Notes from an Exiled Revolutionary
The writer and revolutionary Victor Serge was one of the few prominent opponents of Stalin to escape the despot’s wrath. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Terror, Serge fled the Soviet Union for France. When the Nazis took Paris in 1940, he fled to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days in an exile rife with poverty and grief. In a sense, his notebooks became his new home, a place where he felt comfortable contemplating everything from World War II to Russian literature, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the beauty of an erupting volcano. A new volume from New York Review Books Classics, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, presents for the first time in English Serge’s notebooks in their entirety. Below, in a series of entries from 1944, Serge marvels at the brilliance of his daughter’s art critiques, mourns his friends Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Max Jacob, and muses on the darkness of a world at war.
Victor Serge. Photo: Maurice-Louis Branger. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.
August 9, 1944
Read today:
A dispatch from Istanbul saying that a Turkish ship transporting 296 Jewish refugees was sunk on the Black Sea; a half-dozen people were saved.
Another dispatch on the water shortage and famine in Florence, an open city around which fighting is going on.
Notes on London’s nightmare, bombed by rocket missiles. It’s an absurd massacre and people have become accustomed to living under it.
An article by Léon Dennen on the extermination of Hungary’s Jews—hundreds of thousands [extermination cars for Jews] that function like efficient offices.
