Storm Serge

Victor Serge was the pseudonym of a Belgian-Russian writer and militant (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, 1890–1947) whose career spanned three continents and whose literary legacy sheds much light on the world of Marxist politics from 1918 to the end of the Second World War. Writing in French, he is best known for his masterly Memoirs of a Revolutionary (first published 1963), but thanks to his tireless translator Richard Greeman all of his major novels (The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Conquered City, and Midnight in the Century) are available from New York Review Books. In his newly published Notebooks, we witness the raw material that was eventually recycled into fiction, but also are treated to a good deal of information on the world of revolutionary or near-revolutionary intellectuals in...