the case of comrade tulayev by victor serge

It also includes a novel-”The Case of Comrade Tulayev”-which many think comparable to the work of George Orwell and Arthur Koestler as a fictional depiction of the moral nightmare of Stalinism and which has the additional distinction of having been written by a survivor of same. The archive includes some essential personal reminiscences and glimpses of real people and real events. Not only did Serge put up a fight against Stalin every step of the way, he also committed almost all of his thoughts and experiences to paper (often at vast risk to himself), and much of this imperishable trove has survived. You might think that the rest of the story-disillusionment followed by deportation, imprisonment, persecution, exile and death-more or less wrote itself. He made his way back to the country of his forebears and hoped to see it transformed into the first socialist workers’ republic. But the events of October 1917 caused him to mutate from rebel to revolutionary. His early life was that of an outsider almost a bandit, in the louche anarchistic milieu that flourished after the fin de siecle. Born to a family of Russian revolutionary exiles, Serge was brought up in Belgium-the Belgium of King Leopold’s Congo and the Belgium that furnished the pretext for World War I. The life of her subject was a near microcosm of the fate of the revolutionary left in the 20th century.

Susan Weissman’s study of Victor Serge meets all the above conditions. At the point where this is done properly, biography may shade into history and alter the way in which we view an epoch. And sometimes, too, it is necessary to redeem a reputation from calumny. Sometimes, this duty takes the form of a rescue operation, by which the record of an important life is prevented from toppling into oblivion.

Biography has many tasks, the most salient of which is obviously the re-creation of a human personality for subsequent generations.

The case of comrade tulayev by victor serge