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omniscient third person. The multivolume chronicle, the novel as sequel, was not the best vessel for Serge’s development as a literary writer, but remained a kind of default position from which, always working under harassment and financial strain, he could generate new fictional tasks.
    Serge’s literary affinities, and many of his friendships, were with the great modernists of the 1920s, such as Pilnyak, Zamyatin, Sergei Esenin, Mayakovsky, Pasternak, Daniil Kharms (his brother-in-law), and Mandelstam — rather than with realists like Gorky, a relative on his mother’s side, and Alexei Tolstoy. But in 1928, when Serge started writing fiction, the miraculous new literary era was virtually over, killed by the censors, and soon the writers themselves, most of them, were to be arrested and killed or to commit suicide. The broad-canvas novel, the narrative with multiple voices (another example: Noli me tangere by the late-nineteenth-century Filipino revolutionary José Rizal), might well be the preferred form of a writer with a powerful political consciousness — the political consciousness that was certainly not wanted in the Soviet Union, where, Serge knew, there was no chance of his being translated and published. But it is also the form of some of the enduring works of literary modernism, and has spawned several new fictional genres. Serge’s third novel, Conquered City , is a brilliant work in one of these genres, the novel with a city as protagonist (as Men in Prison had as protagonist “that terrible machine, prison”) — clearly influenced by Biely’s Petersburg , and by Manhattan Transfer (he cites Dos Passos as an influence), and possibly by Ulysses , a book he greatly admired.
    â€œI had the strong conviction of charting a new road for the novel,” Serge says in the Memoirs . One way in which Serge is not charting a new road is his view of women, reminiscent of the great Soviet films about revolutionary ideals, from Eisenstein to Alexei Gherman. In this entirely men-centered society of challenge — and ordeal, and sacrifice — women barely exist, at least not positively, except through being the love objects or wards of very busy men. For revolution, as Serge describes it, is itself a heroic, masculinist enterprise, invested with the values of virility: courage, daring, endurance, decisiveness, independence, ability to be brutal. An attractive woman, someone warm, cherishing, sturdy, often a victim, cannot have these manly characteristics; therefore she cannot be other than a revolutionary’s junior partner. The one powerful woman in The Case of Comrade Tulayev , the Bolshevik prosecutor Zvyeryeva (who will soon have her turn to be arrested and killed), is repeatedly characterized by her pathetically needy sexuality (in one scene she is shown masturbating) and physical repulsiveness. All the men in the novel, villainous or not, have forthright carnal needs and unaffected sexual self-confidence.
    The Case of Comrade Tulayev relates a set of stories, of fates, in a densely populated world. Besides the cast of supportive women, there are at least eight major characters: two emblems of disaffection, Kostia and Romachkin, lowly bachelor clerks who share a single room with a partition in a communal apartment in Moscow — they open the novel — and the veteran loyalists, careerists, and sincere Communists, Ivan Kondratiev, Artyem Makeyev, Stefan Stern, Maxim Erchov, Kiril Rublev, old Ryzhik, who are, one by one, arrested, interrogated, and sentenced to die. (Only Kondratiev is spared, and sent to a remote post in Siberia, by an arbitrarily benign whim of “the Chief,” as Stalin is called in the novel.) Whole lives are portrayed, each of which could make a novel. The account of Makeyev’s ingeniously staged arrest while attending the opera (at the end of Chapter 4) is in itself a short story worthy of Chekhov. And the drama of Makeyev — his