What do you think?
Rate this book
Unforgiving Years
Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge’s final work, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.
The novel is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.
A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.
The novel is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.
A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.
341 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1971
About the author
Victor Serge
117 books202 followersVictor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) was born in exile in 1890 and died in exile in 1947. He is better known as Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919, and later worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the ideals of socialism until his death.
After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'
After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews
April 1, 2020
An elegant literary thriller. It’s 1937 and D is an operative in the Soviet security services who, along with Nadine, his lover and fellow agent, is stationed in Paris. D, who poses as an antiques dealer, is appalled by the slaughter of his friends during Stalin’s show trials (see Robert Conquest's The Great Terror). He sends his letter of resignation prematurely to his superior, and then he and Nadine must run. In a drab hotel on Paris’s outskirts they keep Brownings on the bedside tables covered with silk handkerchiefs, ready for use. The nosy concierge, Gobfin, is an effete stool pigeon right out of Simenon who scares the living piss out of our heroes, who continue to run. There can be little question that Serge’s model for the first section--entitled “The Secret Agent”--is Conrad's The Secret Agent. There are touches of Simenon’s influence, too.
The second part, “The Flame Beneath the Snow,” focuses on the story of Daria, another of D’s Paris operatives. She’s just back from bleakest Kazakstan where she has been made to pay for her blameless association with D by years of work with impoverished Muslims. It’s 1943-44. We join Daria in the dead of winter descending into besieged Leningrad aboard a flak-riddled transport plane. Daria strikes us at first as a hypocrite, mouthing the absurd Soviet platitudes. In fact, although I always try to maintain objectivity, I’m afraid I weakened here and began to hate her a little. That’s how good the writing is. She composes journals so heavily self-censored that they’re little more than descriptions of the rain. For no names, no specifics about her many clandestine missions can ever be set to paper. But she’s a different person in private. After D and Paris her heart is no longer in the revolution. Once in Leningrad (one million Red Army soldiers and 643,000 civilians killed) she sleeps — how can she not! — with the athletically slim young Klimentii, a decorated soldier. Daria is assigned a desk job under Captain Potapov, whose long Dostoyevskian speech is a wonder of tortuous ratiocination.
A lovely taste of the 19th century Russian novel here, I thought. Of course, Hitler’s plan all along was to destroy Leningrad, to leave no inhabitant alive for the very reason Potapov cites. Then Daria is assigned to work with six soldiers ordered to crawl across the frozen Neva, behind enemy lines, and capture one or more Germans for questioning.
Part three — “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs” — is set in early April 1945 in flattened Berlin. The Allies are perhaps a week away from occupying the city. We begin in an air-raid shelter. Here is Brigitte, reduced to a tragic existence on the edge of madness, and Minus Two, a street-wise, prosthesis-adorned veteran. There are descriptions of Berlin streetscapes here that will curl your hair, or straighten it, depending. The overwhelming sense of loss, of destitution I can only hint at. This is the section of insanity. Many buildings have fallen on civilians which now reek of their contents. Every night the streets are destroyed but in the morning women and youngsters come out with their crude brooms to sweep up a semblance of the street grid. When the writing dips into the thoughts of Brigitte we are adrift, unmoored, grasping at figments.
Brigitte may make love to a Wehrmacht soldier, Günther, who brings her the surviving bits of her fiancé’s letters. It’s hard to know, since by this point everything has become so dreamlike. Minus Two combs the lethal streets at night — amid groups of armed rouges, official and otherwise — to see what he can scrounge, for much can be traded on the black market for food. Then the section shifts to a battlefield surgery behind the ever contracting German lines. Erna Laub’s career as a nurse is itemized by way of a dossier review. She’s not very good at what she does. In fact, she’s terrible at it.
In part four, "Journey's End," we return to Daria, now in flight. She is not entirely sure she is not followed. Much of what she goes through here smacks of PTSD. Daria takes ship, moves through American heartland, describing an arc from Brooklyn to the mid-west and south to Mexico. (Where Serge himself made his final home, where he wrote this novel and Comrade Tulayev as well as his revolutionary memoirs, knowing they would not be published in his lifetime. That, my friends, is commitment.) Daria joins D and Nadine hidden away in a backwater under aliases. There’s an overwrought, turgid quality to the writing in thIs part. Meaning often eluded me. I don’t blame the translator since he’s just given us 250 beautiful pages. I think the abstraction probably exists in the original French (I’d be delighted to hear from other GR friends with an opinion). Either Serge did not have time to revise this last section as much as he wanted to do, or he felt this was appropriate language for Daria’s state of mind. Needless to say, I believe it was the former. Even with this stylistic quibble, however, I give the novel five stars and ardently recommended it. (PS Unforgiving Years would make a fantastic movie.)
The second part, “The Flame Beneath the Snow,” focuses on the story of Daria, another of D’s Paris operatives. She’s just back from bleakest Kazakstan where she has been made to pay for her blameless association with D by years of work with impoverished Muslims. It’s 1943-44. We join Daria in the dead of winter descending into besieged Leningrad aboard a flak-riddled transport plane. Daria strikes us at first as a hypocrite, mouthing the absurd Soviet platitudes. In fact, although I always try to maintain objectivity, I’m afraid I weakened here and began to hate her a little. That’s how good the writing is. She composes journals so heavily self-censored that they’re little more than descriptions of the rain. For no names, no specifics about her many clandestine missions can ever be set to paper. But she’s a different person in private. After D and Paris her heart is no longer in the revolution. Once in Leningrad (one million Red Army soldiers and 643,000 civilians killed) she sleeps — how can she not! — with the athletically slim young Klimentii, a decorated soldier. Daria is assigned a desk job under Captain Potapov, whose long Dostoyevskian speech is a wonder of tortuous ratiocination.
So we find ourselves at a disadvantage, half beaten, yet doubly invincible since we cannot be beaten further without succumbing, and it is absolutely impossible for us to succumb.... ❡My guess is that the enemy deliberately put off the conquest of this position [Leningrad], when he could quite easily have taken it. He wanted to choose his moment, ensure his dominance over a hinterland, seize a great and serviceable port and not an isolated city, requiring to be fed, however little... It was a sensible decision but that moment has passed, never to return. In strategy as in life, lost opportunities are lost for good. The single factor of action with an overwhelming probability of disobedience is time, which is an admirable factor of inaction... (p. 132)
A lovely taste of the 19th century Russian novel here, I thought. Of course, Hitler’s plan all along was to destroy Leningrad, to leave no inhabitant alive for the very reason Potapov cites. Then Daria is assigned to work with six soldiers ordered to crawl across the frozen Neva, behind enemy lines, and capture one or more Germans for questioning.
Part three — “Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs” — is set in early April 1945 in flattened Berlin. The Allies are perhaps a week away from occupying the city. We begin in an air-raid shelter. Here is Brigitte, reduced to a tragic existence on the edge of madness, and Minus Two, a street-wise, prosthesis-adorned veteran. There are descriptions of Berlin streetscapes here that will curl your hair, or straighten it, depending. The overwhelming sense of loss, of destitution I can only hint at. This is the section of insanity. Many buildings have fallen on civilians which now reek of their contents. Every night the streets are destroyed but in the morning women and youngsters come out with their crude brooms to sweep up a semblance of the street grid. When the writing dips into the thoughts of Brigitte we are adrift, unmoored, grasping at figments.
Brigitte’s eyes opened again, her hands sank to rest on her knees, her shoulders drooped forward as though with lassitude. A stealthy tremor was starting up at the base of her being, like the buzzing of malevolent insects in the gloom, like the approach of a solitary bomber in the sky. It was only the approach of the nameless terror, senseless, bottomless, lightless, lifeless and deathless, unspeakable, unendurable, ungraspable, imponderable; a wave rising from the very depths of darkness... Brigitte was tearing something to pieces, trying to rip the smallest shreds between sore fingers until her nails were tearing at one another. What more to destroy, how to sleep, where to disappear? She began reeling about the narrow room in short, crazed lunges. (p. 206)
Brigitte may make love to a Wehrmacht soldier, Günther, who brings her the surviving bits of her fiancé’s letters. It’s hard to know, since by this point everything has become so dreamlike. Minus Two combs the lethal streets at night — amid groups of armed rouges, official and otherwise — to see what he can scrounge, for much can be traded on the black market for food. Then the section shifts to a battlefield surgery behind the ever contracting German lines. Erna Laub’s career as a nurse is itemized by way of a dossier review. She’s not very good at what she does. In fact, she’s terrible at it.
In part four, "Journey's End," we return to Daria, now in flight. She is not entirely sure she is not followed. Much of what she goes through here smacks of PTSD. Daria takes ship, moves through American heartland, describing an arc from Brooklyn to the mid-west and south to Mexico. (Where Serge himself made his final home, where he wrote this novel and Comrade Tulayev as well as his revolutionary memoirs, knowing they would not be published in his lifetime. That, my friends, is commitment.) Daria joins D and Nadine hidden away in a backwater under aliases. There’s an overwrought, turgid quality to the writing in thIs part. Meaning often eluded me. I don’t blame the translator since he’s just given us 250 beautiful pages. I think the abstraction probably exists in the original French (I’d be delighted to hear from other GR friends with an opinion). Either Serge did not have time to revise this last section as much as he wanted to do, or he felt this was appropriate language for Daria’s state of mind. Needless to say, I believe it was the former. Even with this stylistic quibble, however, I give the novel five stars and ardently recommended it. (PS Unforgiving Years would make a fantastic movie.)
August 28, 2019
Αστεράκια: 5* κείμενο
Αστεράκια: 3* λογοτεχνική δυσκολία
Το είναι του βιβλίου: Καμιά φαντασία, οσοδήποτε τρελή ή ποτισμένη με οινόπνευμα, δε θα μπορούσε να συλλάβει τον πλούτο των αρχιτεκτονικών εφέ που ανακαλύπτει κανείς στις βομβαρδισμένες πόλεις. Τα παιδιά που μεγαλώνουν σε τέτοιες πόλεις ίσως να δημιουργήσουν, όταν ωριμάσουν μέσα τους αυτές οι εικόνες, μια καινούργια τέχνη, που δε θα είναι ούτε ρεαλιστική ούτε σουρεαλιστική, γιατί η καταστροφή καλλιεργεί μια ιδιαίτερη πραγματικότητα που κλίνει προς το μη πραγματικό: η κίβδηλη πραγματικότητα του πολιτισμού επιστρέφει στις πρώτες της αρχές, στο βίαιο θάνατο, τη διάλυση των όντων και των έργων, την επίμονη δράση μιας ζωικής δύναμης ελεύθερης από κάθε δικαιολόγηση… Ζωγραφικές απεικονίσεις επιμέρους ψυχολογικών τρόμων θα φάνταζαν εδώ εντελώς γελοίες. Κοίτα να εκφράσεις τον Μεγάλο Αυθεντικό Τρόμο, αλλιώς πάρε δρόμο
Η αξία του κειμένου κοινωνικά, πολιτιστικά, ανθρωπιστικά είναι απόλυτη, διαυγής, ρεαλιστική, φιλοσοφημένη. Γι’ αυτήν θα μιλήσω παρακάτω. Τα αστεράκια ανταποκρίνονται μόνο στον τεράστιο βαθμό δυσκολίας του κειμένου, λογοτεχνικά. Επίσης, καλό είναι αυτό το βιβλίο να προηγηθεί της Υπόθεσης Τουλάγεφ. Διότι το πρώτο μέρος αυτού του βιβλίου, είναι το κυρίως θέμα, που αναπτύσσεται στην Υπόθεση Τουλάγεφ, πράγμα που το καθιστά αφόρητα δύσκολο, να το προσπεράσει κάποιος που έχει διαβάσει πρόσφατα την Υπόθεση Τουλάγεφ.
Ο συγγραφέας πραγματοποιεί έναν πολύ περίτεχνο άθλο. Οπουδήποτε αναφέρεται σε Ρώσους, το κείμενο κινείται στα πλαίσια της Λογικής, με ολοκληρωτική σχεδόν, έλλειψη συναισθηματικού υποβάθρου. Στο δεύτερο μέρος, που ‘’εισβάλει’’ σε μια γερμανική πόλη, αποφεύγει εντελώς ( σχεδόν ) τη χρήση της Λογικής και χρησιμοποιεί κυρίως συναισθηματικά πρίσματα. Αυτά, για όποιον έχει γενικές γνώσεις γύρω απ’ την Ιδεοκρατία και τη Λογική, αποτελούν άθλο. Επίσης, η χρήση τους εμπεριέχει σαρκασμό και υπαινιγμούς. Παραπέμπω για περισσότερα, στην εξαιρετική μελέτη που βρίσκεται στον Επαναστατημένο Άνθρωπο, σχετικά με την τάση των Γερμανών να ερεθίζουν τον εαυτό τους, καθώς και στην ίδια τη Νεώτερη Φιλοσοφία, που αρχής γενομένης απ’ τον Καντ, κάνει τα πρώτα βήματα στον τομέα της Λογικής ( με σύγχρονους όρους που χρησιμοποιούνται εδώ και όχι ιστορικά ). Μαζί όμως, μας θυμίζει σε ορισμένα σημεία μια μερίδα Γερμανών, που φαίνεται πως έχουμε αγνοήσει παντελώς: εγώ θα αποφύγω τη στοχοποίηση του Νίτσε, που άλλωστε δεν ευθύνεται ο ίδιος για την εκμετάλλευση και παρερμήνευση των κειμένων του, όπως αυτή έγινε, μετά την κατάρρευση του, απ’ τον φασίστα, άντρα, της αδερφής του που είχε τα δικαιώματα. Αντ’ αυτού και αδιαφορώ ειλικρινά, για τη γνώμη του κοινού για το Χέγκελ, θα τον θέσω σε θέση εφαλτηρίου, τόσο για τη Λογική, όσο και πολύ περισσότερο για Τον Καλύτερο Δυνατό Κόσμο. Για περισσότερα, σε όποιον δεν εντυπωσιάζεται από μεγάλα ονόματα, παραπέμπω στο Βολταίρο και ίσως ορισμένως και στο Φίχτε. Ας γυρίσω όμως, σε αυτό που έγραφα: η Γερμανία είναι η χώρα που έβγαλε το Χέγκελ, έβγαλε το Στίρνερ, έβγαλε όμως και το Μαρξ. Ανάμεσα σε αυτούς, υπάρχει μια μερίδα Γερμανών, που δε μπορεί να αγνοηθεί και είναι κάτι που το οφείλει οποιοσδήποτε θέλει να λέγεται Άνθρωπος.
Εν συνεχεία και προτού προχωρήσω παρακάτω, να ξεκαθαρίσω ότι δεν είμαι γνώστης Φιλοσοφίας, παρά γενικά και μόνο, με εξαίρεση ίσως τη μεγαλύτερη άνεση που έχω με τον Αριστοτέλη και το Σοπενάουερ. Παραπάνω γράφω τη γνώμη μου και μόνο ως μη ειδικός, ως μαθητής στα χνάρια της Φιλοσοφίας και ό,τι κι αν μάθω, όσο κι αν προχωρήσω, μαθητής θα παραμείνω και όλοι οι Δάσκαλοι που είναι και Φίλοι, είναι προσβάσιμοι απ’ όλους σας, στο χέρι σας είναι. Λέγοντας αυτά, θα ήθελα να κάνω μια ειδική μνεία, που πιθανόν να μην καταλάβει κανένας, πέρα ίσως απ’ όποιον θελήσει να διαβάσει το βιβλίο με καθαρή καρδιά και καθαρό μυαλό: στις σελ 314 – 317, η συνέντευξη του Γερμανού καθηγητή Σιφ, στον Αμερικανό δημοσιογράφο, είναι συγκλονιστική. Συμπεριλαμβανομένου του κομματιού που προηγείται με την Ίλζε και τις πασχαλιές και ορισμένα σημεία του διαλόγου της Έρνα / Νταρία με τον Αλαίν ( το Γάλλο αγωνιστή που όταν εμφανίζεται στη σκηνή, τρέχει μαζί κι έ��α κομμάτι που αναφέρεται στο Παράλογο ), ο οποίος δεν ανταποκρίνεται σε πραγματικό διάλογο, αλλά περισσότερο σε μια Ιδέα εσωτερικού διαλόγου.
