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Soviet-Russian writer, he falls through the cracks between academic literature departments. Moreover, along with the hostility of fellow-traveling critics, Serge’s standing as a novelist has suffered from the bourgeois prejudice (‘art for art’s sake’) against politics in literature, indeed against the very notion that a committed Marxist militant could also be a serious literary artist. 30
    On the other hand, back in 1968, when this translation of
Men in Prison
was first published, British and American book reviewers immediately recognized its value as literature:
    It is a stream of exquisite and refined consciousness undergoing man’s most barbaric experience. Not even in “One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich” is there such a penetrating and disturbing account of what prison means to the body and soul. (John Riley,
Los Angeles Times,
December 14, 1968)
    This novel, properly so called by its author, being truth worked up as art, is strongly recommended both as a document and as a powerful work of literature. (Robert Garioch,
Listener,
August 24, 1970)
    [Serge] was one of those rare political activists who was also an artist, and his book is poetic and ironic, the account of a spiritual experience rather than a factual record…. Serge is almost unique (not quite—one remembers Dostoevsky and Koestler) in turning all this into art. (Julian Symons,
London Sunday Times,
July 19, 1970)
    Novel or autobiography, the book is literature, for Serge was a wonderful writer. (New
Yorker,
March 1, 1970)
    Serge [is] the model upon whom George Orwell fashioned himself in his descriptive essays and in
Homage to Catalonia.
… Serge is not merely a political writer; he is also a novelist, a wonderfully lyrical writer…. He is a writer young rebels desperately need whether they know it or not…. He does not tell us what we should feel; instead, he makes us feel it. (Stanley Reynolds,
New Statesman,
July 17, 1970)
    Few other professional writers have ever endured the experience if prison’s living hell, among them Dostoyevsky, sentenced to four years at hard labor in 1849 for his participation in a liberal discussion circle, Oscar Wilde, persecuted for his sexual preference, and of course Russian dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. There is no doubt about the authenticity of Serge’s witness. But how, as a novelist working in the 1920s, did he raise it to literature in
Men in Prison?
His techniques are curiously modern.
    To begin with,
Men in Prison
has is no ‘plot,’ no ‘hero’ in the conventional sense. Although the novel begins with ‘Arrest’ and ends with the narrator’s release, its internal structure deliberately undercuts this outer appearance of a kind of fictional ‘memoir’ through a process of abstraction, irony, and distanciation.
    Despite the author’s “convenient use of the first person singular,” Serge’s ‘I’ is a slippery subject, which the postmodern reader will have no problem identifying as an ‘unreliable narrator.’ For example, the first chapter, “Arrest,” begins with a blanket affirmation: “All men who have truly know prison know …” followed by a series of generalizations in which the narrator’s ‘I’ alternates with the more generalpronoun ‘one’ or the passive voice—interrupting the facile identification between the reader and the ‘narrator-hero’ to the point where we don’t really know who the latter is and why he is in jail. Indeed, under the heading ‘Arrest,’ Serge gives us not one, but three accounts of that ‘icy moment.’
    Similarly, the second chapter, “The Lockup,” although
logically
and
chronologically
the next stage in the processing of all prisoners, opens with the same device of distancing by generalization: “A man imprisoned differs from man in general even in his outward appearance,” and continues: “He feels as if he has been stripped of part of himself, reduced to an impotence inconceivable an hour before.” The nameless