Unforgiving Years Read Free

fight.”[ 13 ] Another reason for Serge’s neglect is his nationality, or lack thereof. As a stateless Russian who wrote in French, he apparently fell through the cracks between academic departments organized around national notions of “French” or “Russian” literature. As a result, there are as yet no Ph.D.s on Serge in any French university, nor will you find “Serge, Victor” listed in French biographical dictionaries and literary manuals.[ 14 ]
    Serge wrote in French, but his work is best situated in the Russian intelligentsia traditions of his expatriate parents. He inherited his father’s scientific culture (physics, geology, sociology) while his literary culture came from his mother, who taught him to read in cheap editions of Shakespeare, Hugo, Dostoyevsky, and the Russian social realist Korolenko. His mother’s family was apparently connected with Maxim Gorky.[ 15 ] By his concept of the writer’s mission, Serge saw himself “in the line of the Russian writers.”[ 16 ] And although he borrowed freely from cosmopolitan influences like Joyce, Dos Passos, and the French unanimists, Serge developed as a writer within the Soviet literary “renaissance” of the relatively liberated period of the free-market New Economic Policy (1921–1928). Indeed, during the 1920s, Serge was the principal transmission belt between the literary worlds of Soviet Russia and France. Through his translations and regular articles on Soviet culture in Henri Barbusse’s
Clarté
he introduced French readers to the postrevolutionary poetry of Alexander Blok, Andrei Biely, Sergei Esenin, Osip Mandelstam, Boris Pasternak, and Vladimir Mayakovsky, as well as to fiction writers like Alexis Tolstoy, Babel, Zamiatine, Lebidinsky, Gladkov, Ivanov, Fedin, and Boris Pilniak — his colleagues in the Soviet Writers Union.[ 17 ]
    By the mid-1930s, many of Serge’s colleagues had been reduced to silence (suicide, censorship, the camps). “No PEN-club” wrote Serge in exile, “even those that held banquets for them, asked the least question about their cases. No literary review, to my knowledge, commented on their mysterious end.” Only Serge — because he wrote in French and was saved from the Gulag by his reputation in France — managed to survive. Only Serge had the freedom to further develop the revolutionary innovations of Soviet literature and to submit the world of Stalinism to the critical lens of fiction in novels like
Midnight in the Century
,
The Case of Comrade Tulayev
, and
Unforgiving Years.
As one Russian scholar put it: “Although written in French, Serge’s novels are perhaps the nearest we have to what Soviet literature of the 30s might have been…”[ 18 ]
    Thus it was that
Unforgiving Years
remained unread for a quarter of a century. It was first published in Paris in 1971 by François Maspero, who was also bringing out many of Serge’s political books as the anti-Stalinist New Left developed in the 1960s. Praised by the critics at the time —
Le Monde
ran “The Secret Agent” as a serial and hailed the novel as Serge’s “political and literary testament”[ 19 ] — now, sixty years after it was written, it is appearing for the first time both in Russian and in English translation.
“A RATHER TERRIFYING NOVEL …”
    Serge began writing
Unforgiving Years
(draft title
Sands, Snows, Fire
) in Mexico in September of 1945. In January 1946 he announced his subject in a letter to Daniel Guérin in newly liberated France: “in progress: a rather terrifying novel on the problems of consciousness in wartime which is giving me actual headaches.” And indeed,
Unforgiving Years
is the most pessimistic, the most inward, and the most contemporary of Serge’s novels. His 1946 characters are asking twenty-first-century questions: How to live if history no longer has a meaning? What remains of human consciousness if society has indeed entered a regressive era of ideological repression and technological