Ο John Berger σε κριτική σχετικά με το βιβλίο που υπάρχει στο οπισθόφυλλο, για όποιον την αναζητήσει, επειδή ο Σερζ ήταν αυτός που ήταν και που τελικά μόνο ως μάρτυρας μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί, με ευαγγελικούς όρους για όλη την περίοδο των δυο παγκοσμίων πολέμων, πως δε μπορεί να υπάρξει σύγκριση, ή συγγένεια με άλλους συγγραφείς ή βιβλία. Εγώ θα διαφωνήσω σε αυτό. Σε κάποια σημεία, ένα βιβλίο που παρουσιάζει συγγένειες, είναι η Ιζαμπώ, του Τερζάκη, έργο το οποίο γράφτηκε πριν το ΒΠΠ και ξαναγράφτηκε μετά. Όποιος έχει διαβάσει τις Προσωπικές Σημειώσεις του Άγγελου Τερζάκη, μπορεί να καταλάβει, με ποια σκοπιμότητα ‘’επιτρέπω’’ αυτή την αναφορά. Επίσης, υπάρχουν συγγένειες κυρίως υφολογικές, κάποιες δραματουργικές, καθώς και στο ‘’σπασμένο’’ λόγο, με τον επίσης αγωνιστή, Ανδρέα Φραγκιά και όποιος έχει διαβάσει Φραγκιά, νομίζω πως μπορεί να καταλάβει τι δυσκολίες παρουσιάζει αυτό το κείμενο, καθώς και τη γοητεία που εμπεριέχει. Όμως, θα ήμουν τυφλός το λιγότερο, αν δεν έβλεπα ορισμένες συγγένειες που υπάρχουν στα σημεία που έχουμε νοσοκομειακές σκηνές, με ή χωρίς ανθρώπους, με το 11.000 Βέργες, του Απολιναίρ. Και δεν αναφέρομαι στις επιφανειακές, αλλά σε κάτι άλλο. Το οποίο όμως φοβάμαι ότι απαιτεί, να έχει διαβαστεί το 11.000 Βέργες, από μη υστερικούς ανθρώπους και δεν υπονοώ τίποτα ( το γράφω ξεκάθαρα! ). Επίσης, αποκλείω, ο Σερζ να μην είχε κάποια γνώση του βιβλίου Αιρεσιάρχης και Σία. Άλλωστε, είχε ζήσει και στο Παρίσι. Στο ίδιο σημείο, θα βρούμε όμως, πως με ένα μη ξεκάθαρο τρόπο, υπάρχει μια συνάφεια, με τον Ίμενο, του Καβάφη.
Τέλος, στο τρίτο μέρος, το ταξίδι στο Μεξικό, φόρο τιμής του ίδιου του συγγραφέα στον τόπο που γεννήθηκε από εξόριστους γονείς και στον τόπο που πήγε να πεθάνει, αυτοεξόριστος και κυνηγημένος πια, μας χαρίζει ένα κείμενο που το χαρακτηρίζει η λιτή παραστατικότητα, οι, παρόλ’ αυτά, πλατιές γραμμές, η αψεγάδιαστη περιγραφικότητα κι η συνοχή. Εδώ δεν υπάρχουν αιχμηρές γωνίες, ούτε βέβαια και γλίστρα. Υπάρχει εκείνη η βαθιά οικειότητα που ξεπερνάει τις μορφολογίες των τόπων και των ανθρώπων και εισβάλλει στο κοινό τους κράμα. Υπάρχει αυτή η αίσθηση της αναπόλησης, των παστέλ χρωμάτων που τόσο προτιμούν και τόσο ταιριάζει στις χώρες και στην ιδιοσυγκρασία των Λατίνων γενικά κι η ραθυμιά που δεν αποσιωπά τη φτώχια, αλλά τουλάχιστον της αντιστέκεται με ‘κεινη την τίμια υπερηφάνεια του ανθρώπου, που αγαπά τον τόπο του, χωρίς να έχει ψευδαισθήσεις. Bueno, bueno… Ο Σερζ εδώ είναι ευτυχισμένος. Ο Σερζ εδώ, θα πεθάνει φτωχός, αλλά κατά κάποιο τρόπο γαληνεμένος και αυτό το νιώθω μέσα στο κείμενο, κάτι που φρόντισε να καταλάβω απ’ όλα τα μέρη που υπήρξε περαστικός, αλλά μόλις οριακά αποδεκτός. Ας θυμηθούμε τη βαριά ατμόσφαιρα του ‘’επισκέπτη’’ Γκρην, στο Δύναμις και δόξα, τη ματιά από έξω προς τα μέσα. Αντίθετα, αυτή τώρα είναι μια ματιά, από μέσα προς τα μέσα, με την στοιχειωμένη γνώση, του έξω. Εδώ έχει την άνεση να πάρει ανάσα και να οδηγήσει την ιστορία στο τέλος της, ή έστω σε μια άνω τελεία, αφού η ζωή, οι πόλεμοι, τα ‘’γραφειοκρατικά ξόρκια’’ θα συνεχιστούν, εσαεί.
Ως εδώ ήταν αυτά που ήθελα να αναφέρω γενικά. Παρακάτω, ακολουθεί μια ανάλυση – αξιολόγηση του κειμένου. Δεν είμαι ούτε κριτικός, ούτε τίποτα άλλο, είμαι εγώ. Και είμαι άσχετος. Και μπροστά σε τέτοια κείμενα, είμαι και μ1λάκας.
<< οι πολλές προφυλάξεις, όσο λογικές κι αν φαίνονται, στην πραγματικότητα είναι παιχνίδι ενός μισότρελου >>
<< Συνειδητοποιεί κανείς το βαθμό της διαφθοράς, από τον τρόπο που δέχονται οι άνθρωποι τα χρήματα >>
<< οι μάσκες καμιά φορά διαβάζονται ευκολότερα απ’ ότι τα πρόσωπα >>
<< Το να ζεις μόνο για τον εαυτό σου είναι άγονο – σαν τον αυνανισμό >>
Αυτό που καθιστά εξαιρετικά δύσκολο ετούτο το βιβλίο, είναι πως το ‘’χωρίς έλεος’’ του τίτλου, μεταφέρεται συμβολικά με την κατάργηση της δομής. Οι σκέψεις, πράξεις των χαρακτήρων, ανακατεύονται με τις σκέψεις του συγγραφέα, με την αφήγηση κι όμως κάθετί διακρίνεται που αρχίζει, και, που τελειώνει κι αυτό είναι δύσκολο και εύκολο. Βαρύ και πυκνό. Καμιά ισορροπία, κανένα κενό, ή παύση. Σε κάνει να συνειδητοποιήσεις 50 χρόνια μετά, οδυνηρές αλήθειες: προφανώς γνωρίζεις ότι η σταλινική τρομοκρατία ήταν ένα κύμα, που κανένα φράγμα δε μπόρεσε να συγκρατήσει. Δεν αναχαιτίστηκε καν απ’ το ΒΠΠ. Κι εδώ βρίσκεται η ουσία. Βρισκόμαστε μέσα στην καρδιά του πολέμου κι οι εφιαλτικοί αυτοί ηγέτες, συνυπάρχουν, είναι σα να δρουν ομόφωνα κι αντίρροπα. Οι λέξεις δε σου λένε τίποτα και το καταλαβαίνω. Κι εγώ, θεωρητικά, καταλάβαινα πως οι περίοδοι αυτοί, ήταν εφαπτόμενες. Αλλά εδώ μιλάμε για ένα λαό που θα μπορούσε να σώσει την ανθρωπότητα απ’ τους ναζί, που και πάλι αντιστάθηκε με μεγάλη επιτυχία, κι, όμως μαζί, αναλωνόταν σε ένα εσωτερικό πόλεμο, δίχως κανένα έλεος. Υπήρξαν στιγμές που αισθανόμουν πάρα πολύ έντονο, πως αυτό το βιβλίο είναι σαν τέταρτος, αθέατος τόμος των Υπνοβατών. Το μετά ρεαλισμού.
<< - Το ασυγχώρητο λάθος μας ήταν ότι νομίσαμε πως αυτό που λέμε ψυχή – εγώ το λέω συνείδηση – δεν είναι παρά μια προβολή του παλιού ξεπερασμένου εγωισμού! Αν ζω ακόμα είναι επειδή κατάλαβα πως παρερμηνεύσαμε το μεγαλείο της συνείδησης. Δε χρειάζεται να μου πεις τίποτα για τις διεστραμμένες ή τις σάπιες ή τις ασπόνδυλες συνειδήσεις, τις τυφλές συνειδήσεις, τις μισότυφλες, τις κωματώδεις, τις διακοπτόμενες, τις έντρομες! Κι ούτε να μου πεις για τα εξαρτημένα αντανακλαστικά, τις εκκρίσεις των αδένων και τις ψυχαναλυτικές νευρώσεις: τα ξέρω πολύ καλά τα τέρατα που πηγαινοέρχονται μες στην αρχέγονη λάσπη, βαθιά μέσα μου, βαθιά μέσα σου. Όμως παρόλ’ αυτά, υπάρχει ένα πεισματάρικο αμυδρό φως, ένα φως αδιάφθορο, που μπορεί να διαπεράσει το γρανίτη, τους τοίχους των φυλακών και τις ταφόπλακες, ένα απρόσωπο αμυδρό φως που καίει μέσα μας, φωτίζει, κρίνει, αρνείται και άτεγκτα καταδικάζει. Δεν είναι ιδιοκτησία κανενός και καμιά μηχανή δε μπορεί να το μετρήσει. Καμιά φορά τρεμοσβήνει γιατί νιώθει μόνο του – τι κτήνη που ήμασταν, και τ’ αφήσαμε να πεθάνει μες στη μοναξιά του!
- Αυτό το αμυδρό φως που λες υπάρχει εδώ και πολλά χρόνια στη λογοτεχνία. Ο Τολστόι λέει: ‘’Το φως που φέγγει μες στα σκοτάδια’’…
- Λάθος Ντάσια. Πριν από τον Τολστόι το είπε ο απόστολος Ιωάννης και σίγουρα δεν ήταν ο πρώτος… Εκτροχιάζομαι προς τη μεταφυσική και το μυστικισμό ε; Έλα πες το, τα μάτια σου με κοροϊδεύουν… Κάναμε ένα θανάσιμο λάθος, υλικά θανάσιμο εννοώ, ένα λάθος που είχε σαν αποτέλεσμα αμέτρητα κεφάλια πυροβολημένα από το δήμιο, ξεχάσαμε πως μόνο αυτή η μορφή συνείδησης πετυχαίνει τη συμφιλίωση του ανθρώπου με τον εαυτό του και με τους άλλους, αυτή είναι σε επιφυλακή και προσέχει το πρωτόγονο κτήνος που ‘ναι έτοιμο να ξαναγεννηθεί και να εξοπλιστεί με τους πιο σύγχρονους πολιτικούς μηχανισμούς… Η γλώσσα μας έχει ξεχωριστές λέξεις για την αντικειμενική συνειδητότητα και την ηθική συνείδηση, λες και θα μπορούσε να υπάρχει η μια δίχως την άλλη! Μελέτησα για καιρό τη σχετική βιβλιογραφία. Μερικοί λόγιοι συγγραφείς ορίζουν αυτά τα φαινόμενα ως το υπερ-εγώ που προϋπάρχει του ατόμου. Ας μη φοβόμαστε τους ψυχολογικούς ορισμούς περισσότερο απ’ όσο φοβόμαστε τα φαντάσματα. Ανατινάξαμε το κοινωνικό υπερεγώ, χρησιμοποιώντας με επιτυχία το πυροβολικό που διαθέταμε, κι έτσι αυτοκρατορία, ιδιοκτησία, χρήμα, δόγματα, καταπίεση, όλα τα πήρε ο διάολος. Θα έπρεπε αυτό να σημαίνει την απελευθέρωση της καλύτερης πλευράς του ανθρώπου, αλλά φοβάμαι πως την πήρε κι αυτήν ο διάολος μαζί με όλα τα υπόλοιπα. Και γίναμε οι δεσμώτες μιας νέας φυλακής, φαινομενικά πιο ορθολογικά στημένης, αλλά στην πραγματικότητα πιο συντριπτικής γιατί έχει πιο γερά θεμέλια. Αυτοκρατορία, δόγματα και τα λοιπά, όλα αποκαταστάθηκαν με σχέδιο και μηχανισμό, ενώ την ίδια ώρα πέθαινε η συνείδηση… >>
Κείμενο σχεδόν απροσπέλαστο, δε χαρίζεται πουθενά, δε συγχωρεί πεταλουδίτσες που πάνε απ’ το ένα βιβλίο στο άλλο για ποικιλία, το ξέρω, το πλήρωσα. Είναι μια διπλή καταγγελία, αν όχι τριπλή. Αν ο Στάλιν είχε προηγηθεί του Χίτλερ, οι θάνατοι πιθανόν να ήταν πολλαπλάσιοι. Αντ’ αυτού, στέφθηκε λυτρωτής, ένας νέος Άτλας. 10 χρόνια μετά θα κατακτούσε τον καλλιτεχνικό κόσμο της Δύσης ώσπου να αντιληφθούν πως η διαφορά απ’ το Χίτλερ ήταν σημειακή, αλλά δυστοπική. Ο Χίτλερ χρειάστηκε να βγει να πυρπολήσει τον κόσμο. Ο Στάλιν χωρίς να μετακινηθεί, τον έφερε στην καρδιά του NKVD.
Αβίαστα μακροπερίοδος λόγος, που εξαντλεί ό,τι αρχίζει και συμπλέκει τα όμορα, μέσω ρεαλιστικού και συμβολικού βήματος. Είναι τόσο αβίαστος, αυτός ο σπασμένος λόγος, που συγγραφείς σαν το Φώκνερ και τον Πύντσον μοιάζουν τεχνητοί, κι, ο Μπροχ συνεχώς πολιτισμένος, για να γίνει τόσο ελεύθερος, με αποτέλεσμα να απομένουν, ο Όε κι ο Φραγκιάς, που τελικά μοιάζουν κάπου, να τον συντροφεύουν. Κι ο Μπέρνχαρτ όμως, που δεν υπάγεται σε καμιά σχετική κατηγορία, ο λόγος του διαπνέεται από διαρκώς αυτοτροφοδοτούμενη, αν και ορισμένως απατηλή, οργή και κουρδίζεται από φράση, σε φράση, κατά κάποιο τρόπο τον κάνει, να ομοιάζει, μέσω αφανών κινήτρων, με αυτό τον καλό, αδικημένο, αγωνιστή, το Σερζ. Κι όμως, την ίδια στιγμή κατά κάποιο τρόπο και γι’ αυτό δεν τίθεται θέμα σύγκρισης ( παρά μόνο η διάθεση να κατατοπίσω όποιον ενδιαφερθεί για το βιβλίο ) θα ήταν ιεροσυλία, να σταθούν αυτά τα ονόματα μαζί. Εκεί δε φτάνει ο Μπέρνχαρτ, εκεί είναι λίγος.
Αν δε διαβαστεί μονορούφι, δε σε αφήνει να το διαπεράσεις. Τόσο τραχύ, τόσο σου κλείνει την ανάσα, καθώς συμπαρασύρει ό,τι συναντά, που δε μπορεί να διαβαστεί μονορούφι. Σου ξεσκίζει το μυαλό. Δε σου επιτρέπει καν, να γίνεις συναισθηματικός, παρά μόνο όταν το θελήσει ο ίδιος. Θέλει να σκεφτείς. Θέλει να εισπράξεις την ομολογία, τη μαρτυρία, την προειδοποίηση: Ο Χίτ��ερ, δεν είναι το τέλος. Κι αν ο στόχος του ήταν να αφανίσει, όποιον δεν ταίριαζε με την ξανθογάλανη εικόνα, ο Στάλιν, επιθυμεί να γίνει, ο κυρίαρχος του κόσμου κυριολεκτικά. Να κατακτήσει μυαλό και θέληση. Δεν επιθυμεί καμιά γενετική ομοιογένεια, αλλά μια κοινωνική.
