Midnight in the Century (NYRB Classics) Read Free Page A

destruction and continuity is intimately related to the theme of the generations, of the human forces who will carry on the struggle against oppression from one generation to the next.
    Serge the Marxist believed that the Russian Revolution was not dead but only sleeping. He felt that as industry developed and Russia emerged from backwardness, the socialized system of production would inevitably come into contradiction with the oppressive system of bureaucratic privilege and control. A new proletariat, self-confident and schooled in this new industry, would then pick up the struggle where the vanquished vanguard of the 1920s and ’30s had gone down in defeat. This, however, might take generations (especially if war intervened, which it did) and until then the germ of revolutionary thought would be kept alive by minorities. Serge found a metaphoric expression for this vision in the related natural images of the spring thaw and of seeds germinating beneath the soil and in the traditional Russian theme of “fathers” and “sons.” A concrete, historically grounded political perspective thus develops as a structuring element in the novel.
    The final section of Midnight , significantly entitled “The Beginning,” focuses on the character of the youngest of the political exiles, Rodion, a semi-educated, semi-alcoholic worker whose brain is befuddled by half-understood quotes from Hegel and whose spirit is obsessed with the problem of fate. As for so many before him, jail and exile have been the “universities” in which the revolutionary traditions of the “fathers” have been passed down to this rather unpromising “son.” It is Rodion who represents the new generation that will carry on the revolutionary idea and assure the continuity between the great but doomed generation of Old Bolsheviks and the unknown future.
    Yet, to do this, he must break with a central element in that tradition: the idea of the Party as the incarnation of the proletarian vanguard. He alone dares to break the tie of Party unity that binds the older Trotskyite dissidents to their Stalinist persecutors, their refusal to appeal to the masses outside the Party, to even imagine creating a “second party.” “Listen to me,” he tells the comrades: “It’s no longer true: something has been lost forever. Lenin will never rise again in his mausoleum. Our only brothers are the working people who no longer have either rights or bread. They’re the ones we must talk to. It is with them that we must remake the Revolution and first of all a completely different Party . . .”
    As he wanders the night streets of Chernoe, troubled and alone, his intuition becomes a certainty. The sight of GPU headquarters, lights blazing into the night, inspires him with a vision of that new revolution as an inevitable spring tide: “Work! Work night and day, you’ll still be swept away . . . The ice breaks up after the long winter, the spring floods sweep it away . . . It will be beautiful when they overflow . . . Your files, your papers, all your dirty little typewritten verdicts, and your prisons, all of them, the old wooden barracks, sealed with barbed wire, the modern American-style concrete buildings, all of that will be blown sky high . . .”
    Rodion’s escape into the starry night across the silent forest and the icy river is a symbolic flight into nature as well as a return to life, to the common destiny of the masses, who are part of nature and part of history. If Stalinist totalitarianism represents the negation of the revolution, then the masses represent what Hegel called “the negation of the negation.” Rodion, the least educated of the novel’s heroes, is also the most philosophical:
    “History,” said Hegel . . . “History is something we make, we are historical, too, like all the poor devils . . .” There is no certainty that this machine will stop and crumble one day all by itself. It must be destroyed. Another revolution.