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

We will make one, and in a very different way. I don’t know how, but it will be very different. But first, escape from them . . .
    Rodion’s experiences in the forest are spiritual as well as physical trials, rites of passage that include a symbolic death by drowning and a rebirth. He is rescued by a nameless, solitary wolf hunter who represents the temptation of a life of self-sufficiency in nature but outside of society. This Rodion also rejects. Purified and tested, nameless now like the wolf man and the natural objects that surround him, he enters a nameless town and rejoins the ranks of the proletariat from which he had sprung. Rodion’s escape is, I assume, the muted “note of hope” with which Serge wanted to end his novel.
    Significantly, the edifice on which he gets a job as a construction worker is the new headquarters for the secret police, the only concrete building in a desert of mud and wood. It is Serge’s ironic symbol for the paradox of “socialist construction” under the Stalinist system where the labor of the proletariat can only serve to increase the power of those who oppress it—until such time as the proletariat is ready once again to take destiny into its own hands. Until then, Serge seems to be saying, Rodion’s revolutionary vision will persist like “seeds germinating in the womb” of the Russian soil ready to bear fruit at the next thaw.
    III. MESSAGES
    History does not move in straight lines. It moves in waves. Those waves are revolutions. Serge’s Communist heroes in Midnight in the Century have ridden on the crest of the great revolutionary wave of 1917 to 1923—a height from which they have caught a glimpse of what might be, of humanity’s power to reshape society in its own image. Now, with Hitler and Stalin in the ascendant, they are in the trough, about to be engulfed in the sea of counter-revolutionary reaction. Yet through the wreckage of their lives and hopes they affirm the vision of what they have seen from the crest, the dangerous secret whose exposure their captors fear most—mankind can be free: What happened once can happen again. Others will succeed where we have failed. The next wave (or the one after that) will reach the shore. As Serge puts it in Birth of Our Power , “Nothing is ever lost.”
    This continuity is the central political message of Serge’s novel for today’s readers. Like a shipwrecked explorer who places the log of his voyage in a bottle and consigns it to the waves, Serge epitomized the experience of a whole revolutionary generation in the form of a novel and set it afloat on the troubled seas of history. By 1939 his Russian comrades, the models for the heroes of Midnight in the Century , had all perished and, like Melville’s shipwrecked Ishmael, Serge might well have said with Job’s messenger, “I only am escaped alone to tell thee.”
    Messages are an important theme in the novel. Indeed, its key chapter is entitled “Messages.” In its most dramatic scene, Varvara furiously tears apart a beautifully bound book she has received in the mail and removes from its binding sheets of ultrathin paper containing the “theses” of her Oppositionist comrades in the prison of Verkneuralsk concerning the “state-capitalist” nature of the Stalinist regime, which Trotsky still considered a “deformed workers state.” Serge was referring here to an authentic document, which was discovered and analyzed by the Moscow historian Alexei Gusev when the GPU archives were opened to scholars in the 1990s. Another “message,” this one from the exiled Trotsky, reaches the deportees by an even more circuitous route. An apolitical technocratic Soviet economist on a mission to Paris comes across a copy of The Bulletin of the Left Opposition and reads it before carefully tearing it up and flushing it down the toilet. Arrested later in a purge of economists, he passes Trotsky’s ideas on to the Oppositionists in the prison who pass it on to the