Η ομιλία του Ποτάποφ στη Νταρία αποτελεί μακράν, κομψοτέχνημα στρατηγικής τέχνης. Εξηγεί με αρθρωτή σαφήνεια, τι ήταν εκείνο, που οδήγησε τελικά, στο κατακεραύνωμα των ναζί. Ένα ιδεώδες ανάλογο με αυτό των 300.
( Η συνέχεια σε σχόλιο )
Αστεράκια: 3* λογοτεχνική δυσκολία
Το είναι του βιβλίου: Καμιά φαντασία, οσοδήποτε τρελή ή ποτισμένη με οινόπνευμα, δε θα μπορούσε να συλλάβει τον πλούτο των αρχιτεκτονικών εφέ που ανακαλύπτει κανείς στις βομβαρδισμένες πόλεις. Τα παιδιά που μεγαλώνουν σε τέτοιες πόλεις ίσως να δημιουργήσουν, όταν ωριμάσουν μέσα τους αυτές οι εικόνες, μια καινούργια τέχνη, που δε θα είναι ούτε ρεαλιστική ούτε σουρεαλιστική, γιατί η καταστροφή καλλιεργεί μια ιδιαίτερη πραγματικότητα που κλίνει προς το μη πραγματικό: η κίβδηλη πραγματικότητα του πολιτισμού επιστρέφει στις πρώτες της αρχές, στο βίαιο θάνατο, τη διάλυση των όντων και των έργων, την επίμονη δράση μιας ζωικής δύναμης ελεύθερης από κάθε δικαιολόγηση… Ζωγραφικές απεικονίσεις επιμέρους ψυχολογικών τρόμων θα φάνταζαν εδώ εντελώς γελοίες. Κοίτα να εκφράσεις τον Μεγάλο Αυθεντικό Τρόμο, αλλιώς πάρε δρόμο
Η αξία του κειμένου κοινωνικά, πολιτιστικά, ανθρωπιστικά είναι απόλυτη, διαυγής, ρεαλιστική, φιλοσοφημένη. Γι’ αυτήν θα μιλήσω παρακάτω. Τα αστεράκια ανταποκρίνονται μόνο στον τεράστιο βαθμό δυσκολίας του κειμένου, λογοτεχνικά. Επίσης, καλό είναι αυτό το βιβλίο να προηγηθεί της Υπόθεσης Τουλάγεφ. Διότι το πρώτο μέρος αυτού του βιβλίου, είναι το κυρίως θέμα, που αναπτύσσεται στην Υπόθεση Τουλάγεφ, πράγμα που το καθιστά αφόρητα δύσκολο, να το προσπεράσει κάποιος που έχει διαβάσει πρόσφατα την Υπόθεση Τουλάγεφ.
Ο συγγραφέας πραγματοποιεί έναν πολύ περίτεχνο άθλο. Οπουδήποτε αναφέρεται σε Ρώσους, το κείμενο κινείται στα πλαίσια της Λογικής, με ολοκληρωτική σχεδόν, έλλειψη συναισθηματικού υποβάθρου. Στο δεύτερο μέρος, που ‘’εισβάλει’’ σε μια γερμανική πόλη, αποφεύγει εντελώς ( σχεδόν ) τη χρήση της Λογικής και χρησιμοποιεί κυρίως συναισθηματικά πρίσματα. Αυτά, για όποιον έχει γενικές γνώσεις γύρω απ’ την Ιδεοκρατία και τη Λογική, αποτελούν άθλο. Επίσης, η χρήση τους εμπεριέχει σαρκασμό και υπαινιγμούς. Παραπέμπω για περισσότερα, στην εξαιρετική μελέτη που βρίσκεται στον Επαναστατημένο Άνθρωπο, σχετικά με την τάση των Γερμανών να ερεθίζουν τον εαυτό τους, καθώς και στην ίδια τη Νεώτερη Φιλοσοφία, που αρχής γενομένης απ’ τον Καντ, κάνει τα πρώτα βήματα στον τομέα της Λογικής ( με σύγχρονους όρους που χρησιμοποιούνται εδώ και όχι ιστορικά ). Μαζί όμως, μας θυμίζει σε ορισμένα σημεία μια μερίδα Γερμανών, που φαίνεται πως έχουμε αγνοήσει παντελώς: εγώ θα αποφύγω τη στοχοποίηση του Νίτσε, που άλλωστε δεν ευθύνεται ο ίδιος για την εκμετάλλευση και παρερμήνευση των κειμένων του, όπως αυτή έγινε, μετά την κατάρρευση του, απ’ τον φασίστα, άντρα, της αδερφής του που είχε τα δικαιώματα. Αντ’ αυτού και αδιαφορώ ειλικρινά, για τη γνώμη του κοινού για το Χέγκελ, θα τον θέσω σε θέση εφαλτηρίου, τόσο για τη Λογική, όσο και πολύ περισσότερο για Τον Καλύτερο Δυνατό Κόσμο. Για περισσότερα, σε όποιον δεν εντυπωσιάζεται από μεγάλα ονόματα, παραπέμπω στο Βολταίρο και ίσως ορισμένως και στο Φίχτε. Ας γυρίσω όμως, σε αυτό που έγραφα: η Γερμανία είναι η χώρα που έβγαλε το Χέγκελ, έβγαλε το Στίρνερ, έβγαλε όμως και το Μαρξ. Ανάμεσα σε αυτούς, υπάρχει μια μερίδα Γερμανών, που δε μπορεί να αγνοηθεί και είναι κάτι που το οφείλει οποιοσδήποτε θέλει να λέγεται Άνθρωπος.
Εν συνεχεία και προτού προχωρήσω παρακάτω, να ξεκαθαρίσω ότι δεν είμαι γνώστης Φιλοσοφίας, παρά γενικά και μόνο, με εξαίρεση ίσως τη μεγαλύτερη άνεση που έχω με τον Αριστοτέλη και το Σοπενάουερ. Παραπάνω γράφω τη γνώμη μου και μόνο ως μη ειδικός, ως μαθητής στα χνάρια της Φιλοσοφίας και ό,τι κι αν μάθω, όσο κι αν προχωρήσω, μαθητής θα παραμείνω και όλοι οι Δάσκαλοι που είναι και Φίλοι, είναι προσβάσιμοι απ’ όλους σας, στο χέρι σας είναι. Λέγοντας αυτά, θα ήθελα να κάνω μια ειδική μνεία, που πιθανόν να μην καταλάβει κανένας, πέρα ίσως απ’ όποιον θελήσει να διαβάσει το βιβλίο με καθαρή καρδιά και καθαρό μυαλό: στις σελ 314 – 317, η συνέντευξη του Γερμανού καθηγητή Σιφ, στον Αμερικανό δημοσιογράφο, είναι συγκλονιστική. Συμπεριλαμβανομένου του κομματιού που προηγείται με την Ίλζε και τις πασχαλιές και ορισμένα σημεία του διαλόγου της Έρνα / Νταρία με τον Αλαίν ( το Γάλλο αγωνιστή που όταν εμφανίζεται στη σκηνή, τρέχει μαζί κι έ��α κομμάτι που αναφέρεται στο Παράλογο ), ο οποίος δεν ανταποκρίνεται σε πραγματικό διάλογο, αλλά περισσότερο σε μια Ιδέα εσωτερικού διαλόγου.
Ο John Berger σε κριτική σχετικά με το βιβλίο που υπάρχει στο οπισθόφυλλο, για όποιον την αναζητήσει, επειδή ο Σερζ ήταν αυτός που ήταν και που τελικά μόνο ως μάρτυρας μπορεί να χαρακτηριστεί, με ευαγγελικούς όρους για όλη την περίοδο των δυο παγκοσμίων πολέμων, πως δε μπορεί να υπάρξει σύγκριση, ή συγγένεια με άλλους συγγραφείς ή βιβλία. Εγώ θα διαφωνήσω σε αυτό. Σε κάποια σημεία, ένα βιβλίο που παρουσιάζει συγγένειες, είναι η Ιζαμπώ, του Τερζάκη, έργο το οποίο γράφτηκε πριν το ΒΠΠ και ξαναγράφτηκε μετά. Όποιος έχει διαβάσει τις Προσωπικές Σημειώσεις του Άγγελου Τερζάκη, μπορεί να καταλάβει, με ποια σκοπιμότητα ‘’επιτρέπω’’ αυτή την αναφορά. Επίσης, υπάρχουν συγγένειες κυρίως υφολογικές, κάποιες δραματουργικές, καθώς και στο ‘’σπασμένο’’ λόγο, με τον επίσης αγωνιστή, Ανδρέα Φραγκιά και όποιος έχει διαβάσει Φραγκιά, νομίζω πως μπορεί να καταλάβει τι δυσκολίες παρουσιάζει αυτό το κείμενο, καθώς και τη γοητεία που εμπεριέχει. Όμως, θα ήμουν τυφλός το λιγότερο, αν δεν έβλεπα ορισμένες συγγένειες που υπάρχουν στα σημεία που έχουμε νοσοκομειακές σκηνές, με ή χωρίς ανθρώπους, με το 11.000 Βέργες, του Απολιναίρ. Και δεν αναφέρομαι στις επιφανειακές, αλλά σε κάτι άλλο. Το οποίο όμως φοβάμαι ότι απαιτεί, να έχει διαβαστεί το 11.000 Βέργες, από μη υστερικούς ανθρώπους και δεν υπονοώ τίποτα ( το γράφω ξεκάθαρα! ). Επίσης, αποκλείω, ο Σερζ να μην είχε κάποια γνώση του βιβλίου Αιρεσιάρχης και Σία. Άλλωστε, είχε ζήσει και στο Παρίσι. Στο ίδιο σημείο, θα βρούμε όμως, πως με ένα μη ξεκάθαρο τρόπο, υπάρχει μια συνάφεια, με τον Ίμενο, του Καβάφη.
Τέλος, στο τρίτο μέρος, το ταξίδι στο Μεξικό, φόρο τιμής του ίδιου του συγγραφέα στον τόπο που γεννήθηκε από εξόριστους γονείς και στον τόπο που πήγε να πεθάνει, αυτοεξόριστος και κυνηγημένος πια, μας χαρίζει ένα κείμενο που το χαρακτηρίζει η λιτή παραστατικότητα, οι, παρόλ’ αυτά, πλατιές γραμμές, η αψεγάδιαστη περιγραφικότητα κι η συνοχή. Εδώ δεν υπάρχουν αιχμηρές γωνίες, ούτε βέβαια και γλίστρα. Υπάρχει εκείνη η βαθιά οικειότητα που ξεπερνάει τις μορφολογίες των τόπων και των ανθρώπων και εισβάλλει στο κοινό τους κράμα. Υπάρχει αυτή η αίσθηση της αναπόλησης, των παστέλ χρωμάτων που τόσο προτιμούν και τόσο ταιριάζει στις χώρες και στην ιδιοσυγκρασία των Λατίνων γενικά κι η ραθυμιά που δεν αποσιωπά τη φτώχια, αλλά τουλάχιστον της αντιστέκεται με ‘κεινη την τίμια υπερηφάνεια του ανθρώπου, που αγαπά τον τόπο του, χωρίς να έχει ψευδαισθήσεις. Bueno, bueno… Ο Σερζ εδώ είναι ευτυχισμένος. Ο Σερζ εδώ, θα πεθάνει φτωχός, αλλά κατά κάποιο τρόπο γαληνεμένος και αυτό το νιώθω μέσα στο κείμενο, κάτι που φρόντισε να καταλάβω απ’ όλα τα μέρη που υπήρξε περαστικός, αλλά μόλις οριακά αποδεκτός. Ας θυμηθούμε τη βαριά ατμόσφαιρα του ‘’επισκέπτη’’ Γκρην, στο Δύναμις και δόξα, τη ματιά από έξω προς τα μέσα. Αντίθετα, αυτή τώρα είναι μια ματιά, από μέσα προς τα μέσα, με την στοιχειωμένη γνώση, του έξω. Εδώ έχει την άνεση να πάρει ανάσα και να οδηγήσει την ιστορία στο τέλος της, ή έστω σε μια άνω τελεία, αφού η ζωή, οι πόλεμοι, τα ‘’γραφειοκρατικά ξόρκια’’ θα συνεχιστούν, εσαεί.
Ως εδώ ήταν αυτά που ήθελα να αναφέρω γενικά. Παρακάτω, ακολουθεί μια ανάλυση – αξιολόγηση του κειμένου. Δεν είμαι ούτε κριτικός, ούτε τίποτα άλλο, είμαι εγώ. Και είμαι άσχετος. Και μπροστά σε τέτοια κείμενα, είμαι και μ1λάκας.
<< οι πολλές προφυλάξεις, όσο λογικές κι αν φαίνονται, στην πραγματικότητα είναι παιχνίδι ενός μισότρελου >>
<< Συνειδητοποιεί κανείς το βαθμό της διαφθοράς, από τον τρόπο που δέχονται οι άνθρωποι τα χρήματα >>
<< οι μάσκες καμιά φορά διαβάζονται ευκολότερα απ’ ότι τα πρόσωπα >>
<< Το να ζεις μόνο για τον εαυτό σου είναι άγονο – σαν τον αυνανισμό >>
Αυτό που καθιστά εξαιρετικά δύσκολο ετούτο το βιβλίο, είναι πως το ‘’χωρίς έλεος’’ του τίτλου, μεταφέρεται συμβολικά με την κατάργηση της δομής. Οι σκέψεις, πράξεις των χαρακτήρων, ανακατεύονται με τις σκέψεις του συγγραφέα, με την αφήγηση κι όμως κάθετί διακρίνεται που αρχίζει, και, που τελειώνει κι αυτό είναι δύσκολο και εύκολο. Βαρύ και πυκνό. Καμιά ισορροπία, κανένα κενό, ή παύση. Σε κάνει να συνειδητοποιήσεις 50 χρόνια μετά, οδυνηρές αλήθειες: προφανώς γνωρίζεις ότι η σταλινική τρομοκρατία ήταν ένα κύμα, που κανένα φράγμα δε μπόρεσε να συγκρατήσει. Δεν αναχαιτίστηκε καν απ’ το ΒΠΠ. Κι εδώ βρίσκεται η ουσία. Βρισκόμαστε μέσα στην καρδιά του πολέμου κι οι εφιαλτικοί αυτοί ηγέτες, συνυπάρχουν, είναι σα να δρουν ομόφωνα κι αντίρροπα. Οι λέξεις δε σου λένε τίποτα και το καταλαβαίνω. Κι εγώ, θεωρητικά, καταλάβαινα πως οι περίοδοι αυτοί, ήταν εφαπτόμενες. Αλλά εδώ μιλάμε για ένα λαό που θα μπορούσε να σώσει την ανθρωπότητα απ’ τους ναζί, που και πάλι αντιστάθηκε με μεγάλη επιτυχία, κι, όμως μαζί, αναλωνόταν σε ένα εσωτερικό πόλεμο, δίχως κανένα έλεος. Υπήρξαν στιγμές που αισθανόμουν πάρα πολύ έντονο, πως αυτό το βιβλίο είναι σαν τέταρτος, αθέατος τόμος των Υπνοβατών. Το μετά ρεαλισμού.
