” Serge’s willed optimism came to the fore in an argument with Dwight Macdonald, whose belief in socialism had been shaken by the threat of the A-bomb: “It is possible,” Serge admits, “that it all must end via atomic destruction of this terrestrial sphere, as Anatole France foresaw in the final chapter of Penguin Island. But this is not at all a certainty. And it seems less probable, rationally, than the proper organization of a society in which atomic energy will contribute to ending the last slavery, that of hard work. As long as this possibility-probability continues, isn’t it our job to push in that direction?” The same optimism has inspired generations of readers of his Memoirs of a Revolutionary, where he sums up:

However, Serge’s pessimism of the intellect came out in his private journals, letters, and fiction. In a 1946 letter, he opines that the world “after a period of dark struggles and anxieties, may succumb to a terrible conflagration” and compares the “shock” of modern weapons of mass destruction to “cosmic phenomena.” “Today, all explosives have attained such power that their effect is no longer on a human scale.” In his Notebooks, he reflected that “Trotsky correctly foresaw that we might enter a phase of uninterrupted, permanent warfare if humanity does not achieve a social (and psychological) reorganization, the means to which appear, realistically, pitifully weak.” There was not much time left either: “For technological reasons, decisions [about society’s future] can not be put off indefinitely.” Yet such social changes depend on intellectual clarity, on critical thinking, which Serge increasingly saw both as impotent in the face of mass social conditioning and as threatened with outright extinction: “Destroy a few brains, quickly done! ” And if they are the few thousand brains that understand Einstein, Freud, or Marx?

These pessimistic visions inspired Serge’s “terrifying” novel about “the problem of consciousness in time of war.” The imagery of the chapter titles and the poems placed at their heads evokes planetary catastrophe (“the central fire,” “lightning,” “smoking rains,” “naked dawns”). A Russian soldier wonders that “they haven’t invented war toys to split open the planet yet.” A German soldier reflects: “There are no warriors anymore: only poor bastards facing exploding volcanoes. The cosmos has gone berserk…. He was…alive, living under the cold light of a huge, dark, sulfurous star: the sun of destruction.” The Berlin section opens in an underground shelter where the thunder of bombs sends “huge waves through the earth.” “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs” is full of images of dreams, geological eruptions, and buried civilizations like Pompeii and Atlantis. Serge had to invent a neologism, “pan-destruction,” to express the scale of the devastation.

Nowhere was the destruction so total as in Germany. Serge fearlessly depicted Germany’s defeat from the point of view of ordinary middle-class Germans seen principally as victims. This viewpoint is only now being legitimized sixty years later with a reexamination of the unparalleled destruction of German civilian cities by the Anglo-American bomber command and the publication in Germany of World War II memoirs and diaries. Serge satirized the cliché of German collective responsibility in the figure of an arrogant, overfed American journalist who drives up to a bombed-out Berlin neighborhood in a jeep and asks the uncomprehending survivors — whom Serge compares to “inhabitants of Chicago’s slums” — if they feel guilty.

As distinct from the rich and powerful Germans, whose country estates were largely untouched by the war, Serge portrays ordinary Germans as more or less good people who patriotically believed what the government and the media told them (like many Americans today). As he explained in a letter to Macdonald: “People are caught up in the gears [of the social machine…] Nothing mysterious about it.” For Serge, neither the German soldiers killed and mutilated at the front nor their starved, bombed-out, and mass-raped mothers and sisters were “responsible” for the war. Indeed, the Nazis and industrialists who started it needed first to arrest thousands of German trade unionists, socialists, Communists, and conscious-stricken Christians like Brigitte’s fiancé. These were the Germans he had lived with and written about twenty years earlier in Witness to the German Revolution.

Serge symbolized German innocence in the angelic figure of Brigitte, a gentle, cultivated, middle-class girl, orphaned by the war and driven to Ophelia-like madness by the death at the front of her beloved fiancé (shot by the SS for questioning the war). A midnight bombing raid draws the ecstatic girl to the roof. We see her frail figure silhouetted against the constellations and the “lightning” of explosions: “The whiteness wove a tissue of radiance around the city, around the entire planet: the planet in her wedding dress. A bright cupola rose high above Brigitte’s rapt, thrown-back head.” When she is found mysteriously strangled, a neighbor picks some lilacs that have miraculously survived the bombings — testimony to “the power of simple vegetative life” — and lays them next to her fragile body. Alain, the artist, sees her as “Botticellian,” and her image returns in his delirious meditations on the nature of beauty and art which conclude the German section.

The final movement, “Journey’s End,” returns to the question “What to live for?” by posing another: “What will endure, when it all blows up, melts down, or grinds to a sulfurous halt?” It opens with an invocation:

Serge’s “funeral masks” suggest that enduring works of art can preserve the content of human consciousness from oblivion — even after the destruction of whole civilizations. They may point as well to works of literature which successfully “capture the moment” — thus winning their author a kind of immortality. But these are forlorn hopes. In Birth of Our Power, his 1930 novel about a failed workers’ uprising in Barcelona, Serge had confidently written “Nothing is ever lost” — correctly anticipating the coming Spanish revolution of 1936. The 1946 version “nothing yet is lost” signals a change of historical perspective to archaeological time and from social progress to art.

It is in art that Alain, now disillusioned about Russia, finds his solution to the problem of “what to live for.” Daria is still seeking a solution of her own as she crosses the Atlantic and makes her way to join Sacha/D/Bruno Battisti at his remote coffee plantation in rural Mexico. However, instead of discoursing on politics and history with her, Sacha tells her about his life in Mexico, about its ancient peoples, who “lived in an unstable cosmos, as we live in an unstable humanity armed with cosmic powers”; about its seasons, the annual death of the sun-parched earth and its irresistible luxuriant rebirth under the violent rains and lightning storms of the spring. In response to her horrifying account of the bombing of Berlin, he leads her to a banana tree and points to its “violet-tinted, powerfully-sexed turgidity.” His consciousness, free of the imperative of historical integration, has led him to this final affirmation: “All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist.”

This striking affirmation illustrates what Serge’s son, Vlady, used to call his father’s “materialist spirituality” — since it was derived from Serge’s scientific worldview rather than from any tendency toward mysticism. Serge’s notion of materialism is closer to Spinoza’s Substance, Bergson’s élan vital, Hegelian-Marxist dialectics, Verdnatsky’s noosphere, and Edgar Morin’s Complexity than to positivism and vulgar scientism. “The immaterial is not in the least unreal, but on the contrary an essential form of the real (thought) completely unexplainable by yesterday’s scientific rules.”[23] Indeed, it was after reading two scientific books about recent discoveries and theories in genetics that he noted: “The old materialist schools would wax indignant and yet it is quite evident, however mysterious nature may be, that thought is the product of life, consubstantial with life, and that there would be nothing particularly bold in maintaining that it [thought] is itself life coming to discover and know itself.” In consequence, even after a nuclear holocaust, consciousness/life will survive, if only in the form of a virus whose reproduction will, over the eons, evolve toward greater complexity until it reaches the stage of intelligent life in some unimagined form “coming to discover and know itself.” Thus while Serge the socialist activist continued to “set his course on hope,” Serge the creator of Unforgiving Years put hope further off into the long term, to archaeological, geological, and evolutionary time where ultimately “true death does not exist.” A writer for our times — which well may be (to quote the title of another Serge novel) Last Times.[24]