FICTION: EILEEN BATTERSBYreviews Conquered CityBy Victor Serge, translated by Robert Greeman New York Review Books Classics, 198pp, £8.99
GEORGE ORWELL tried to be one in Spain, John Reed became one in Russia, yet few writers have understood the role of witness as well as Victor Serge (1890-1947), author of Memoirs of a Revolutionary.He was born political: his parents were anti-tsarist exiles living in Brussels. Their internationalist son first went to Russia at the age of 21, yet Serge – born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich – remains a Russian writer, a natural outsider who was both detached and engaged. He had experienced socialism at work in Spain and France, was imprisoned and exiled. He finally arrived in Russia in 1919, after spending a year in a French concentration camp. He joined the Bolsheviks. He knew how revolutionaries responded; he was one of them. He saw their idealism and noted their confusion. Always outspoken, he openly detested Stalin and was expelled from the party.
Conquered City,first published in France in 1932, is an unfolding series of dramatic episodes, close-up shots. It is cinematic, atmospheric and vivid. You feel you are watching characters that are real as life. This is a novel that reads as fact because it is based so closely on the gestures he saw, the words he heard. Most telling of all is the balance between certainty and doubt. Throughout the narrative the concept of change is analysed. Objectives are dwarfed by realities: "We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, and 'iron' discipline – yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen moulds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength – and we are the bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is 'fraternity and death' in reality."
The liberators beat up their fellow citizens. And there are meetings, many meetings in which high-blown ideas and rhetoric are aired. But what does it mean? Is there such a thing as democratic solidarity? “Osipov voted mechanically with the others, for at every vote unanimity was re-established. We’ve come to that, he thought. The Great Works against us! Hemmed in by hunger, picking up all the old weapons of power . . . What can we promise these workers if they no longer want to die for the Revolution?”
As have so many Russian writers before him, Serge summons the presiding spirit of St Petersburg. The city shimmers under its habitual covering of ice and snow. “This white, silent, weightless shroud stretched out to infinity in time and space. By three in the afternoon it was already necessary to light the lamps. Evening darkened the snow with hues of ash, deep blue, and the stubborn grey of old stones. Night took over, inexorable and calm: unreal. In the darkness the delta reverted to its geographical configurations.” Peter the Great has become Peter I. The past is no longer sent to provide the key to the present; the present is the answer, or so the new order believes.
Translated from the French, Serge’s prose is elegant and precise; the chapters are self-contained, yet many of the characters reappear. There is also an almost theatrical element, a Greek chorus of emerging awareness. Serge moves between the lyrical and the logical. For all the eerie dignity there is also the ordinary: “Get rid of those ideas, comrade. They’ve been beaten into us with billy clubs, I mean with defeats. No beautiful suicides, above all! They were invented by literary folk, who don’t commit suicide either beautifully or any other way. A philosophy of the whipped. No more of that.”
Serge examines the two contrasting terrors that tore Russia asunder, that of the White and, particularly, that of the Red. Great palaces become slums inhabited by terrorised people who live in fear of their former neighbours. The novel is about poverty on all levels, from lack of bread to lack of hope. The new progress is almost comical in its inefficiency: “The factory? It takes us a week to produce what we produced in a day last year. I had to reintroduce the practice of searching the workers on the way out: they steal everything.” Xenia, a young woman revolutionary who may be the heroine, if there is one, imagines what it will be like when everything is finished: “ . . . perhaps a similar cloud will pass through a similar sky at this very spot . . . I see nothing of that future. I am like a person emerging from a cave.”
It is dense with ideas, with thoughts and with Serge's experience. In ways this remarkable novel, cool, sophisticated, intelligent and reasoned, is the companion to Andrei Bely's classic Petersburg(1916). Yet whereas the earlier novel drew on the dazzling 19th-century Russian comic tradition, Serge writes with measured lamentation. All the familiar landmarks are there: the Bronze Horseman, the literary tradition, the shadow of Dostoevsky, the worker pulled in too many directions, the hopes and aspirations. Serge looks to them but also beyond. Wild dreams invariably falter: "Not a single chimney was smoking. The city was thus dying. And, like shipwrecked men on a raft devouring each other, we were about to fight among ourselves, workers against workers, revolutionaries against revolutionaries." It is the bleak lucidity, the recognition of how men fail and fail again that makes this such a powerful testament.
Victor Serge: the Russian outsider who came from a distance to know his country – came to know her and her story and, most importantly, her tragedy – better than most. Read this novel: it teaches so much about history, how it is made and unmade; how humans look to it for answers only to reject them.
Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times