<< - Το ασυγχώρητο λάθος μας ήταν ότι νομίσαμε πως αυτό που λέμε ψυχή – εγώ το λέω συνείδηση – δεν είναι παρά μια προβολή του παλιού ξεπερασμένου εγωισμού! Αν ζω ακόμα είναι επειδή κατάλαβα πως παρερμηνεύσαμε το μεγαλείο της συνείδησης. Δε χρειάζεται να μου πεις τίποτα για τις διεστραμμένες ή τις σάπιες ή τις ασπόνδυλες συνειδήσεις, τις τυφλές συνειδήσεις, τις μισότυφλες, τις κωματώδεις, τις διακοπτόμενες, τις έντρομες! Κι ούτε να μου πεις για τα εξαρτημένα αντανακλαστικά, τις εκκρίσεις των αδένων και τις ψυχαναλυτικές νευρώσεις: τα ξέρω πολύ καλά τα τέρατα που πηγαινοέρχονται μες στην αρχέγονη λάσπη, βαθιά μέσα μου, βαθιά μέσα σου. Όμως παρόλ’ αυτά, υπάρχει ένα πεισματάρικο αμυδρό φως, ένα φως αδιάφθορο, που μπορεί να διαπεράσει το γρανίτη, τους τοίχους των φυλακών και τις ταφόπλακες, ένα απρόσωπο αμυδρό φως που καίει μέσα μας, φωτίζει, κρίνει, αρνείται και άτεγκτα καταδικάζει. Δεν είναι ιδιοκτησία κανενός και καμιά μηχανή δε μπορεί να το μετρήσει. Καμιά φορά τρεμοσβήνει γιατί νιώθει μόνο του – τι κτήνη που ήμασταν, και τ’ αφήσαμε να πεθάνει μες στη μοναξιά του!
- Αυτό το αμυδρό φως που λες υπάρχει εδώ και πολλά χρόνια στη λογοτεχνία. Ο Τολστόι λέει: ‘’Το φως που φέγγει μες στα σκοτάδια’’…
- Λάθος Ντάσια. Πριν από τον Τολστόι το είπε ο απόστολος Ιωάννης και σίγουρα δεν ήταν ο πρώτος… Εκτροχιάζομαι προς τη μεταφυσική και το μυστικισμό ε; Έλα πες το, τα μάτια σου με κοροϊδεύουν… Κάναμε ένα θανάσιμο λάθος, υλικά θανάσιμο εννοώ, ένα λάθος που είχε σαν αποτέλεσμα αμέτρητα κεφάλια πυροβολημένα από το δήμιο, ξεχάσαμε πως μόνο αυτή η μορφή συνείδησης πετυχαίνει τη συμφιλίωση του ανθρώπου με τον εαυτό του και με τους άλλους, αυτή είναι σε επιφυλακή και προσέχει το πρωτόγονο κτήνος που ‘ναι έτοιμο να ξαναγεννηθεί και να εξοπλιστεί με τους πιο σύγχρονους πολιτικούς μηχανισμούς… Η γλώσσα μας έχει ξεχωριστές λέξεις για την αντικειμενική συνειδητότητα και την ηθική συνείδηση, λες και θα μπορούσε να υπάρχει η μια δίχως την άλλη! Μελέτησα για καιρό τη σχετική βιβλιογραφία. Μερικοί λόγιοι συγγραφείς ορίζουν αυτά τα φαινόμενα ως το υπερ-εγώ που προϋπάρχει του ατόμου. Ας μη φοβόμαστε τους ψυχολογικούς ορισμούς περισσότερο απ’ όσο φοβόμαστε τα φαντάσματα. Ανατινάξαμε το κοινωνικό υπερεγώ, χρησιμοποιώντας με επιτυχία το πυροβολικό που διαθέταμε, κι έτσι αυτοκρατορία, ιδιοκτησία, χρήμα, δόγματα, καταπίεση, όλα τα πήρε ο διάολος. Θα έπρεπε αυτό να σημαίνει την απελευθέρωση της καλύτερης πλευράς του ανθρώπου, αλλά φοβάμαι πως την πήρε κι αυτήν ο διάολος μαζί με όλα τα υπόλοιπα. Και γίναμε οι δεσμώτες μιας νέας φυλακής, φαινομενικά πιο ορθολογικά στημένης, αλλά στην πραγματικότητα πιο συντριπτικής γιατί έχει πιο γερά θεμέλια. Αυτοκρατορία, δόγματα και τα λοιπά, όλα αποκαταστάθηκαν με σχέδιο και μηχανισμό, ενώ την ίδια ώρα πέθαινε η συνείδηση… >>
Κείμενο σχεδόν απροσπέλαστο, δε χαρίζεται πουθενά, δε συγχωρεί πεταλουδίτσες που πάνε απ’ το ένα βιβλίο στο άλλο για ποικιλία, το ξέρω, το πλήρωσα. Είναι μια διπλή καταγγελία, αν όχι τριπλή. Αν ο Στάλιν είχε προηγηθεί του Χίτλερ, οι θάνατοι πιθανόν να ήταν πολλαπλάσιοι. Αντ’ αυτού, στέφθηκε λυτρωτής, ένας νέος Άτλας. 10 χρόνια μετά θα κατακτούσε τον καλλιτεχνικό κόσμο της Δύσης ώσπου να αντιληφθούν πως η διαφορά απ’ το Χίτλερ ήταν σημειακή, αλλά δυστοπική. Ο Χίτλερ χρειάστηκε να βγει να πυρπολήσει τον κόσμο. Ο Στάλιν χωρίς να μετακινηθεί, τον έφερε στην καρδιά του NKVD.
Αβίαστα μακροπερίοδος λόγος, που εξαντλεί ό,τι αρχίζει και συμπλέκει τα όμορα, μέσω ρεαλιστικού και συμβολικού βήματος. Είναι τόσο αβίαστος, αυτός ο σπασμένος λόγος, που συγγραφείς σαν το Φώκνερ και τον Πύντσον μοιάζουν τεχνητοί, κι, ο Μπροχ συνεχώς πολιτισμένος, για να γίνει τόσο ελεύθερος, με αποτέλεσμα να απομένουν, ο Όε κι ο Φραγκιάς, που τελικά μοιάζουν κάπου, να τον συντροφεύουν. Κι ο Μπέρνχαρτ όμως, που δεν υπάγεται σε καμιά σχετική κατηγορία, ο λόγος του διαπνέεται από διαρκώς αυτοτροφοδοτούμενη, αν και ορισμένως απατηλή, οργή και κουρδίζεται από φράση, σε φράση, κατά κάποιο τρόπο τον κάνει, να ομοιάζει, μέσω αφανών κινήτρων, με αυτό τον καλό, αδικημένο, αγωνιστή, το Σερζ. Κι όμως, την ίδια στιγμή κατά κάποιο τρόπο και γι’ αυτό δεν τίθεται θέμα σύγκρισης ( παρά μόνο η διάθεση να κατατοπίσω όποιον ενδιαφερθεί για το βιβλίο ) θα ήταν ιεροσυλία, να σταθούν αυτά τα ονόματα μαζί. Εκεί δε φτάνει ο Μπέρνχαρτ, εκεί είναι λίγος.
Αν δε διαβαστεί μονορούφι, δε σε αφήνει να το διαπεράσεις. Τόσο τραχύ, τόσο σου κλείνει την ανάσα, καθώς συμπαρασύρει ό,τι συναντά, που δε μπορεί να διαβαστεί μονορούφι. Σου ξεσκίζει το μυαλό. Δε σου επιτρέπει καν, να γίνεις συναισθηματικός, παρά μόνο όταν το θελήσει ο ίδιος. Θέλει να σκεφτείς. Θέλει να εισπράξεις την ομολογία, τη μαρτυρία, την προειδοποίηση: Ο Χίτ��ερ, δεν είναι το τέλος. Κι αν ο στόχος του ήταν να αφανίσει, όποιον δεν ταίριαζε με την ξανθογάλανη εικόνα, ο Στάλιν, επιθυμεί να γίνει, ο κυρίαρχος του κόσμου κυριολεκτικά. Να κατακτήσει μυαλό και θέληση. Δεν επιθυμεί καμιά γενετική ομοιογένεια, αλλά μια κοινωνική.
Η ομιλία του Ποτάποφ στη Νταρία αποτελεί μακράν, κομψοτέχνημα στρατηγικής τέχνης. Εξηγεί με αρθρωτή σαφήνεια, τι ήταν εκείνο, που οδήγησε τελικά, στο κατακεραύνωμα των ναζί. Ένα ιδεώδες ανάλογο με αυτό των 300.
( Η συνέχεια σε σχόλιο )
March 7, 2011
When, at last, you open your eyes after feeling the day's warmth full upon your face, what if the vision that stands before you reveals not a golden, lambent orb levering itself free from earthly bonds but millions upon millions of souls aflame, burning spirits in solar flare, emancipated from the cadavers to light the gaping maw of hell? Would you weep for the murdered revolution? Would you recognize its tomb for the abyss?
The above bit of symbolic lugubriousness does a fair job of summing up the absolute core of Serge's brilliantly bleak and despairing quadtych, set in and around the cataclysmic mechanical destruction that comprised the Second World War—but it is, really, so much more. I'd held back from posting a more detailed review, simply because I felt a tad unsure of how to proceed in lauding this work of concupiscible and coruscating darkness, a hallucinatory nightmare conjured forth from the dimmest recess of hell at the beck of a squirming and sweating recumbent mind suffering all the painful withdrawals from a cherished and necessary belief. It's an unendingly grim—but, ultimately, hopeful—slice of tragedy, along with Vasily Grossman's epic Life and Fate the single best depiction of how utterly disabled in purpose and faith a legion of dedicated communists were rendered when the brutal truth of the terrible and murderous perversions worked upon the glorious Revolution by the despot Stalin—and, by complicity, themselves—could no longer be ignored or explained away.
Based in part upon his own experiences, in another of those of select personages he had encountered during his peripatetic life as a man without state, Serge created a circle of four members of the Comintern—two old communists, the introspective, calculating, and philosophical D. (also Sacha, also Bruno Battisti) and his comrade-in-revolution, the angularly beautiful and inwardly passionate Daria—and a pair of junior agents, D.'s steely-but-vulnerable and somewhat naïve wife, Nadine (aka Noémi) and his dedicated and somewhat naïve French underling, Alain, who is also Nadine's part-time lover. In the opening section, entitled The Secret Agent, D.—growingly disillusioned and appalled by the unending executions of the old Bolsheviks and the deadly intrigues visited upon committed fighters in the Spanish Civil War, is presumably pushed over the edge by the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Unable to work any further towards the corrupted ends of Historical Materialism, he announces his resignation—a decision that, to a senior Comintern agent, is answerable only by death. Serge exquisitely portrays here a Paris on the cusp of disaster, all strained grins and frippery and drunken revels and nervous glancing over one's shoulder. As the shadows lengthen, D. and Nadine experience wave upon wave of paranoia when they understand that D's letter of resignation has been prematurely discovered and teams of killers already on the hunt for the traitorous pair: or are they? With Alain devastated by this betrayal by an idealized boss and passionate lover, and Daria refusing, in the end, to accompany the pair into exile, sublimating her desire to do so to the more powerful strictures of service to the Grand Cause, all of the frantic hiding and panicked dodging and near misses are never explicity revealed as existing in reality—are they, perhaps, the illusory terrors teased forth by a pair of guilty and depressed minds?
The second section is a stunning depiction of a starving, filthy, and emaciated Leningrad during the hardcore nine hundred-day siege. Daria—brought to the city from a term of exile in the Kazakh deserts imposed as punishment for her close relationship with the traitor D.—serves the Red Army headquarters as a translator of German prisoners and intercepts. This is an immensely beautiful and lyrical portrayal, a gelid, frozen city constantly visited by overburdened blankets of steel that blot out the sky and endlessly contribute more cottony bounty to the omnipresent snow that bleaches everything to a shade of white as aptly empty as the resolute city denizen's bellies. This is all death and madness, hunger and lust, explosions and quiet, solitude and crowded company buried under the mounds of frozen earth. Daria's erotic and earthy prose poetry written in code; fulsome cerise detonations as the sun sinks below the melting point of endless sky with infinite steppe; breathless, tortured flight through an arctic blizzard into the besieged city; her torrid, but doomed, love affair with the eternal optimist soldier, Klim; demented and unreal forays across the ice-garbed breadth of the Neva river in search of enemy prey; German soldiers driven beyond the borderlands of lunacy by the enduring torments of a hostile and alien north that lashes with cold and kills with a fury; the implacable will of the starving populace to endure this inhuman grind; it's an astonishing, preternatural achievement.
Serge switches gears for the third part, in which an unnamed German city—though almost certainly meant to be Berlin—is the prime loci for the cataclysm and myriad horrors of total war the limn nearly every page. With Daria now undercover as Erna, a Lithuanian dissident nurse gone over to the Great Reich, and Alain a leader of a band of partisan outlaws seeking refuge—whilst working sabotage—amongst the cellar shadows of the battalions of bombed out buildings that now epitomize urban Germany, the threads of horror, intertwining as the war approaches its sanguinary climax, are all drawn in towards this bombed-out hell-on-earth. As the American and Red Armies inexorably close in, Serge shows the German populace suffering the same savageries, enduring the same traumas and miseries, as their armies dished out to the rest of Europe. To Serge, this war is one of complicity between a Fascism allied with international Capitalism, all working against—and thus perverting—an isolated Soviet Union and its burgeoning efforts at global socialist brotherhood. Whilst SS officers and Party bigwigs carry out bitterly comedic routine executions and reprisals—and loot what remains of staples and luxuries—whilst the roof is caving in all around them, the average German is a confused and miserable entity, daily struggling to find the energy to work and to scrape up sufficient food to feed oneself, let alone one's family. This typology of the overwhelmed and ordinary German citizen is realized in the hobbled Franz Minus-Two—limbs, that is—a war veteran cashiered into lurking amongst the ruins, eying the bounteous destruction with a mix of repressed violent urges and sarcastic mockery; whereas the Teutonic blend of dutiful innocence is revealed in the trembling grace of Brigitte, a lovely young German lass driven to the edge—perhaps over the edge—of madness by the news of her fiancé's death at the hands of the SS for an insufficient commitment to a war of extermination. Passages where she sits in her room—the sole upper story apartment remaining in her mangled tenement building—and watches the explosive colour spray of a nighttime air raid, all flowery prismatic blossoms that match the blood that continually seeps from the cruel blade driven into her heart by loss—are haunting and ethereal. In the end, whether rich or poor, the sentence for the defeated Germans is one of bemused contempt by overfed and ignorant American journalists or rape and beatings by hornet-mad Soviet soldiers. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The concluding piece dramatically alters the scenery, swapping for the devastated rubble and dusty insanity of a broken Europe the tropical and sultry mysteries, the arid heat and throbbing wetness of the Mexican Pacific coast, where D. and Nadine have fled, setting themselves up as respected Italian expatriate farmers secluded amidst the austere and dignified indios and the stone remnants of the graveyard empires that once exulted over torn-out, still-living hearts dedicated to the shadowy-but-visceral and primeval gods that held sovereignty over the oppressive heat, the slumbering volcanos, the turbulent storms and humming chords of lightning that threaten to burn all life to ashes. After a wearying journey, Daria manages to rejoin her old comrades—and to try to accept, as they have come to, that there can be lived a life—enjoyed a life—that is not in service to historic destiny, that doesn't require its own sacrifice, to shed its own blood, to work murderous means, all in the name of advancing the whole of society towards its date with a utopian perfection that—so the rational mind has decided—has to be the supreme meaning of life. Yet even in this simple, sweltering paradise, there must exist a serpent to tempt a modern day Adam and Eve—and the fruit of this particular tree of knowledge will impart an understanding that is immensely bittersweet.
This is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Unbelievable that it hadn't previously been translated into English; imperative that it be read now that it has been made so available. Serge is interested in human consciousness, the decisions that one must make about what constitutes the livable life, the desired life, about the utter importance of means in achieving an end, about the sheer destructive power of a mechanized and technological society, torn between a combative capitalism and communism that, in the end, may not actually be all that dissimilar. It is about belief and faith, the tortures of apostasy, the struggle to deal with the consequences of willingly abandoning one's service to a cause that is, of necessity, so much larger than oneself; it is about comradeship and friendship, the brutal tests visited upon the spirit by the calamity of war—and, especially, of the Earth itself, of the role and textures of nature in the modern age, her ofttimes tenuous, but undeniable, links with the evolutionary pathways of the human mind, and what, in the end, the fate may be of this oh-so-curious creature man, so eminently corruptible, killable, risible—and yet so easily worth every drop of agony wrung from the soul over his inscrutable existence, and so dearly important to the forking paths that, to the redoubtable Serge, must lead, in the end, through the doorway of hope into something truly, cosmically beautiful.
