Birth of Our Power Read Free

the pro-Allied Provisional Government. The road to Russia led through wartime Paris, where, in order to be repatriated to revolutionary Russia, Victor tried to join the Russian forces still fighting on the Western Front. There, he found his former French anarchist comrades mostly demoralized and was soon arrested and thrown into a French detention camp for ‘undesirables.’
    Précigné (depicted in the novel as ‘Crécy’) was one of seventy officially nominated ‘concentration camps’ set up during World War I into which the French Republic threw anarchists, pacifists, refugees from German-occupied Belgian and dozens of other countries, Gypsies, prostitutes, and even an odd American ambulance driver (the poet E.E. Cummings, whose
Enormous Room
is often compared to this section of Serge’s novel). At the end of the war, after sixteen months of captivity, Victor was released as part of an exchange of alleged ‘Bolsheviks’ (including children!) imprisoned in France for an equal number French officers held hostage by the Soviets. Accompanied by a group of returning revolutionary exiles, Serge-Kibalchich debarked in Red Petrogradand joined the Revolution on the side of the Bolsheviks at the darkest moment of the Civil War.
Serge’s Literary ‘Restraint’
    In a review of
Birth of Our Power
published in Paris in 1931, Marcel Martinet, Serge’s literary mentor, praised his style for its ‘restraint’
(pudeur)
and its total absence of exhibitionism. However, Martinet also wondered aloud if these virtues were not “defects” in a novel. Comparing Serge to Jules Vallès, the revered revolutionary novelist of the Paris Commune, Martinet demanded of him more emotional expressiveness
(pathétique). 8
    From Leningrad, Serge replied to his mentor, explaining apologetically that his years in prison had hardened him and made him incapable of that kind of romantic literary emotional expressiveness. On the other hand, subtly defending his post-romantic twentieth-century modernist aesthetic, Serge pointed out that his style was appropriate to the modern age: “I wonder if Vallès’ emotional temperament would be able to withstand the singular power of the telephone in an age of terror. The formidable killing machines invented and put in place since 1914 have succeeded in obliterating some of man’s essential instincts.”
    Such is Serge’s restraint that the reader of his ‘semiautobiographical’
Birth of Our Power
would have no idea that 1917–1919 was a critical time in the personal and political life of its author. Serge’s narrator functions as a camera-eye, presenting the reader with a series of jumpcut scenes, sharing his political reflections but nothing of his personal life. Through the narrator’s eye, we see Barcelona as a vibrant, joyful, sun-washed city, but in fact Serge’s
Memoirs
tell us that prison was still hanging heavily over his head and that he was obsessed with guilt at having escaped the common fate of his generation: participation in the great slaughter that was World War I. He also went through a political crisis. It was in Barcelona that Kibaltchich settled his score with French anarcho-individualism, was drawn to syndicalism under the influence of the charismatic workers’ leader Salvador Seguí (Dario in the novel), returned to the orbit of his Russian forebears, and metamorphosed himself into “Victor Serge.”
    Nor do Serge’s mainly political
Memoirs
divulge that their author also went through a sentimental crisis during this period. Victor had been in love with Rirette Maitrejean, his coeditor of the Paris journal
l’anarchie
since 1910. It was partly to shield her that he took the rap in the 1913 ‘anarchist bandit’ trial that landed him in the penitentiary for five years. Rirette, who was a great beauty and took ‘free love’ literally, joined her lover