Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Read Free

welcomes the cleansing hurricane of the 1917 revolution in Chernoe—one thousand miles from the capital—and contemplates his lonely fate on the same hilltop where Seraphim had earlier meditated his martyrdom. Seventeen years pass and Chernoe is again populated by deportees, martyrs, and schismatics. Although the foreground of Serge’s novel is occupied by the Left Oppositionists, the heretics of the new Stalinist orthodoxy, the background is crowded with persecuted schismatics—religious sectarians, Old Believers, Zionists—who are also suffering for their faith. In the novel’s climactic scene, Rodion’s break from jail, there is a translucent moment of silent communion between the young Trotskyite and an Old Believer, which epitomizes the theme of eternal heresy and eternal persecution in the tortured Russian land. This epiphany, for which Serge has carefully and lovingly prepared, takes place under streaming stars in a mystical atmosphere of biblical simplicity. It is a Marxist materialist’s homage to spirituality.
    Nature, too, is intimately related to Serge’s theme of suffering and resistance. Although primarily a man of cities—Paris, Barcelona, Moscow, and Petrograd were his places of predilection and the setting of much of his fiction—Serge had a deep awareness of man’s place in the natural order. For him, the dialectic of human history is an outgrowth of the dialectic of nature, and in Midnight in the Century the rhythms of nature are at once the physical setting and the consistent metaphor against which the action develops.
    The Chernoe section of the novel opens with a heartrendingly bittersweet evocation of the return of spring to the frozen steppe. The breakup of the ice on the river, greeted with joy by the villagers after the long, barren winter, is emblematic of the renewal of human hopes. The exiled Trotskyites are also touched by the spectacle. Their clandestine meeting on the riverbank becomes the occasion for a lyrical celebration of the northern spring on the part of the granite-faced Old Bolshevik, Ryzhik, and even the sarcasms of the cynical Elkin fail to dampen his ardor:
    “Ryzhik, you missed your calling. You should be turning out octosyllables at three roubles a line. Why did you have to get mixed up in the Revolution? Today, you would be an official of the Pastoral Poets’ Division of the Union of Soviet Writers. You would be inundating the gazettes with organized, ideologically correct, and profitable lyricism. Pushkin would turn green with envy on his pedestal.”
    “Go to Hell. I would never have seen the amazing flowers of the North. And you see, nothing in the world would make me want to cross them out of my life.”
    The joy of nature’s renewal is more deeply undercut by the irony of the political situation: “Spring . . . means sowing-time. Sowing time means repression.” The logic of events demands that in order to squeeze a grain surplus out of the sullenly resisting, newly collectivized peasantry, Stalin will take a new political tack, necessitating a new purge. The political exiles understand this process as a sign of the weakness of the regime. They have predicted it. The villagers, equally prescient in their resignation, accept it as one more seasonal cataclysm to be endured. Yet such is the power of nature’s spectacle of death and rebirth that neither group can resist the temptation to embrace life and hope. Life is struggle. Life goes on.
    The central action of the novel unfolds in this brief moment between the breakup of the winter ice and the onset of the political freeze that will deprive Serge’s heroes of the semi-freedom of deportation and send them back to prison. During this interval there is time to take stock of their lives, to choose how they will resist the inevitable, to exchange significant messages, to fall in love, and to pass the living flame of revolution from one generation to the next. Thus the seasonal pattern of death and rebirth,