The above bit of symbolic lugubriousness does a fair job of summing up the absolute core of Serge's brilliantly bleak and despairing quadtych, set in and around the cataclysmic mechanical destruction that comprised the Second World War—but it is, really, so much more. I'd held back from posting a more detailed review, simply because I felt a tad unsure of how to proceed in lauding this work of concupiscible and coruscating darkness, a hallucinatory nightmare conjured forth from the dimmest recess of hell at the beck of a squirming and sweating recumbent mind suffering all the painful withdrawals from a cherished and necessary belief. It's an unendingly grim—but, ultimately, hopeful—slice of tragedy, along with Vasily Grossman's epic Life and Fate the single best depiction of how utterly disabled in purpose and faith a legion of dedicated communists were rendered when the brutal truth of the terrible and murderous perversions worked upon the glorious Revolution by the despot Stalin—and, by complicity, themselves—could no longer be ignored or explained away.
Based in part upon his own experiences, in another of those of select personages he had encountered during his peripatetic life as a man without state, Serge created a circle of four members of the Comintern—two old communists, the introspective, calculating, and philosophical D. (also Sacha, also Bruno Battisti) and his comrade-in-revolution, the angularly beautiful and inwardly passionate Daria—and a pair of junior agents, D.'s steely-but-vulnerable and somewhat naïve wife, Nadine (aka Noémi) and his dedicated and somewhat naïve French underling, Alain, who is also Nadine's part-time lover. In the opening section, entitled The Secret Agent, D.—growingly disillusioned and appalled by the unending executions of the old Bolsheviks and the deadly intrigues visited upon committed fighters in the Spanish Civil War, is presumably pushed over the edge by the announcement of the Hitler-Stalin pact. Unable to work any further towards the corrupted ends of Historical Materialism, he announces his resignation—a decision that, to a senior Comintern agent, is answerable only by death. Serge exquisitely portrays here a Paris on the cusp of disaster, all strained grins and frippery and drunken revels and nervous glancing over one's shoulder. As the shadows lengthen, D. and Nadine experience wave upon wave of paranoia when they understand that D's letter of resignation has been prematurely discovered and teams of killers already on the hunt for the traitorous pair: or are they? With Alain devastated by this betrayal by an idealized boss and passionate lover, and Daria refusing, in the end, to accompany the pair into exile, sublimating her desire to do so to the more powerful strictures of service to the Grand Cause, all of the frantic hiding and panicked dodging and near misses are never explicity revealed as existing in reality—are they, perhaps, the illusory terrors teased forth by a pair of guilty and depressed minds?
The second section is a stunning depiction of a starving, filthy, and emaciated Leningrad during the hardcore nine hundred-day siege. Daria—brought to the city from a term of exile in the Kazakh deserts imposed as punishment for her close relationship with the traitor D.—serves the Red Army headquarters as a translator of German prisoners and intercepts. This is an immensely beautiful and lyrical portrayal, a gelid, frozen city constantly visited by overburdened blankets of steel that blot out the sky and endlessly contribute more cottony bounty to the omnipresent snow that bleaches everything to a shade of white as aptly empty as the resolute city denizen's bellies. This is all death and madness, hunger and lust, explosions and quiet, solitude and crowded company buried under the mounds of frozen earth. Daria's erotic and earthy prose poetry written in code; fulsome cerise detonations as the sun sinks below the melting point of endless sky with infinite steppe; breathless, tortured flight through an arctic blizzard into the besieged city; her torrid, but doomed, love affair with the eternal optimist soldier, Klim; demented and unreal forays across the ice-garbed breadth of the Neva river in search of enemy prey; German soldiers driven beyond the borderlands of lunacy by the enduring torments of a hostile and alien north that lashes with cold and kills with a fury; the implacable will of the starving populace to endure this inhuman grind; it's an astonishing, preternatural achievement.
Serge switches gears for the third part, in which an unnamed German city—though almost certainly meant to be Berlin—is the prime loci for the cataclysm and myriad horrors of total war the limn nearly every page. With Daria now undercover as Erna, a Lithuanian dissident nurse gone over to the Great Reich, and Alain a leader of a band of partisan outlaws seeking refuge—whilst working sabotage—amongst the cellar shadows of the battalions of bombed out buildings that now epitomize urban Germany, the threads of horror, intertwining as the war approaches its sanguinary climax, are all drawn in towards this bombed-out hell-on-earth. As the American and Red Armies inexorably close in, Serge shows the German populace suffering the same savageries, enduring the same traumas and miseries, as their armies dished out to the rest of Europe. To Serge, this war is one of complicity between a Fascism allied with international Capitalism, all working against—and thus perverting—an isolated Soviet Union and its burgeoning efforts at global socialist brotherhood. Whilst SS officers and Party bigwigs carry out bitterly comedic routine executions and reprisals—and loot what remains of staples and luxuries—whilst the roof is caving in all around them, the average German is a confused and miserable entity, daily struggling to find the energy to work and to scrape up sufficient food to feed oneself, let alone one's family. This typology of the overwhelmed and ordinary German citizen is realized in the hobbled Franz Minus-Two—limbs, that is—a war veteran cashiered into lurking amongst the ruins, eying the bounteous destruction with a mix of repressed violent urges and sarcastic mockery; whereas the Teutonic blend of dutiful innocence is revealed in the trembling grace of Brigitte, a lovely young German lass driven to the edge—perhaps over the edge—of madness by the news of her fiancé's death at the hands of the SS for an insufficient commitment to a war of extermination. Passages where she sits in her room—the sole upper story apartment remaining in her mangled tenement building—and watches the explosive colour spray of a nighttime air raid, all flowery prismatic blossoms that match the blood that continually seeps from the cruel blade driven into her heart by loss—are haunting and ethereal. In the end, whether rich or poor, the sentence for the defeated Germans is one of bemused contempt by overfed and ignorant American journalists or rape and beatings by hornet-mad Soviet soldiers. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
The concluding piece dramatically alters the scenery, swapping for the devastated rubble and dusty insanity of a broken Europe the tropical and sultry mysteries, the arid heat and throbbing wetness of the Mexican Pacific coast, where D. and Nadine have fled, setting themselves up as respected Italian expatriate farmers secluded amidst the austere and dignified indios and the stone remnants of the graveyard empires that once exulted over torn-out, still-living hearts dedicated to the shadowy-but-visceral and primeval gods that held sovereignty over the oppressive heat, the slumbering volcanos, the turbulent storms and humming chords of lightning that threaten to burn all life to ashes. After a wearying journey, Daria manages to rejoin her old comrades—and to try to accept, as they have come to, that there can be lived a life—enjoyed a life—that is not in service to historic destiny, that doesn't require its own sacrifice, to shed its own blood, to work murderous means, all in the name of advancing the whole of society towards its date with a utopian perfection that—so the rational mind has decided—has to be the supreme meaning of life. Yet even in this simple, sweltering paradise, there must exist a serpent to tempt a modern day Adam and Eve—and the fruit of this particular tree of knowledge will impart an understanding that is immensely bittersweet.
This is, quite simply, a masterpiece. Unbelievable that it hadn't previously been translated into English; imperative that it be read now that it has been made so available. Serge is interested in human consciousness, the decisions that one must make about what constitutes the livable life, the desired life, about the utter importance of means in achieving an end, about the sheer destructive power of a mechanized and technological society, torn between a combative capitalism and communism that, in the end, may not actually be all that dissimilar. It is about belief and faith, the tortures of apostasy, the struggle to deal with the consequences of willingly abandoning one's service to a cause that is, of necessity, so much larger than oneself; it is about comradeship and friendship, the brutal tests visited upon the spirit by the calamity of war—and, especially, of the Earth itself, of the role and textures of nature in the modern age, her ofttimes tenuous, but undeniable, links with the evolutionary pathways of the human mind, and what, in the end, the fate may be of this oh-so-curious creature man, so eminently corruptible, killable, risible—and yet so easily worth every drop of agony wrung from the soul over his inscrutable existence, and so dearly important to the forking paths that, to the redoubtable Serge, must lead, in the end, through the doorway of hope into something truly, cosmically beautiful.
July 1, 2019
The last of Victor Serge's novels, Années Sans Pardon (written just before his death in 1947, but not published in English as Unforgiving Years until 1971), is divided into four sections- there's a noirish opening section set in Paris, which begins with a man called D. running into someone named Alain at a train station, and explaining to him that he will no longer work for what he refers to as The Organization, which immediately makes Alain his enemy; the second section follows Daria, a colleague of D.'s, through St. Petersburg, during the German invasion; the third section takes place in decimated Berlin, as the Allies close in; and in the final, unclassifiable, section, Daria travels to Mexico, in an attempt to locate D., for reasons that are unclear but not infinite in possibility.
I started to flip through my copy of the book yesterday in hopes of refreshing my memory and writing a short review, but I quickly realized that I would have to re-read it pretty much in its entirety to do it justice (nor did it help that, for the majority of the time I was reading the second and third sections, I was most likely on the train and didn't feel like digging through my backpack to try to find a pen- hence, notes and underlinings indicating review-worthy passages are scarce). I may do that at some point because it really is excellent, but for now what linger in my mind are some of the striking individual moments and anecdotes that make up this fragmented novel- the German soldier who impregnates a Ukrainian woman and tries to save her life once she's discovered by claiming that she will soon give birth to a healthy young future soldier of the Reich; the German prisoner who, when Daria is assigned to help translate his words into Russian, admits to being a Nazi suspiciously quickly, so quickly and enthusiastically in fact that it seems he has a fundamental misunderstanding of the situation; the American journalist who hops out of a jeep in the ruins of Berlin and asks an old man if 'you people feel guilty', and the old man's response; or a hotel owner in Mexico who while arranging a room for Daria 'sprinkled his laconic remarks with a bueno, bueno that implied nothing in particular; mentally continuing his game of dominoes with Don Gorgono...he looked at the voyager with eyes both sunny and remote, as though to say: I have nothing to say to you, but your presence pleases me; I see many things in you that do not concern me.'
'...And up in the sierra behind San Blas there is Las Calaveras, the Skulls, an ancient altar of sacrifice. Many thousands of years old.'There are some rather lukewarm reviews here, which might have something to do with the expectation allowed by the first section that the book will be a spy thriller- although even in the early pages there are some indications that this isn't that kind of novel- as well as with the notion that in 2019 we tend to expect all the boxes to be ticked off- world-building check, character development check, the big 'reveal' check- and get annoyed when we haven't received the entertainment experience we think we've paid for. But this novel's pacing is erratic and off-kilter, Serge shifts from third-person to first and back again without comment (almost as if Serge didn't recognize a stark boundary between the two, which come to think of it I don't think he did), and his characters disappear for sections at a time, then reappear with different names (almost as if a sense of individuality is less important than the role in history one might be asked to play, or almost as if some force of history works through individuals).
(According to the books, these Aztec, or Toltec, or other ruins were at most a thousand years old. But here, in the everyday strangeness of this courtyard, exact chronologies- always a chimera- counted for little. One was closer to the time scheme of rocks, or plants, than to historical time...)
'Thousands of years', Daria echoed, entranced.
Don Saturnino liked a woman who was attracted by the centuries. He remembered his youth, and his eyelids crinkled. He said, 'I fought for the revolution here, in my country. We made a good stand at Isla Verde, on top of the pyramids...'
'So, you fought for the revolution too', went vaguely through her mind.
Another reason for the lukewarm reviews might be that Serge had a sensibility that has pretty much disappeared from the face of the earth; namely, a disinclination to waste too many trees on his own suffering, and a broad concern for humanity in general. It could be argued that these qualities aren't always strengths in a fiction writer; the implication that no one character is more important than another, for example, seems to work against the expectations that many of us have for fiction. On the other hand, it would be a mistake to portray Serge as working from a fixed ideology, writing his fiction to advance it- in fact, as a Socialist who went to Russia to join the Bolsheviks and was later imprisoned for his dissent against Stalin, Serge was, I believe, involved in the lifelong process of awakening from ideology, forced to reckon with how his dedication to living for something more than just himself could have ended up contributing to one of the most brutal tyrannies in history. That lack of certitude, which in modern life is often understood as weakness, is in fact one of the tensions that runs through the novel, a strength, and there are even moments when Serge's characters imagine that there could be something between giving oneself over to a great cause on one hand, and selfish narcissism on the other. 'Our unpardonable error', D. thinks at one point, 'was to believe that what they call soul- I prefer to call it conscience- was no more than a projection of the old superseded egoism...what brutes we've been, to let it die in solitude!'
There's a hint of Conrad in Serge's sensibility as well; I found Unforgiving Years especially reminiscent of Nostromo in the sense of that chilly and formal Conradian distance between the reader and the characters. In Nostromo in particular, the reader tends to be on a surname basis with Conrad's characters, or a professional basis (nor do you ever feel that Conrad is your friend- he's a dimly seen figure telling you a story from the far end of a ship's deck, obviously indifferent as to whether you live or die), whereas in Unforgiving Years we're on a pseudonym basis- D. after all is also Sacha (that's how the name is transliterated in the NYRB edition, anyway) and later in Mexico Don Bruno, while Daria is also Erna. We can infer what country they're from, but we're never told explicitly. But as in Nostromo, the distance also serves to make the characters more mysterious, more like figures in a dream occasionally emerging from a haze of smoke and language, and therefore every word and gesture and description of a face becomes compelling.
D. and Daria are the survivors of a cult that filled '...to the brim the cup of existence', and an aspect of that survival is that they, D. anyway, can never quite escape the part of himself that wants to believe, that doesn't know what to do with the empty cup. But even Alain, so devoted early on in the novel to 'The Master' (Stalin, also, is never mentioned by name) and so ready to turn in D. for disloyalty, has started to awaken from ideology when he runs into Daria (a.k.a. Erna) at the end of the war, a conversation that really sounds like Serge debating with himself:
'...It's now been proved, Erna. I'm not destined to hang myself. It's decided.'Sensing that she is not convinced, he continues.
'And what have you decided?'
'I'm changing my life, changing my soul. I've realized that everything in this world is geared towards destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking...I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. I have the right to run away. From now on I only want to serve life, the only one I've got.'
'But your life will no longer be of any use', Erna objected.
'...One day on a slippery, disintegrating embankment I met an ex-soldier who spoke French...who had just returned from the penal colony at Kamchatka and was nostalgic for the fisheries there. 'So how many of you are behind the great Fatherland's barbed-wire fences?' I asked him. 'Millions', he answered...'Serge, wanted by both the Gestapo and the GRU, born in Brussels to Russian emigre parents and essentially stateless, managed to get on the last ship out of Marseille and eventually made it to Mexico, where he lived until his death of a heart attack in 1947, although he can't have felt particularly safe there; he arrived a few months after Trotsky was assassinated, which proved that the cult he'd once belonged to wasn't constrained by geography. According to Wikipedia, since Serge had no official nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, and he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican', perhaps strangely appropriate. The Mexico section that finishes this novel is truly stunning, evocative and elegiac and visceral, and probably the less said about it the better. But as 'Don Bruno' begins to tell Daria about his life there, in a small village in the Sierra Madre, he seems to paint an image of limbo, a place at the end of the world where everyone ends up who can't let go of the dream- or, as Daria still believes, 'we have no life beyond working for a great common destiny.'
'Tropical countries', he said, 'are full of aging men who still remember having followed dreams, wanting to become artists, scientists, discoverers, revolutionaries, reformers, sages! But one day they said to themselves: let's make some money first, otherwise we're powerless. And it was all the easier because they were diving into another powerlessness. They became wealthy; disillusioned with themselves and hence with everything, they frittered their lives away in gilding their cages, while a cynical bitterness grew within them. The best of them kept up subscriptions to high-minded journals...as a reminder of extinguished passions...they play bridge and continue to speculate in real estate and commodity values, largely out of habit...I know some of these men. We've smoked sad cigars together in good restaurants, pontificating about the war- not without flashes of insight. I've stopped seeing them, because some of them stupidly admire a dead revolution. They depend on it like an injection to prolong their final breathing.'
