Their guiding ethos is perhaps best captured by a title Serge used for a chapter of his memoirs: “World With No Escape Possible.” His novels repeatedly trace the collapse of hopes and societies, from the disabused vision of revolutionary Russia in Conquered City (1932) to the rise of Stalinism in The Case of Comrade Tulayev (published posthumously in 1948).
Though Memoirs of a Revolutionary, an account of his life from his beginnings in Belgium to his final home in Mexico City, has become his best-known book, it was his fiction that Serge valued most highly. There is no more striking proof of his intellectual stature than Susan Sontag’s laudatory 2004 essay “Unextinguished,” which lamented Serge’s “obscurity” while celebrating him as “one of the most compelling of twentieth-century ethical and literary heroes.” Once all but forgotten even in the French-speaking world outside of small radical circles, Serge is now an international icon of independent, anti-Stalinist leftism.
Of these, five have been translated from the French by the Marxist scholar and activist Richard Greeman, who-in addition to translating his novels and Notebooks (the latter in collaboration with the author of these lines)-has spent more than 50 years garnering widespread recognition for Serge. With the arrival of Last Times, we now have full English versions of all seven novels by the great Belgian-born writer and revolutionary Victor Serge.
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