Serge in English

FICTION

Men in Prison (Les hommes dans la prison, 1930). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1969; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1970; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1972; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2014. A searing personal experience transformed into a literary creation of general import.

Birth of Our Power (Naissance de notre force, 1931). Translated by Richard Greeman. Garden City, NY: Doubleday & Co., 1967; London: Victor Gollancz Ltd., 1968; Middlesex: Penguin Books Ltd., 1970; London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1977; Oakland: PM Press, 2015. From Barcelona to Petersburg, the conflagration of World War I ignites the spark of revolution, and poses a new problem for the revolutionaries’ power.

Conquered City (Ville conquise, 1932). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2009. Idealistic revolutionaries cope with the poison of power as the Red Terror and the White struggle for control of Petrograd during the Civil War.

Midnight in the Century (S’il est minuit dans le siècle, 1939). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. London and New York: Writers and Readers, 1981; New York, NYRB Classics, 2014. On the eve of the great Purges, convicted anti-Stalin oppositionists in deportation attempt to survive, resist the GPU, debate political solutions, ponder their fates, and fall in love.

The Long Dusk (Les derniers temps, 1946). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Dial Press, 1946. The fall of Paris (1940), the exodus of the refugees to the Free Zone, the beginnings of the French Resistance.

The Case of Comrade Tulayev (L’Affaire Toulaèv, 1951). Translated by Willard Trask. Introduction by Susan Sontag. New York: NYRB Classics, 2007. A panorama of the USSR and Republican Spain during the Purges, with a cast of sharply etched characters from provincial policemen to Old Bolsheviks and the Chief himself.

Unforgiving Years (Les années sans pardon, posthumous, 1973). Translated and introduced by Richard Greeman. New York: NYRB Classics, 2010. Tormented Russian revolutionaries in Paris on the eve of World War II, Leningrad under siege, the last days of Berlin, and Mexico.

POETRY

Resistance: Poems by Victor Serge (Résistance, 1938). Translated by James Brook. Introduction by Richard Greeman. San Francisco: City Lights, 1972. Most of these poems were composed in deportation in Orenburg (1933–36), confiscated by the GPU, and reconstructed from memory in France.

PM Press plans to publish James Brook’s new translation of Serge’s complete poetry in 2016.

NONFICTION

Revolution in Danger: Writings from Russia 1919–1921. Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. Serge’s early reports from Russia were designed to win over his French anarchist comrades to the cause of the Soviets.

Witness to the German Revolution (1923). Translated by Ian Birchall. London: Redwords, 1997; Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2011. A collection of the articles Serge wrote in Berlin in 1923 under the pseudonym R. Albert.

What Every Militant Should Know about Repression (Les Coulisses d’une Sûreté Générale: Ce que tout révolutionnaire doit savoir sur la répression, 1925). Popular pamphlet reprinted in a dozen languages. Serge unmasks the secrets he discovered working in the archives the Czarist Secret Police, then explains how police provocateurs operate everywhere and gives practical advice on security to activists.

The Chinese Revolution (1927–1928), Online at http://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1927/china/index.html.

Year One of the Russian Revolution (L’an 1 de la révolution russe, 1930) Translated by Peter Sedgwick. London: Pluto Press; Chicago, Haymarket Books. Written soon after Stalin’s takeover in Russia, this history presents the Left Opposition’s take on the October Revolution and early Bolshevism.

From Lenin to Stalin (De Lénine à Staline, 1937). Translated by Ralph Manheim. New York: Monad and Pathfinder Press, 1973. A brilliant, short primer, on the Russian Revolution and its degeneration, with close-ups of Lenin and Trotsky.

Russia Twenty Years After (Destin d’une Revolution, 1937). Translated by Max Shactman (Includes “Thirty Years After the Russian Revolution,” 1947). Atlantic Highlands, NJ: Humanities Press, 1996. Descriptive panorama and analysis of bureaucratic tyranny and chaos in Russia under Stalin’s Five-Year Plans, based on statistics and economic, sociological, and political analysis.

The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (Vie et Mort de Léon Trotski, 1951), by Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova Trotsky. Translated by Arnold Pomerans. London: Wildwood, 1975; Chicago: Haymarket Books, forthcoming. Still the most concise, authentic, and well-written one-volume Trotsky biography, based on the two authors’ intimate knowledge of the man and his times and on Trotsky’s personal archives (before they were sealed up in Harvard).

Memoirs of a Revolutionary (Mémoires d’un révolutionnaire, 1901–1941) Paris: Éditions du Seuil, 1951. Translated by Peter Sedwick. New York: NYRB Classics, 2012. Originally titled “Souvenirs of Vanished Worlds,” Serge’s Memoirs are an eyewitness chronicle of the revolutionary movements of Belgium, France, Spain, Russia, and Germany studded with brilliant portraits of the people he knew. This is the first complete English translation and comes with a glossary.

The Serge-Trotsky Papers: Correspondence and Other Writings between Victor Serge and Leon Trotsky. D. Cotterill, ed. London, Pluto Press, 1994. Includes their personal letters and polemical articles as well as essays on Serge and Trotsky by various authors.

Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution. Translated and edited by Al Richardson. London: Francis Boutle, 2004. Includes Serge’s reports on Soviet Cultural life in the 1920s (published in Paris in Clarté), studies of writers like Blok, Mayakovsky, Essenin, and Pilniak as well as his highly original contributions to the debate on “proletarian literature” in the 1930s.

Anarchists Never Surrender: Essays, Polemics, and Correspondence on Anarchism, 1908–1938. Oakland: PM Press, 2015. An original anthology of Serge’s writing on anarchism translated, edited, and introduced by Mitchell Abidor. Foreword by Richard Greeman.

Notebooks, 1936–1947. Sketches and meditations on subjects ranging from the Stalinist terror, Gide, Giraudoux, and Trotsky to Mexican earthquakes, popular wrestling matches, and death. NYRB Classics plans to publish this in 2016. Translation by Mitch Abidor and Richard Greeman. Intro by Claudio Albertani.

UNTRANSLATED BOOKS IN FRENCH:

Le tropique et le nord. Montpellier: Maspero 1972; Paris: La Découverte, 2003. Four short stories: Mer blanche (1931), L’Impasse St. Barnabé (1936), La folie d’Iouriev [L’Hôpital de Léningrad, 1953] and Le Séisme [San Juan Parangarcutiro]

Retour à l’Ouest: Chroniques, juin 1936-mai 1940. Preface by Richard Greeman. Marseille: Agone, 2010. From the euphoria of Popular Front France in June 1936 to the defeat of the Spanish Republic, Serge’s weekly columns for a trade union-owned independent daily in Belgium provide a lucid panorama of this confused and confusing period.

MANUSCRIPTS:

The Victor Serge Papers (1936–1947), Beinecke Library, Yale University. Twenty-seven boxes of correspondence, documents, and manuscripts (mostly unpublished) on a wide variety of subjects from politics to Mexican anthropology. Catalog online:

http://drs.library.yale.edu:8083/fedoragsearch/rest?filter=&operation=solrQuery&query=Victor+Serge+Papers.