November 4, 2011
This has been described as Victor Serges best novel. Whilst being obviously his most ambitious work, containing some deep philosophising and disturbing portrayals of both what the effect the Second World War had upon civilian populations and also what it meant to live in fear of persecution from Stalinist agents, I found his earlier book 'The Case of Comrade Tulyaev better for lots more reasons. Possibly it was because I didn't like the flow of the book, it became quite confusing to link all the characters contained in the various different 'acts' (the book is split into four different, interlinked but still remotely different parts), but also because I found his descriptions of inhumanity quite disturbing to read. Really.
Victor Serge was subjected to harassment, incarceration, being ostracised and eventual exile because he was a supporter of Trotskys Left Opposition against the increasing dominance of Stalin. His experiences of being treated almost like a heretic are painted all to clear in his novels, none of which saw publication during his lifetime. Unforgiven Years was the last book he wrote whilst in exile in Mexico, and I suppose it portrays both Stalinist treachery and how World War Two affected him on a very personal level. There is some quite deep thinking here; deep, soul searching stuff about, not only Stalinist 'Terror', but also he delves into discourse via his characters of the nature of existence itself.
An interesting novel no doubt, more really as a insight into Victors mind after experiencing the first half of a very brutal and bloody Twentieth Century.
Victor Serge was subjected to harassment, incarceration, being ostracised and eventual exile because he was a supporter of Trotskys Left Opposition against the increasing dominance of Stalin. His experiences of being treated almost like a heretic are painted all to clear in his novels, none of which saw publication during his lifetime. Unforgiven Years was the last book he wrote whilst in exile in Mexico, and I suppose it portrays both Stalinist treachery and how World War Two affected him on a very personal level. There is some quite deep thinking here; deep, soul searching stuff about, not only Stalinist 'Terror', but also he delves into discourse via his characters of the nature of existence itself.
An interesting novel no doubt, more really as a insight into Victors mind after experiencing the first half of a very brutal and bloody Twentieth Century.
August 26, 2018
Unforgiving years.. What an exciting title, what a great book. One of those works which after finishing them you have this sense that the author gave all his soul and effort by writing and offer it to wide audience. Unfortunately for him, Victor Serge wrote it just a year before his death and very sadly he never had the chance to see it published.. But I 'm sure he knew that he left a legacy behind him.
The plot takes place over ten years, more specifically between '36 and '46 covering pre WWII period and a year after the end of conflicts. It is separated in 4 parts which are set in different places and times starring mostly two characters, although the goal is to highlight the whole era.
First part is set in Paris '36 where D, a soviet secret agent disgusted by soviet politics after those famous trials of Moscow and other facts, he openly complains to his superiors and resign from his duties in a period where an action like this means betrayal, with all that this implies.. Ready to leave Paris for USA with his lover, the last moment he meets Daria, a fellow agent and very admirable to him personality and discussing their future. Finally she decides to stay back. In this part the feeling of terror for the soviet state's reaction for his choice is extremely intensive and powerful. In second part we meet Daria, now in Russia, at '43 where she has been sent by the state to Kazakhstan for punishment and correction for her good relationship with D. But since the war is tough enough for Russia, they call her back and assign her to besieged Stalingrad to fight while her believing for unjust soviet dictatorship haven't change. In part three the date is '45, we follow Daria again and her actions as a secret spy working as nurse in a hospital in the last days of Reich in a bombing Berlin where someone can feel the horror of war and horror of German people to their own different dictatorship. Book ends in part four in Mexico at '46 with the reunion of the two former spies D. and Daria, no spoilers here.
Having a look at Victor Serge's life, someone can easily identify that perhaps this book contains a lot of autobiographical details. Many times I found myself thinking that through the voice of his characters Serge expressing his own believing and thoughts, or if he didn't exactly do this, it was the voice of many people who couldn't do it because of fear. Clearly a political reading with many parts being a novel of ideas and ideologies. The writer deals and focuses a lot with loyalty crisis and issues of consciousness. Difficult and demanding, tough but very well written, intense and powerful, a fantastic reading.
The plot takes place over ten years, more specifically between '36 and '46 covering pre WWII period and a year after the end of conflicts. It is separated in 4 parts which are set in different places and times starring mostly two characters, although the goal is to highlight the whole era.
First part is set in Paris '36 where D, a soviet secret agent disgusted by soviet politics after those famous trials of Moscow and other facts, he openly complains to his superiors and resign from his duties in a period where an action like this means betrayal, with all that this implies.. Ready to leave Paris for USA with his lover, the last moment he meets Daria, a fellow agent and very admirable to him personality and discussing their future. Finally she decides to stay back. In this part the feeling of terror for the soviet state's reaction for his choice is extremely intensive and powerful. In second part we meet Daria, now in Russia, at '43 where she has been sent by the state to Kazakhstan for punishment and correction for her good relationship with D. But since the war is tough enough for Russia, they call her back and assign her to besieged Stalingrad to fight while her believing for unjust soviet dictatorship haven't change. In part three the date is '45, we follow Daria again and her actions as a secret spy working as nurse in a hospital in the last days of Reich in a bombing Berlin where someone can feel the horror of war and horror of German people to their own different dictatorship. Book ends in part four in Mexico at '46 with the reunion of the two former spies D. and Daria, no spoilers here.
Having a look at Victor Serge's life, someone can easily identify that perhaps this book contains a lot of autobiographical details. Many times I found myself thinking that through the voice of his characters Serge expressing his own believing and thoughts, or if he didn't exactly do this, it was the voice of many people who couldn't do it because of fear. Clearly a political reading with many parts being a novel of ideas and ideologies. The writer deals and focuses a lot with loyalty crisis and issues of consciousness. Difficult and demanding, tough but very well written, intense and powerful, a fantastic reading.
April 1, 2020
This is a beautiful, beautiful book. At first..., I was not sure. I had to read half of it before I was convinced... and after reading Tulayev..., that Serge is probably a genius.
At any rate..., others are much better trained to read literature than I am... so take that observation for what little it's worth.
(A partial reread in 2020, during the plague, did not add much to what I had remembered. It loses a star on the second round)
At any rate..., others are much better trained to read literature than I am... so take that observation for what little it's worth.
(A partial reread in 2020, during the plague, did not add much to what I had remembered. It loses a star on the second round)
December 25, 2020
I cannot praise this book enough. It is epic in every last sense of the word. Originally written in French as Les Années sans pardon and released posthumously in 1971, Unforgiving Years is divided into four parts, the first three, like the panels in a Hieronymus Bosch triptych, altogether composing a panoramic view of the "disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century" (publisher's copy – I couldn't have said it better myself). The overall plot centers on two Russian comrades named D and Daria, yet the true subject is the madness, destruction, and ultimate disillusionment of Europe in the 1930s and '40s.
Part I, "The Secret Agent," follows a paranoid D as he races through pre-war Paris, having abandoned the Party and expecting reprisal at every turn. He knows that global catastrophe is on the horizon and seeks nothing more than freedom, beholden to nothing and no one. Serge illustrates brilliantly the mood of a city on the edge, in all of its Old World bourgeoisie decadence even as calamity looms. There is more fuss over the murder of gay sculptor than the ominous signs coming out of Germany. Except for his wife Nadine, D is a man alone, like the classical figure of Cassandra, a prophetess cursed by Apollo so that nobody would ever believe her predictions.
Part II, "The Flame Beneath the Snow," follows Daria through the siege of Leningrad, in all of its desperate, indomitable heroism. Once again, Serge is a master of evocation, easily bringing to life another city, this one barely holding out under both the Nazis and a brutal Russian winter. The reader is there when Daria enters in pitch black in the back of a truck, when she walks the bleak streets, when she witnesses the glare of rockets on the periphery.
Part III, entitled "Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs," is surprising. After describing so vividly the ordeal of Leningrad, Serge's humanizing depiction of Germans is simply astonishing. Individual characters – particularly despondent Brigitte, demoralized Gunther, and Franz Minus-Two, sarcastic double amputee – are complex and fully realized human beings written with an unflinching realism. Nor does Serge falter as we are taken on a tour of yet a third city, this one wearily facing final defeat even as some cling tenaciously to the ideals of the Third Reich. Interesting that each of the first three sections occupies an urban setting in crisis. Serge seems to be demonstrating the disparity between the heights of civilization and man's continuing inhumanity to man. "She's insane. Shock, schizophrenia? Whole continents have gone insane, civilization is a form of schizophrenia."
Part IV is "Journey's End." Part IV is rest and relief and, finally, light. Part IV is so shattering it will leave you breathless.
Seriously, please, read this. Serge, lifelong revolutionary, captures both the zeal of the true believer and the hollowness of the political apostate in dark, dense prose reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad, Serge delves deep into the human psyche, confronts head-on the brutality that lives there, and takes the reader on a corresponding physical journey through a threatening landscape that mirrors the chaos within. In other words, Unforgiving Years is not an uplifting book. It is bitter in tone and prone to lyrical flights of surrealism. Throughout, Serge emphasizes revolutionary fanaticism and world-weary disillusionment as only one who has experienced them possibly can. He writes with a fully authentic voice that effectively explores the full range of human emotions under conditions wholly foreign to the average American reader, today and yesterday: his characters persist through war, poverty, prison, undercover behind enemy lines, and on the run from Communist militants. Again, it is not a pleasant tale, but it is an important one, for it is, above all, an eloquent testimony to both the perils of political fanaticism and the dark rivers of the human heart.
Original Review
Part I, "The Secret Agent," follows a paranoid D as he races through pre-war Paris, having abandoned the Party and expecting reprisal at every turn. He knows that global catastrophe is on the horizon and seeks nothing more than freedom, beholden to nothing and no one. Serge illustrates brilliantly the mood of a city on the edge, in all of its Old World bourgeoisie decadence even as calamity looms. There is more fuss over the murder of gay sculptor than the ominous signs coming out of Germany. Except for his wife Nadine, D is a man alone, like the classical figure of Cassandra, a prophetess cursed by Apollo so that nobody would ever believe her predictions.
Part II, "The Flame Beneath the Snow," follows Daria through the siege of Leningrad, in all of its desperate, indomitable heroism. Once again, Serge is a master of evocation, easily bringing to life another city, this one barely holding out under both the Nazis and a brutal Russian winter. The reader is there when Daria enters in pitch black in the back of a truck, when she walks the bleak streets, when she witnesses the glare of rockets on the periphery.
Part III, entitled "Brigitte, Lightning, Lilacs," is surprising. After describing so vividly the ordeal of Leningrad, Serge's humanizing depiction of Germans is simply astonishing. Individual characters – particularly despondent Brigitte, demoralized Gunther, and Franz Minus-Two, sarcastic double amputee – are complex and fully realized human beings written with an unflinching realism. Nor does Serge falter as we are taken on a tour of yet a third city, this one wearily facing final defeat even as some cling tenaciously to the ideals of the Third Reich. Interesting that each of the first three sections occupies an urban setting in crisis. Serge seems to be demonstrating the disparity between the heights of civilization and man's continuing inhumanity to man. "She's insane. Shock, schizophrenia? Whole continents have gone insane, civilization is a form of schizophrenia."
Part IV is "Journey's End." Part IV is rest and relief and, finally, light. Part IV is so shattering it will leave you breathless.
Seriously, please, read this. Serge, lifelong revolutionary, captures both the zeal of the true believer and the hollowness of the political apostate in dark, dense prose reminiscent of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Like Conrad, Serge delves deep into the human psyche, confronts head-on the brutality that lives there, and takes the reader on a corresponding physical journey through a threatening landscape that mirrors the chaos within. In other words, Unforgiving Years is not an uplifting book. It is bitter in tone and prone to lyrical flights of surrealism. Throughout, Serge emphasizes revolutionary fanaticism and world-weary disillusionment as only one who has experienced them possibly can. He writes with a fully authentic voice that effectively explores the full range of human emotions under conditions wholly foreign to the average American reader, today and yesterday: his characters persist through war, poverty, prison, undercover behind enemy lines, and on the run from Communist militants. Again, it is not a pleasant tale, but it is an important one, for it is, above all, an eloquent testimony to both the perils of political fanaticism and the dark rivers of the human heart.
Original Review
October 28, 2020
A frustrating, dense, bleak narrative that seems to be fashioned out of blood, dirt, mangled steel, debris, crushed hopes, unfulfilled dreams and a lot more besides. Parts of it verge on the mystical. There are lots of orientalist and racist bits also.
The book is divided into four parts that I ended up visualizing as Autumn, Winter, Deepest Winter and Spring. This is by far the most lyrical and feverish of Serge's works. The prose is incisive and is clearly a hastily assembled distillation of the experiences of a very challenging life (I've read his 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary' also). Each one of the four parts of 'Unforgiving Years' has the potential to be expanded into an entire book.
The book is divided into four parts that I ended up visualizing as Autumn, Winter, Deepest Winter and Spring. This is by far the most lyrical and feverish of Serge's works. The prose is incisive and is clearly a hastily assembled distillation of the experiences of a very challenging life (I've read his 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary' also). Each one of the four parts of 'Unforgiving Years' has the potential to be expanded into an entire book.
January 3, 2013
I suspect that, in addition to this being a ghastlily muddled narrative, which is Victor Serge's fault (but ascribed to modernist sensibilities by Serge fans), the translation by Richard Greeman must be lacking. Greeman's introduction was unimpressive, and whoever wrote the little NYRB biography of Serge at the beginning (was it Greeman too?) desperately needs to be schooled on paragraph writing. When every sentence in a paragraph has exactly the same structure, it feels like being hit on the head with a hammer repeatedly. Really, it's painful.
July 1, 2017
I really don't have much to say about this novel. I just couldn't get on with the writing style and it was a story that wasn't very interesting at the beginning, but got less and less interesting page after page, like I was sinking in a quicksand of nothing relevant. I wanted something deeper about the Stalin purges than the thought of "could they really be guilty?'. I wanted so much more and was disappointed.
December 8, 2011
Appallingly exquisite. Worth reading again and again, letting the words wash over the senses... Greeman's translation seems to have a life of its own. The book deals masterfully with the European aspects of the War, interrogating Western consciousness. Serge's perspective is nevertheless encrusted with orientalism. His (not inconsiderable) sense of humanity had some obvious limits...
January 31, 2014
After p. 100.
My summary judgement of the first section of this novel is that one should not even begin to think that one has even the most tenuous grasp of Victor Serge as he might have been by reading his "Memoirs" and none of his novels, certainly without having read the first 100 pages of "Unforgiving Years".
At my advanced age I should have called to mind a rule of mine before I commented on "Memoirs" - advance no thought before its time. I remembered after the fact that I felt I had constructed just the most tentative of senses about who Henry James might have been only after I had read (and thought about) twelve or fourteen biographies and as many pages of his late novels as I could stomach. (I find his characters so revolting that I can not tolerate them for more than 150-200 pages.) Nonetheless, I included in my comments on "Memoirs" that I had begun to think of VS as a sort of zombie. I'm sure that VS had his reasons for presenting himself in that book in such a way that an attentive reader could form that impression - reasonably, but I should have reserved judgement - certainly until I had read the first section of "Unforgiving Years."
I do not claim that these pages would withstand scholarly scrutiny as a source of biographical information. I don't really care today whether they would or wouldn't. And I will not repeat the cautions that usually render biographers skeptical of works of fiction as guides to an understanding of their authors. But today, nevertheless, and the contrary notwithstanding, I choose to believe that in pp. 76-87 VS is altogether truthful in his revelations and disclosures of himself and the quality of his experience during the late 1930s. And what a wonderfully admirable specimen of a human being, of whom there are astonishingly few among the bipeds who can muster 46 chromosomes per cell!
