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until his death in 2005, and he is the source of much of my information about his father. His 2,000 square meters of murals, which reflect Serge’s politics and aesthetics, can be seen in Mexico City and on the Web site www.vlady.org ].
    [ 9 ] The manuscripts have never been recovered, despite diligent searches of recently opened Soviet archives. See Richard Greeman, “The Victor Serge Affair and the French Literary Left,”
Revolutionary History
5, no. 3 (Autumn 1994).
    [ 10 ] See Alfred Rosmer, Victor Serge, and Maurice Wullens, “
L’Assassinat d’Ignace Reiss
,”
Les Humbles
(April 1938).
    [ 11 ] Walter Krivitsky,
In Stalin’s Secret Service
(Harper, 1939).
    [ 12 ] FBI Archives, Serge’s file for February 13, 1941. Courtesy of Susan Weissman.
    [ 13 ]
The Course Is Set on Hope
(Verso, 2002), p. 67. The book’s main argument is that “Serge’s critique of Stalinism was the core of his life and work” (p. 6), and she gives short shift to his anarchist years, his poetry, and his fiction, which she finds “useful” in understanding Stalinism.
    [ 14 ] Serge is better known in US and British French departments, with two Ph.D. theses: my own (Columbia) and Bill Marshall’s (Oxford), later published as
Victor Serge: The Uses of Dissent
(New York: Berg, 1992).
    [ 15 ] Serge went to see Gorky as soon as he arrived in Russia in 1919, but declined an offer to join the staff of Gorky’s newspaper. During the civil war, Serge depended on Gorky’s relationship with Lenin to intercede to save anarchist comrades from being shot by the Cheka.
    [ 16 ] Serge,
Memoirs
.
    [ 17 ] See Victor Serge,
Collected Writings on Literature and Revolution
, translated by Al Richardson (London: Francis Boutle, 2004).
    [ 18 ] Neil Cornwell, review of
Midnight in the Century
,
Irish Slavonic Studies
4 (1983).
    [ 19 ] Morelle, p. 12.
    [ 20 ] Victor Serge,
Carnets
(Arles: Actes Sud, 1985). ß
    [ 21 ] Serge,
Carnets
.
    [ 22 ] The image of “smoking rains” probably came to Serge after witnessing the birth of the volcano Parcutin in 1943 under a rain of hot cinders which ignited and buried the surrounding dwellings and forest. They also refer, of course, to explosives raining from the sky which destroy the “cerebral forest” of human consciousness — seen as if rooted in the earth like a great living brain. Yet the poet’s attitude to this destruction is one of consent, for “nothing yet is lost.” Not as long as the earth preserves “funeral masks” — artefacts of dead cultures like the Aztecs and Mayas he wrote about in
Tombeau des civilisations.
    [ 23 ] Victor Serge,
Carnets
.
    [ 24 ]
Les derniers temps
(Monteal: Editions de l’Arbre, 1946), translated into English by Ralph Manheim as
The Long Dusk
(Dial Press, 1946).

Unforgiving Years

I. The Secret Agent
    Do I still have enough space for an intelligent death?
    He who had no idea discovered the central fire.
    A ROUND seven in the morning, D personally loaded his two suitcases into the taxi. The street was still slumbering, tinged by the bleak whiteness of a Paris awakening. No one was about except for a milkman. Morning purity of cobbles and asphalt. The garbage cans were empty. D felt no suspicions. He had himself driven to the Gare du Nord, grew irritable at the station buffet because they made him wait for a tasteless cup of coffee, and piled his luggage into another cab which dropped him off in the place d’Iéna. Sure of not being followed, he took in the vast square, a stage set empty of actors, bathed in a dappled light under which one would wish to live for a long while, meditating. Before eight in the morning Paris, in her wealthier neighborhoods, seems delivered from herself; pacified, she is nothing more than a work of human wisdom. D found a chauffeurs’ bar where he was served a good, unpretentious coffee and two hot croissants, reminding him of that young condemned man whose sole last request was for croissants, which he could not have, because it was too early.