Men in Prison Read Free

compared Serge’s classic prison novel to Dostoyevsky’s
House of the Dead,
Koestler’s
Spanish Testament,
Genet’s
Miracle of the Rose,
and Solzhenitsyn’s
One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.
Nonetheless, his notoriety as a revolutionary has always overshadowed his achievements as a writer. We will return to the literary qualities of
Men in Prison,
but first let us look at the remarkable life of the man behind the novel.
    The Life of a Revolutionary Maverick
    The briefest chronological summary of Serge’s career as a rebel reads like a roll call of the radical movements and revolutionary uprisings of the first half of the twentieth century. 1 Born Victor Lvovitch Kibalchich in 1890 in Brussels to an unmarried couple of penniless Russian revolutionary refugee students, Serge was by birth a stateless exile and remained a lifelong internationalist. From his parents he inherited the critical spirit of the radical Russian
intelligentsia
and the heroic ideals of the
Narodniki
—the Party of the People’s Will who executed Czar Alexander II in 1881. By his mid-teens, Victor was already an activist, signing his radical articles
Le Rétif
(Maverick). Alone in the world afterhis parents’ breakup, he bonded with his crew of teenage comrades. They were “closer than brothers,” idealistic, overworked apprentices, who devoted their rare free time to reading dangerous books and hardening their bodies through all-night hikes. They all met tragic ends.
    Raymond Callemin, a.k.a. ‘Science,’ with his baby-face, myopic squint, and sarcastic tongue, was Victor’s oldest friend—and rival. [See jacket cover, photo B4 (bottom row, fourth from left)]. On the steps of the guillotine, Callemin taunted reporters with a sarcastic: “A beautiful sight, eh, to watch a man die!” Tough Edouard Carouy (M1, middle row #1, with beard and moustache), built like a circus strongman, newly awakened to reading and ‘ideas.’ Sentenced to Devil’s Island for life, Carouy took poison in prison. Serious Jean de Boë, a.k.a. ‘Printer’ (photo B5), was the organizer of their Brussels Revolutionary Group. Sent to Devil’s Island for life, he managed to escape, after several attempts. 2
    Together, these serious young rebels evolved from the Brussels Socialist Young Guard, through anarchist ‘communes’ (where they learned printing and put on their own four-page
Rebel!),
to anarchism, which, unlike reformist socialism, demanded deeds not just words. By 1909, their strident militancy had provoked repression in Brussels, and one by one they drifted to Paris, to anarcho-individualist circles where ‘illegalism’ (individual expropriation) was
à la mode.
There the group was swelled by new comrades: handsome, violent Octave Garnier (photo M2); pale, tubercular André Soudy (B2), a.k.a. ‘Out-of-Luck,’ who on the morning he was guillotined didn’t even get his ‘last request,’ coffee and a croissant (the cafés were still closed); Victor’s red-headed Left Bank soul-brother René Valet, a.k.a. ‘Carrot-Top’ (M3) a square-jawed ‘young Siegfried’ who loved poetry and shot himself with his last bullet after a twelve-hour gun battle with the police; and sentimental Eugene Dièudonné (T1), condemned to death although known to be innocent.
    In Paris, in the Summer of 1911, Victor and his lover Rirette Maitrejean had been uneasily sharing the suburban print shop-commune of the anarcho-individualist weekly
anarchie
with Victor’s Brussels homeboys, who had been more-or-less living off small ‘expropriations’ (thefts) and needed to disappear. The boys soon teamed up with an anarchist chauffeur—an older desperado from Lyon named Jules Bonnot (T2)—and embarked on a series of bloody holdups that literally paralyzed Paris for half a year. They have gone down in French judicial history as the ‘Tragic Bandits of Anarchy’—the subject of dozens of books, radio and TV dramas, graphic novels, and a popular film with Jacques Brel.