And the most surprising and illuminating revelation that I found in this section appears on pages 84-86, in which VS expresses a sympathetic assessment of Joseph Stalin, which he apparently formed while he was in France after his expulsion from the party and the USSR in the late 1930s and before he fled Europe for Mexico in 1941 - if I recall that particular detail of his biography correctly. How is it possible that anyone could be so detached, equinimious (Someday I'll learn to spell that word correctly - maybe.), sympathetic, generous, even kindly, in his judgements of Stalin, while simultaneously living out his own little vignette in the unfolding of Stalin's terror? Truly astonishing and moving - provided, of course, that I accept his apparent sincerity and honesty at face value - and I do - today.
After p. 200.
At this point it seems quite clear that VS intended to write a novel of dissent and refusal to accept Stalin's state, to portray the experiences of certain individuals who said "I am and I do not consent!" (p. 195). The three episodes I've read occur between about 1937/8 (years of Stalin's terror), during the siege of Leningrad and during the last months of WWII (in Berlin), which places that section in 1945. So the context and the consequences of dissent and refusal differ from section to section. The essential traits of the central characters of each episode are remarkably similar, however, as are their circumstances - at the extremes of human endurance, I would say. Most are Russians/Soviets, and one is German. So VS, as generous as always, finds exemplars in Berlin as well. It's all quite interesting how one could dissent and refuse in such subtile and devious way - moving.
I'm sensing more and more that this novel and Grossman's "Life and Fate" share a family resemblance. Both portray exceptional human beings, VS - those truly human creatures who say "I am and I do not consent!," who still work as they can to realize the loftiest democratic/humanitarian goals of the revolution in 1917/18, who expose and oppose Stalin's betrayal of the revolution without regard to consequences; VG - those exceptional individuals who will not and do not allow "human kindness" to perish from the Earth - at whatever cost.
The novel is really quite a revelation to me. I understand the quality of mind and emotion that motivated militant revolutionaries, especially those who came to Bolshevism by way of anarchism. I also understand ever more clearly why Soviet authority could not permit such individuals as VS's militant characters to exist.
At end.
It appears to me that in the last section of the novel VS deals with the question of commitment to a thorough, revolutionary transformation of the world, especially among militant opponents of Stalin, who formerly belonged to Trotsky's Left Opposition. The question of commitment arises among the characters, all of whom were/are militants, who have survived the terror, exile, the siege of Leningrad and the destruction of Berlin - in short after surviving depravation of every imaginable variety in the extreme and witnessing the deaths of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and knowing of the deaths of millions. After these experiences is revolutionary militancy at all possible to sustain?
One character rejects militancy. "I'm changing my life, changing my soul. I've realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking ... I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. The right to defend myself and to run away. From now on I only want to serve life - my own to start with, the only one I've got." (p. 272)
A second character, utterly shattered, has lapsed into some undiagnosed but nonetheless, very real and severe mental illness.
Two other characters, both of whom were also left-wing revolutionaries of an anarchist stripe, left oppositionists, one, a man with many names, whom I consider to be VS's self-portrait, victim of the terror, the other, a woman, Daria, a survivor of exile imposed during the terror, a survivor of the siege of Leningrad AND the destruction of Berlin - at the end an all but entirely shattered human being. After WWII these two meet after years of separation, but they can hardly speak of the question that is in both minds. By the last page of the novel, Daria has no answer to a question that VS doesn't pose directly. The VS character, however, still thinks: "One should never consent to everything, there are always non-consentments, refusals to be maintained ... Our failure to admit this was the great error, or one of them." (p. 326) His very last thought on the matter is an unqualified commitment to militancy - to his commitment to the anarchist/Left Oppositionist understanding of revolution and to their vision of the post-revolutionary world: "Be hard, never give in, believe, believe-know! Will! Everything will be transformed ... This sick and crazy world..." (p. 327)
So what to make of all of this?
As I written elsewhere, if I remember correctly, I view most anything I read as a document of greater or lesser historical/biographical significance or interest. Once upon a time, literary merit concerned me, but no longer. So rightly or wrongly, I take from this altogether engaging novel a rather full sense of VS's inner life, I think, a sense that is a reading of "Memoirs" evokes not at all. I must read more.
My summary judgement of the first section of this novel is that one should not even begin to think that one has even the most tenuous grasp of Victor Serge as he might have been by reading his "Memoirs" and none of his novels, certainly without having read the first 100 pages of "Unforgiving Years".
At my advanced age I should have called to mind a rule of mine before I commented on "Memoirs" - advance no thought before its time. I remembered after the fact that I felt I had constructed just the most tentative of senses about who Henry James might have been only after I had read (and thought about) twelve or fourteen biographies and as many pages of his late novels as I could stomach. (I find his characters so revolting that I can not tolerate them for more than 150-200 pages.) Nonetheless, I included in my comments on "Memoirs" that I had begun to think of VS as a sort of zombie. I'm sure that VS had his reasons for presenting himself in that book in such a way that an attentive reader could form that impression - reasonably, but I should have reserved judgement - certainly until I had read the first section of "Unforgiving Years."
I do not claim that these pages would withstand scholarly scrutiny as a source of biographical information. I don't really care today whether they would or wouldn't. And I will not repeat the cautions that usually render biographers skeptical of works of fiction as guides to an understanding of their authors. But today, nevertheless, and the contrary notwithstanding, I choose to believe that in pp. 76-87 VS is altogether truthful in his revelations and disclosures of himself and the quality of his experience during the late 1930s. And what a wonderfully admirable specimen of a human being, of whom there are astonishingly few among the bipeds who can muster 46 chromosomes per cell!
And the most surprising and illuminating revelation that I found in this section appears on pages 84-86, in which VS expresses a sympathetic assessment of Joseph Stalin, which he apparently formed while he was in France after his expulsion from the party and the USSR in the late 1930s and before he fled Europe for Mexico in 1941 - if I recall that particular detail of his biography correctly. How is it possible that anyone could be so detached, equinimious (Someday I'll learn to spell that word correctly - maybe.), sympathetic, generous, even kindly, in his judgements of Stalin, while simultaneously living out his own little vignette in the unfolding of Stalin's terror? Truly astonishing and moving - provided, of course, that I accept his apparent sincerity and honesty at face value - and I do - today.
After p. 200.
At this point it seems quite clear that VS intended to write a novel of dissent and refusal to accept Stalin's state, to portray the experiences of certain individuals who said "I am and I do not consent!" (p. 195). The three episodes I've read occur between about 1937/8 (years of Stalin's terror), during the siege of Leningrad and during the last months of WWII (in Berlin), which places that section in 1945. So the context and the consequences of dissent and refusal differ from section to section. The essential traits of the central characters of each episode are remarkably similar, however, as are their circumstances - at the extremes of human endurance, I would say. Most are Russians/Soviets, and one is German. So VS, as generous as always, finds exemplars in Berlin as well. It's all quite interesting how one could dissent and refuse in such subtile and devious way - moving.
I'm sensing more and more that this novel and Grossman's "Life and Fate" share a family resemblance. Both portray exceptional human beings, VS - those truly human creatures who say "I am and I do not consent!," who still work as they can to realize the loftiest democratic/humanitarian goals of the revolution in 1917/18, who expose and oppose Stalin's betrayal of the revolution without regard to consequences; VG - those exceptional individuals who will not and do not allow "human kindness" to perish from the Earth - at whatever cost.
The novel is really quite a revelation to me. I understand the quality of mind and emotion that motivated militant revolutionaries, especially those who came to Bolshevism by way of anarchism. I also understand ever more clearly why Soviet authority could not permit such individuals as VS's militant characters to exist.
At end.
It appears to me that in the last section of the novel VS deals with the question of commitment to a thorough, revolutionary transformation of the world, especially among militant opponents of Stalin, who formerly belonged to Trotsky's Left Opposition. The question of commitment arises among the characters, all of whom were/are militants, who have survived the terror, exile, the siege of Leningrad and the destruction of Berlin - in short after surviving depravation of every imaginable variety in the extreme and witnessing the deaths of thousands, perhaps tens of thousands, and knowing of the deaths of millions. After these experiences is revolutionary militancy at all possible to sustain?
One character rejects militancy. "I'm changing my life, changing my soul. I've realized that everything in this world is geared to destroying mankind, to destroying me, among others. Everything: even the faith I once had. The Party, the triumphant revolution, I used to believe in all that. Deep down I still believe in it, but only as one believes in a dream after waking ... I am on my own. I have the right to want to live, even through the decline of Europe. The right to defend myself and to run away. From now on I only want to serve life - my own to start with, the only one I've got." (p. 272)
A second character, utterly shattered, has lapsed into some undiagnosed but nonetheless, very real and severe mental illness.
Two other characters, both of whom were also left-wing revolutionaries of an anarchist stripe, left oppositionists, one, a man with many names, whom I consider to be VS's self-portrait, victim of the terror, the other, a woman, Daria, a survivor of exile imposed during the terror, a survivor of the siege of Leningrad AND the destruction of Berlin - at the end an all but entirely shattered human being. After WWII these two meet after years of separation, but they can hardly speak of the question that is in both minds. By the last page of the novel, Daria has no answer to a question that VS doesn't pose directly. The VS character, however, still thinks: "One should never consent to everything, there are always non-consentments, refusals to be maintained ... Our failure to admit this was the great error, or one of them." (p. 326) His very last thought on the matter is an unqualified commitment to militancy - to his commitment to the anarchist/Left Oppositionist understanding of revolution and to their vision of the post-revolutionary world: "Be hard, never give in, believe, believe-know! Will! Everything will be transformed ... This sick and crazy world..." (p. 327)
So what to make of all of this?
As I written elsewhere, if I remember correctly, I view most anything I read as a document of greater or lesser historical/biographical significance or interest. Once upon a time, literary merit concerned me, but no longer. So rightly or wrongly, I take from this altogether engaging novel a rather full sense of VS's inner life, I think, a sense that is a reading of "Memoirs" evokes not at all. I must read more.
April 28, 2015
http://www.mytwostotinki.com/?p=1406
Unforgiving Years - a very suitable title for a novel that is reflecting the lives of the protagonists of Victor Serge's posthumously published book about a group of life-long revolutionaries that have broken with the Communist Party after the show trials of the years 1936/37 in Moscow and the great purges in the Soviet Union, followed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
D - like all Comintern agents he is using several names and passports - has sent his "letter of resignation" to the service, a step that can result in any moment in retribution, i.e. assassination by one of the services loyal agents. Defectors are considered as traitors and have to be eliminated, in pre-War Paris where the novel starts like in any place of the world where Stalin's long arm is reaching.
The novel consists of four sections, which are like large panels of a painting that shows the ideological, physical and personal devastations of these Unforgiving Years. In the first part, D is preparing his and his partner Noemi's escape to the New World; the atmosphere is that of growing paranoia: both fear for very good reasons that a killer commando is after them and they are using all stratagems of conspiracy to stay safe. D tries to convince Daria, a close friend and fellow revolutionary whom he knows a long time (and was once in love with) to join them, but to no avail. Daria has made up her mind to go back to the Soviet Union.
In part Two, we are following Daria's fate in the steppe of Kazakhstan and during the blockade of Leningrad. In part Three, she is on a dangerous mission behing enemy lines in a bombed-out German city during the last days of the war. These parts are full with some of the most impressive pages I have read about WWII; characters like the young officer Klim, the cripple Franz or the girl Brigitte and her fate leave a very strong impression on the reader. In the last part, Daria finally defects too and is joining D and Noemi - they have established themselves as small farmers in a remote part of Mexico - hoping that they have finally escaped the wrath of Stalin and the tentacles of his secret army of agents and killerati.
It is interesting to compare Serge's novel with a few others written by so-called renegades; authors that were not only "fellow-travelers" of communism but that participated actively as Comintern agents or in other official or secret function in the fight for the revolution (or for Stalin), and that grew more and more disappointed after the trials and the pact with the devil Nazism. Unforgiving Years, Like a Tear in the Ocean (by Manes Sperber), The Great Crusade (by Gustav Regler), Darkness at Noon (by Arthur Koestler), and I could mention also many other works by Silone, Spender, Malraux, Orwell and others - they all have a central character that turns after a long inner fight from a convinced communist and revolutionary into a renegade, a person that objects to brutal and inhumane Stalinist ideology.
Contrary to the other mentioned authors, Serge was a life-long activist and a revolutionary by birth so to say. He was born into a Russian family of emigrants in Brussels - a distant relative was the explosives expert of the anarchist group that assassinated Czar Alexander II -, got involved in the activities of an anarchist group (probably the first one to use cars as escape vehicles during their bank robberies), served some time in prison and went shortly after the October Revolution to the Soviet Union were he became a part of the so-called "Left Opposition". The later part of his life resembles a lot that of the novel's main character,
Against all odds, this is also a novel of hope. D is expressing it after Daria arrives at his farm in Mexico and finds him changed and more calm, even philosophical:
"Every bit of basalt has its crown of greenery and flowers sprung from lifeless aridity. It's a miracle of resurrection, like when the snows melt in our cold countries... For months there was nothing to see but a dried-up desert; who could guess that beneath the calcinated ground, millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate. We observe that he true power is not that of darkness, or barrenness, but of life. All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist."
For me, Unforgiving Years is first of all a novel about the conscience and responsibility of the individual. Quite in the beginning, D - who is also the narrator of this part - says something that reflects perfectly the author's opinion of that question, I suppose. And I think it is worth it to quote it in detail:
"What is "conscience"? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today's mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don't even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I'm behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther's words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, "God help me!" What will come to help me?"
From his memoirs which I had read long ago, I knew that Serge was an interesting author. Judging from Unforgiving Years it seems that he was even a very accomplished novelist who is still to discover; the very informative preface of the translator explains us that a recent biography on Serge wants to make us believe that "writing, for Serge, was something to do only when he was unable to fight." (Susan Weissman, The Course Is Set On Hope, Verso 2002). I find this opinion wrong and the biographer's decision to reduce Serge to anti-Stalinist fighter and propagandist only diminishes this extraordinary novelist without reason.
In a perfect world, the works of Serge and other writers who tried to open the world's eyes to see the ugly truth about Stalinism, would be read far more widespread - and the works of those authors who started their careers as GPU henchmen that organised the assassination of renegades and ended up as Stalin or Nobel Prize winners would be, where they belong...but, as we all know, the Pablo Neruda industry is still blooming, whereas Serge is still virtually unknown to a big part of the reading public.
Thanks to New York Review Books, at least several of Serge's books are available in English and we readers can do him justice: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Midnight in the Century, Conquered City, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years, a masterpiece that I can recommend strongly.
Unforgiving Years - a very suitable title for a novel that is reflecting the lives of the protagonists of Victor Serge's posthumously published book about a group of life-long revolutionaries that have broken with the Communist Party after the show trials of the years 1936/37 in Moscow and the great purges in the Soviet Union, followed by the Ribbentrop-Molotov pact between Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
D - like all Comintern agents he is using several names and passports - has sent his "letter of resignation" to the service, a step that can result in any moment in retribution, i.e. assassination by one of the services loyal agents. Defectors are considered as traitors and have to be eliminated, in pre-War Paris where the novel starts like in any place of the world where Stalin's long arm is reaching.
The novel consists of four sections, which are like large panels of a painting that shows the ideological, physical and personal devastations of these Unforgiving Years. In the first part, D is preparing his and his partner Noemi's escape to the New World; the atmosphere is that of growing paranoia: both fear for very good reasons that a killer commando is after them and they are using all stratagems of conspiracy to stay safe. D tries to convince Daria, a close friend and fellow revolutionary whom he knows a long time (and was once in love with) to join them, but to no avail. Daria has made up her mind to go back to the Soviet Union.
In part Two, we are following Daria's fate in the steppe of Kazakhstan and during the blockade of Leningrad. In part Three, she is on a dangerous mission behing enemy lines in a bombed-out German city during the last days of the war. These parts are full with some of the most impressive pages I have read about WWII; characters like the young officer Klim, the cripple Franz or the girl Brigitte and her fate leave a very strong impression on the reader. In the last part, Daria finally defects too and is joining D and Noemi - they have established themselves as small farmers in a remote part of Mexico - hoping that they have finally escaped the wrath of Stalin and the tentacles of his secret army of agents and killerati.
