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the “crystal sphere”
(sphère de cristal)
of the philosopher Taine and the “Azure!” of the poet Mallarmé. It is a constant struggle against the encroachment of madness and obsession, symbolized by “le
cafard”
(thecockroach, French slang for depression). “The image fits. The ugly black bug zigzags around under the vault of your skull” ( p.48 ).
    Serge’s narrator also evokes the religious retreats of earlier times. There are meditations on the joys provoked by the sight of a patch of color, by the passage of a thin ray of sunlight across the ceiling of a cell. There is the fierce ironic joy of the narrator, who as a prisoner is
forbidden to know
any news of the Great War taking place on the Marne, when he hears the German bombardments approach his prison and reads the panic in the face of the guards as the old world crumbles about their ears.
    Yet for Serge’s narrator, (as for Stendhal’s heroes Fabrice and Julien) imprisonment is also a privileged situation. The world may be crumbling, but the insane prison-machine grinds implacably on as if nothing had changed. The guards themselves are trembling, for the German advance on the Marne has come almost within artillery range of the prison. But the deadly routine must continue. Serge’s narrator derives a fierce satisfaction from the idea that his prison—that microcosm of a brutal society—may soon be destroyed by the cannon, the ultimate symbol of that society in its most inhuman, and therefore most natural, incarnation. Far from sharing his captors’ terror, he experiences an apocalyptic sense of release, a savage joy:
    Our church steeple seemed to us a perfect landmark for artillery. Poule, [an inmate] asked me, terrified: “Do you really think they’ll shell us?” “Naturally,” I replied. I lived
alone,
feeling the fear spread from one man to the next. I felt a sort of exaltation which gave birth to a great serenity. The old world was being smashed by the cannon. The Mill would be crushed by the cannon. The law of kill-and-be-killed- was reaffirmed for my generation … There was profound joy in thinking about this resurrection of the world through the cannon, which had at last interrupted our round …
    We were the only men on earth forbidden to know about the war; but, though we read nothing and could only glimpse, through the double smokescreen of war and administrative stupidity, the general outline of events, some few of us were blessed with exceptional clear-sightedness. I knew enough about the inner decay of the Russian Empire to foresee, at a time when the Cossacks still incarnated the hope of several old Western countries, its inevitable fall. Long before Europe ever dreamt it, we were discussing, in whispers, the coming Russian Revolution. We knew in whatpart of the globe the long-awaited flame would be born. And in it we found a new reason for living …
    The bell gave the signal for lights out. Squadrons of airplanes flew over the prison on the way to Paris. The sky was golden.
    The tone is at once ironical, lyrical, apocalyptic. The bitter irony of being “privileged” through loss of liberty, of being forbidden to know war; the paradox of feeling joy and serenity in the face of catastrophe, the lyricism of the final image of bombers against a golden sky. And yet politics informs and organizes this vision of the totality of a world organized for repression and finding its ultimate expression (and its own negation) in the brutalities of prison and war. Without this savage irony there would be no exaltation, no apocalyptic vision. And the image of the Russian Revolution, that dim candle flickering at the end of a long, dark corridor, evokes the ironic theme of the whole passage, indeed of the whole novel: victory-in-defeat. 33 As literature, it is a powerful and compelling vision; as politics, a kind of poetic equivalent of Lenin’s 1917 “revolutionary defeatism.”
    Men in Prison
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    As David Gilbert’s foreword indicates,