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in Barcelona after his release from prison, but she did not stay long, and her departure left him desolate. Nor did Serge ever talk about the serious emotional crisis he passed through during the year he spent in the French concentration camp at Fleury-en-Bière (Cummings’s
Enormous Room)
before being transferred to Précigné (‘Trécy’ in the novel).
    Liberated a month after the Armistice, Victor fell in love again in 1919, on the ship taking him to Red Russia through mine- and iceberg-infested waters, and for once his personal, sentimental interest is reflected in the novel. He bonded with another returning Francophone revolutionary exile, Alexander Russakov, a Russian-Jewish tailor and idealistic anarchist, the father of five children (and the model for ‘Old Levine’ in the novel). Victor fell in love with Alexander’s oldest daughter, Liouba Russakova, the ‘child woman’ whose haunting portrait illuminated by firelight appears in “The Laws Are Burning,” in the climactic scene that ends the novel. In Petrograd Victor lived in a collective apartment with the Russakovs, forming a Franco-Russian household, and a year later Liouba give birth to their son, Vladimir Kibalchich. 9 It was in this collective apartment, now invaded by a resident GPU informer, that Serge, now an outcast, wrote
Birth of Our Power
during 1929–1930.
    Nonetheless, there is almost nothing ‘confessional’ in
Birth of Our Power,
Serge’s most autobiographical novel (or for that matter in his so-called Memoirs). 10 Indeed, the novel tells us next to nothing about the narrator’s (or Serge’s) personal life. The true subject of the novel is not Serge’s personal rebirth but the rebirth and coming to consciousness of the worldwide workers’ movement after its collapse into the fratricidal nationalisms of World War I. Although the ‘plot’ follows the narrator’ssomewhat picaresque wanderings, his near-anonymity shifts the reader’s focus to the true ‘hero’ of Serge’s novel, which is not an ‘I’ but a ‘we.’
Serge’s Collective Hero
    Underlying
Birth of Our Power,
indeed running through all of Serge’s novels, there is a permanent and collective protagonist, a revolutionary subject, identified the ‘comrades,’ the ‘we’ of
Birth of Our Power,
the permanent revolutionaries of all lands and epochs, the invisible international. Behind this self-identified cohort stand the masses themselves—the workers, the poor farmers, the youth, the downtrodden and dispossessed—who are ever present in Serge’s novels. In this vision, individual rebels may be obliterated, but “the comrades” will always exist, gagged, exiled, jailed, or storming the heavens on the wave of revolution. So too the masses, in victory or in defeat, ensuring that no defeat will be permanent. 11
    Serge’s concept of ‘we’ as collective subject flows directly from his spiritual heritage as a child of exiled members of Russia’s unique revolutionary intelligentsia for whom the meaning of life was to understand, to participate, to consciously integrate oneself into the process of history. He also spoke out of a long experience of European worker militancy and a lifelong identification with the international revolutionary movement. He saw himself as one of its ‘bards.’
    As an organic intellectual of the working class, Serge’s ‘Marxism’ was as integral to his vision of his narrator’s epic journey as Dante’s Christianity to his narrator’s road from
Inferno
to
Paradiso.
Serge conceived literature as “a means of expressing to men what most of them live inwardly without being able to express, as a means of communion, a testimony to the vast flow of life through us, whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us.” He