It is interesting to compare Serge's novel with a few others written by so-called renegades; authors that were not only "fellow-travelers" of communism but that participated actively as Comintern agents or in other official or secret function in the fight for the revolution (or for Stalin), and that grew more and more disappointed after the trials and the pact with the devil Nazism. Unforgiving Years, Like a Tear in the Ocean (by Manes Sperber), The Great Crusade (by Gustav Regler), Darkness at Noon (by Arthur Koestler), and I could mention also many other works by Silone, Spender, Malraux, Orwell and others - they all have a central character that turns after a long inner fight from a convinced communist and revolutionary into a renegade, a person that objects to brutal and inhumane Stalinist ideology.
Contrary to the other mentioned authors, Serge was a life-long activist and a revolutionary by birth so to say. He was born into a Russian family of emigrants in Brussels - a distant relative was the explosives expert of the anarchist group that assassinated Czar Alexander II -, got involved in the activities of an anarchist group (probably the first one to use cars as escape vehicles during their bank robberies), served some time in prison and went shortly after the October Revolution to the Soviet Union were he became a part of the so-called "Left Opposition". The later part of his life resembles a lot that of the novel's main character,
Against all odds, this is also a novel of hope. D is expressing it after Daria arrives at his farm in Mexico and finds him changed and more calm, even philosophical:
"Every bit of basalt has its crown of greenery and flowers sprung from lifeless aridity. It's a miracle of resurrection, like when the snows melt in our cold countries... For months there was nothing to see but a dried-up desert; who could guess that beneath the calcinated ground, millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate. We observe that he true power is not that of darkness, or barrenness, but of life. All that exists cries, whispers, or sings that we must never despair, for true death does not exist."
For me, Unforgiving Years is first of all a novel about the conscience and responsibility of the individual. Quite in the beginning, D - who is also the narrator of this part - says something that reflects perfectly the author's opinion of that question, I suppose. And I think it is worth it to quote it in detail:
"What is "conscience"? A residue of beliefs inculcated in us from the time of primitive taboos until today's mass press? Psychologists have come up with an appropriate term for these imprints deep within us: the superego, they say. I have nothing left to invoke but conscience, and I don't even know what it is. I feel an ineffectual protest surging up from a deep and unknown part of me to challenge destructive expediency, power, the whole of material reality, and in the name of what? Inner enlightenment? I'm behaving almost like a believer. I cannot do otherwise: Luther's words. Except that the German visionary who flung his inkwell at the devil went on to add, "God help me!" What will come to help me?"
From his memoirs which I had read long ago, I knew that Serge was an interesting author. Judging from Unforgiving Years it seems that he was even a very accomplished novelist who is still to discover; the very informative preface of the translator explains us that a recent biography on Serge wants to make us believe that "writing, for Serge, was something to do only when he was unable to fight." (Susan Weissman, The Course Is Set On Hope, Verso 2002). I find this opinion wrong and the biographer's decision to reduce Serge to anti-Stalinist fighter and propagandist only diminishes this extraordinary novelist without reason.
In a perfect world, the works of Serge and other writers who tried to open the world's eyes to see the ugly truth about Stalinism, would be read far more widespread - and the works of those authors who started their careers as GPU henchmen that organised the assassination of renegades and ended up as Stalin or Nobel Prize winners would be, where they belong...but, as we all know, the Pablo Neruda industry is still blooming, whereas Serge is still virtually unknown to a big part of the reading public.
Thanks to New York Review Books, at least several of Serge's books are available in English and we readers can do him justice: Memoirs of a Revolutionary, Midnight in the Century, Conquered City, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, and Unforgiving Years, a masterpiece that I can recommend strongly.
October 30, 2015
an hallucinatory, nightmarish, apocalyptic vision lyrically submerged with a surrealistic, horrifying reality. gripping!!
October 15, 2019
What a man, what a book, and what a life. Surely one of the best ignored-writers of all time. His life itself was as fascinating as his work of literature. One of my all-time favorites.
March 1, 2022
A few short passage from Unforgiving Years:
*
No one suspected anything. Unbelievable that They hadn’t moved to place me under internal surveillance months ago! But if the unbelievable were not sometimes a reality, there would be no possibility of struggle.
*
Should I join them? Would they believe in me, when I don’t believe in them? I can believe in nothing now but power. Truth, stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth. Power is against them, against me, there’s nothing we can do about it. The torrent is washing us away.
*
We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned…
*
One of the charms of Paris, unique in the world, is that people here neglect ferociousness – that power – and the organized brutality that drives great empires. A grandeur of another order is germinating here in the very rottenness (all social grandeurs are rooted in a compost of decay), ahead of its time. We may pay dearly for this clumsy attempt at a human life, more human than ever…
*
*
No one suspected anything. Unbelievable that They hadn’t moved to place me under internal surveillance months ago! But if the unbelievable were not sometimes a reality, there would be no possibility of struggle.
*
Should I join them? Would they believe in me, when I don’t believe in them? I can believe in nothing now but power. Truth, stripped of its metaphysical poetry, exists only in the brain. Destroy a few brains, quickly done! Then, goodbye truth. Power is against them, against me, there’s nothing we can do about it. The torrent is washing us away.
*
We all construct elaborate traps for ourselves, and when we walk straight into them, we’re stunned…
*
One of the charms of Paris, unique in the world, is that people here neglect ferociousness – that power – and the organized brutality that drives great empires. A grandeur of another order is germinating here in the very rottenness (all social grandeurs are rooted in a compost of decay), ahead of its time. We may pay dearly for this clumsy attempt at a human life, more human than ever…
*
Read
April 22, 2015So after last week's debacle, after I laid that goose egg, after the rare route in the lifelong battle against ignorance, I had hoped to return this week at double-speed. Alas. I only read the one book, and even then only barely. Part of this is because I'm under the gun with Those Below, and I'm moving out of my apartment, and I'm going traveling at the end of the month, and also for other reasons that don't need to be entered in on. But mostly because Unforgiving Years is not a page turner, not something to skim while defecating or half-read in a bar while eying a pretty girl. Simultaneously complex in language, structure, and thought, Unforgiving Years chronicles the terrible brutality of the years leading up to an immediately after WWII. It is loosely the story of Daria, a Soviet revolutionary struggling against the onslaught of Fascism while trying to survive Stalin's savage series of purges, although really this is to simplify the matter immensely.
It is a fantastic book. It is a minor masterpiece. It is very, very hard to read. The complexity of Serge's language and thought, the curious shifts in perspective—he has a habit of slipping seamlessly from one character to another so that you barely notice he has done so—are not easily comprehended, not even to a relatively capable reader. Moreover, the subject matter itself, which, though despairing, is not nihilistic, is similarly something of a challenge. The third portion of the novel in particular, which chronicles Daria's mission in war-ravaged Germany, is ferocious and disturbing, the imagery horrifying, the prose chaotic. Serge's perspective as true witness to war—he fought for the Red Army during the Russian revolution—offers an authentically tragic perspective on what is one of the darkest periods of human history, when the full potential of the industrial age has been turned towards the eradication of all that is decent and noble and innocent in humankind.
It took me a while, but it was worth it. And it got me thinking some about difficult literature, and of the things that books ask of us. Books can serve different purposes—to educate, to entertain, to enlighten, although the last I think it ultimately the most important. But revelation is not something which can be easily granted—it requires struggle, it requires sacrifice. The best books, in my opinion, are usually not the easy ones, not the downhill sprints (though they can be fun also). They're the rough ones, the ones that force us to stretch ourselves, the ones that stare back at us from our bedside tables contemptuously, challenging our attention. Unforgiving Years is one of these books, though a reader who makes the attempt will find not only a profound meditation on the nature of man, and on the foolish, formless optimism which is a requirement to avoid the weight of nihilism, but also a work of immense lyrical and aesthetic excellence. Highly recommended.
It is a fantastic book. It is a minor masterpiece. It is very, very hard to read. The complexity of Serge's language and thought, the curious shifts in perspective—he has a habit of slipping seamlessly from one character to another so that you barely notice he has done so—are not easily comprehended, not even to a relatively capable reader. Moreover, the subject matter itself, which, though despairing, is not nihilistic, is similarly something of a challenge. The third portion of the novel in particular, which chronicles Daria's mission in war-ravaged Germany, is ferocious and disturbing, the imagery horrifying, the prose chaotic. Serge's perspective as true witness to war—he fought for the Red Army during the Russian revolution—offers an authentically tragic perspective on what is one of the darkest periods of human history, when the full potential of the industrial age has been turned towards the eradication of all that is decent and noble and innocent in humankind.
It took me a while, but it was worth it. And it got me thinking some about difficult literature, and of the things that books ask of us. Books can serve different purposes—to educate, to entertain, to enlighten, although the last I think it ultimately the most important. But revelation is not something which can be easily granted—it requires struggle, it requires sacrifice. The best books, in my opinion, are usually not the easy ones, not the downhill sprints (though they can be fun also). They're the rough ones, the ones that force us to stretch ourselves, the ones that stare back at us from our bedside tables contemptuously, challenging our attention. Unforgiving Years is one of these books, though a reader who makes the attempt will find not only a profound meditation on the nature of man, and on the foolish, formless optimism which is a requirement to avoid the weight of nihilism, but also a work of immense lyrical and aesthetic excellence. Highly recommended.
September 21, 2016
A grim, beautiful, anxious assessment of 1917 and its aftermath -- written in exile in Mexico in 1946. After all the betrayals and murder, Serge still holds out hope for a revolutionary renewal.
Every page is poetry. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
On 1930s revolutionaries:
"There is no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world moving toward cataclysms, lurching from one cataclysm to the next."
On the Russian army at Leningrad:
"retreat is the preparation for a counterattack, flight is the opportunity to regroup, and defeat is fundamentally a maneuver."
On life during total war:
"After all, there's some philosophical solace to be found in the fact that some still live while others die, an obvious improvement on everyone dying ..."
On a cactus:
"... only the cactuses survive, thanks to their bitter energy and what scarce moisture is condensed by the night... Proof that a humble, resistant victory is nearly always possible, even if it amounts to little more than holding out."
On spring in the desert:
"For months there was nothing to see but a dried up desert; who could guess that beneath that calcined ground millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate.... There must come after the desert seasons. We shall see ideas, forces, men, and works sprouting up from the graveyards, no matter the rot and decay...."
Every page is poetry. Here are some of my favorite quotes:
On 1930s revolutionaries:
"There is no real peace for those who understand the mechanics of a world moving toward cataclysms, lurching from one cataclysm to the next."
On the Russian army at Leningrad:
"retreat is the preparation for a counterattack, flight is the opportunity to regroup, and defeat is fundamentally a maneuver."
On life during total war:
"After all, there's some philosophical solace to be found in the fact that some still live while others die, an obvious improvement on everyone dying ..."
On a cactus:
"... only the cactuses survive, thanks to their bitter energy and what scarce moisture is condensed by the night... Proof that a humble, resistant victory is nearly always possible, even if it amounts to little more than holding out."
On spring in the desert:
"For months there was nothing to see but a dried up desert; who could guess that beneath that calcined ground millions of invincible seeds were concealed, ready to germinate.... There must come after the desert seasons. We shall see ideas, forces, men, and works sprouting up from the graveyards, no matter the rot and decay...."
February 8, 2019
110711: Uneven. There are several novels here, several plots, single recurring character, and a sense of honest idealism betrayed by contingencies of the world. Revolution, war, espionage, all international, from the perspectives of each group, he could have made several works, but this works sometimes as each story interweaves with other. First, easiest to follow, is paranoid life of the secret agent, then the revolution in Russia, the war in Berlin, the ending in Mexico. Some political diversions, but it is interesting to follow plot motivated by politics in all situations...
July 24, 2016
The book is more four novellas based around the Second World War. The first story takes place in Paris, and the work of two Soviet spies. It does a good job of depicting the paranoia of spy craft. The second is set in Stalingrad during the German siege. The third is set in a rural German town as the occupants await the approaching Soviet army. The last story takes place in Mexico as two people flee Stalin, and run into difficulties traveling the country side. To say the least, Serge is not a good communist.
July 21, 2010
Seeing as the protagonists are true-believer Communists in the 30s and 40s, this book is occasionally mind-numbing, which is only appropriate. It's occasionally deeply moving, which is only appropriate. What I didn't expect but was so happy to find was the black humor all through it, the irony as deep as the earnestness. And when it ends, you can't decide it if it's mercy or crime.
October 18, 2016
This is one of the most satisfying books that I have ever read in dealing with the complexities of being human in the modern world. Haunting, poetic, reflective, and genuine.
"Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life, an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness?" p. 307
"Why write, why read, if not to offer, to find, a larger image of life, an image of man as deep as the problems that make up his greatness?" p. 307
April 12, 2022
Great book by an ex-Russian official based on the author's (Victor Serge's) own life (back in the late 1930s or Mid-40s) who, an anarchist and an ex-prisoner, joined the Bolshevik Revolution and experienced the rapid collapse of it into despotism and terror under Stalin through WWII. Serge (or "D" as he is called in the book), a poet, novelist and historian became journalist, editor and translator for the Comintern in 1919, an organization dedicated to advocating for the rise of communism under the Soviet Union. Critical of Stalin's regime, he leaves his post, extremely paranoid - knowing - that the Russians would hunt him down and exterminate him. He suspects everyone. He and his girlfriend, less set on escaping, separate and go their separate ways. The story shifts hard to her, who becomes a journalist during the Soviet war with Germany and the suffering that entailed. She escapes to a bombed out German city where she survives until the end of the war. She then migrates to Mexico to find D, who has transplanted his paranoiac-self in remote Mexico to hide from the Soviets who will stop at nothing to kill him. That's all I'll tell. But it is a very, very well written book, although down 4 different trails, delving into the psyche's of the individuals impacted by the period. I've always wanted to read a book about someone(s) who participated in the Bolshevik revolution and then the hardening of the communist state under Stalin, from the inside. It's made me want to read some more of Serge's works, his most famous being Memoir of a Revolutionary.
Read
March 2, 2018Κριτική παρουσίαση του βιβλίου από τον Μπάμπη Κουρουνδή στο δεύτερό μας τεύχος: https://marginalia.gr/arthro/chronia-...
December 26, 2023
Daria parts 4 stars
Sacha part 2 stars
Sacha part 2 stars
May 21, 2023
Awful and beautiful all at once. Examines war, conscience, and the fate of humankind in the face of annihilation from different angles in poetic and heartrending prose.
February 17, 2016
I'd probably give this book four and a half stars if I could I liked the minor characters like Harris and Klim I liked the part w Daria in Stalingrad the best I thought the third part was kinda tedious I guess you could read Daria and sascha being the same pwrson?? Uhh I'm an idiot
November 18, 2019
beautiful but a very difficult read. maybe it's just me but I had a hard time following the flow and sentence structures; this book was definitely written by someone who is at the end of their career and has seen quite a bit.
May 17, 2022
This is not a book for those who read at night and then expect a peaceful rest. Unforgiving Years is four long chapters. The first take places in Paris just before WWII. Two Soviet spies, a couple, have become alientated by Stalin's insane purges. And so they plan their escape. Just before leaving the man meets with an old friend, Daria, also a spy, who doesn't join them but promises not to put their plan in jeopardy. In the second chapter we find Daria in Leningrad helping to defend the city from the German onslaught. A million dead rot where they've fallen and another million are on the brink of starvation. Victor Serge's description of the city's suffering is graphic and profound. (It made me wonder that a people who suffered so much would then impose that suffering on Ukraine.) Next we are in Berlin in its last days before the collapse of the Third Reich. Another gut wrenching description of a city in ruins though with some of the residents still thrilled that Hitler got rid of the Jews and Slavs and all the "subhumans." The last chapter I won't explain. It takes place in Mexico with a wonderful plot twist.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 74 reviews