Unforgiving Years - читать бесплатно онлайн полную версию книги автора Victor Serge (ч. notes)

Footnotes

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1. Paul Morelle, “Les Années sans pardon de Victor Serge,” Le Monde, September 3, 1971, p. 11.

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2. All quotations from Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Oxford University Press, 1963), an indispensable introduction to twentieth-century revolutionary politics for readers who don’t want to die asphyxiated by political correctness. With close-up sketches of Lenin, Trotsky, and the Bolsheviks; anarchists like Voline, Bill Haywood, Emma Goldman; and poets like Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Esenin, and Vladimir Mayakovsky.

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3. Jim Haberman first asked this question twenty years ago in the title of his Voice Literary Supplement article on Serge (November 30, 1984).

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The name Kibalchich is famous in Russia because of a distant relative of Victor’s father, the Narodnik N. I. Kibalchich, who was hanged in 1881 for his participation in the assassination of Czar Alexander II.

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5. See Victor Serge, Revolution in Danger: Writings on Russia 1919–1921, translated by Ian Birchall (London: Redwords, 1997).

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6. Cronstadt later became a bone of contention between Serge and Trotsky in exile.

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7. I first identified “R. Albert” as Serge’s pseudonym in the archives of Inprokorr on the basis of his style. These articles have been collected and translated by my colleague/comrade Ian Birchall in Witness to the German Revolution (London: Redwords, 1997).

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8. I was privileged to know Vlady from 1963 until his death in 2005, and he is the source of much of my information about his father. His 2,000 square meters of murals, which reflect Serge’s politics and aesthetics, can be seen in Mexico City and on the Web site www.vlady.org.

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9. The manuscripts have never been recovered, despite diligent searches of recently opened Soviet archives. See Richard Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left,” Revolutionary History 5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994).

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10. See Alfred Rosmer, Victor Serge, and Maurice Wullens, “L’Assassinat d’Ignace Reiss,” Les Humbles (April 1938).

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11. Walter Krivitsky, In Stalin’s Secret Service (Harper, 1939).

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12. FBI Archives, Serge’s file for February 13, 1941. Courtesy of Susan Weissman.

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13. The Course Is Set on Hope (Verso, 2002), p. 67. The book’s main argument is that “Serge’s critique of Stalinism was the core of his life and work” (p. 6), and she gives short shift to his anarchist years, his poetry, and his fiction, which she finds “useful” in understanding Stalinism.

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14. Serge is better known in US and British French departments, with two Ph.D. theses: my own (Columbia) and Bill Marshall’s (Oxford), later published as Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent (New York: Berg, 1992).

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15. Serge went to see Gorky as soon as he arrived in Russia in 1919, but declined an offer to join the staff of Gorky’s newspaper. During the civil war, Serge depended on Gorky’s relationship with Lenin to intercede to save anarchist comrades from being shot by the Cheka.

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16. Serge, Memoirs.

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17. See Victor Serge, Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution, translated by Al Richardson (London: Francis Boutle, 2004).

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18. Neil Cornwell, review of Midnight in the Century, Irish Slavonic Studies 4 (1983).

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19. Morelle, p. 12.

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20. Victor Serge, Carnets (Arles: Actes Sud, 1985). ß

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21. Serge, Carnets.

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22. The image of “smoking rains” probably came to Serge after witnessing the birth of the volcano Parcutin in 1943 under a rain of hot cinders which ignited and buried the surrounding dwellings and forest. They also refer, of course, to explosives raining from the sky which destroy the “cerebral forest” of human consciousness — seen as if rooted in the earth like a great living brain. Yet the poet’s attitude to this destruction is one of consent, for “nothing yet is lost.” Not as long as the earth preserves “funeral masks” — artefacts of dead cultures like the Aztecs and Mayas he wrote about in Tombeau des civilisations.