The Case of Comrade Tulayev Read Online Free PDF

antecedents, ascent to power (he is governor of Kurgansk), sudden arrest on a visit to Moscow, imprisonment, interrogation, confession — is only one of the plots elaborated in The Case of Comrade Tulayev .
    No interrogator is a major character. Among the minor characters is Serge’s fictional epitome of the fellow traveler of influence. In a late scene, set in Paris, “Professor Passereau, famous in two hemispheres, President of the Congress for the Defense of Culture,” tells the young émigré, Xenia Popov, vainly seeking his intervention on behalf of the most sympathetic of Serge’s Old Bolshevik protagonists: “For the justice of your country I have a respect which is absolute … If Rublev is innocent, the Supreme Tribunal will accord him justice.” As for the eponymous Tulayev, the high government official whose murder sets off the arrest and execution of the others, he makes only the briefest appearance early in the novel. He is there to be shot.
    Serge’s Tulayev, at any rate his murder and its consequences, seems obviously to point back to Sergei Kirov, the head of the Leningrad Party organization, whose assassination in his office on December 1, 1934, by a young Party member named Leon Nikolayev became Stalin’s pretext for the years of slaughter that followed, which decimated the loyal Party membership and killed or kept imprisoned for decades millions of ordinary citizens. It may be difficult not to read The Case of Comrade Tulayev as a roman à clef, though Serge in a prefatory note explicitly warns against doing just that. “This novel,” he writes, “belongs entirely to the domain of literary fiction. The truth created by the novelist cannot be confounded, in any degree whatever, with the truth of the historian or the chronicler.” One can hardly imagine Solzhenitsyn prefacing one of his Lenin-novels with such a disclaimer. But perhaps one should take Serge at his word — noting that he set his novel in 1939. The arrests and trials in The Case of Comrade Tulayev are fictional successors to, rather than a fictional synthesis of, the actual Moscow trials of 1936, 1937, and 1938.
    Serge is not just pointing out that the truth of the novelist differs from the truth of the historian. He is asserting, here only implicitly, the superiority of the novelist’s truth. Serge had made the bolder claim in the letter to Istrati about Men in Prison : a novel that, despite “the convenient use of the first person singular,” is “not about me,” and in which “I don’t even want to stick too close to things I have actually seen.” The novelist, Serge continues, is after “a richer and more general truth than the truth of observation.” That truth “sometimes coincides almost photographically with certain things I have seen; sometimes it differs from them in every respect.”
    To assert the superiority of the truth of fiction is a venerable literary commonplace (its earliest formulation is in Aristotle’s Poetics ), and in the mouths of many writers sounds glib and even self-serving: a permission claimed by the novelist to be inaccurate, or partial, or arbitrary. To say that the assertion voiced by Serge has nothing of this quality is to point to the evidence of his novels, their incontestable sincerity and intelligence applied to lived truths re-created in the form of fiction.
    The Case of Comrade Tulayev has never enjoyed a fraction of the fame of Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940), a novel with ostensibly the same subject, which makes the opposite claim, for the correspondence of fiction to historical reality. “The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow Trials,” the prefatory note to Darkness at Noon advises the reader. (Rubashov is thought to be mostly based on Nikolai Bukharin, with something of Karl Radek.) But