the case of comrade tulayev by victor serge

However, as a French-language writer publishing in Paris, Serge was able to continue the literary experiments of his Russian friends and colleagues - Babel, Essenin, Gladkov, Mandelstam, Mayakovsky, Pilniak, et al- whose voices were silenced by censorship, suicide, and deportation. By 1930, the freedom and creative ferment of the Soviet literary renaissance of the 1920s in which Serge had taken part as a critic and translator, had been crushed by the Stalinist bureaucracy. Paradoxically, Serge turned to literature at the very moment when Russian writers were being forced to deny those values. The values that inform his work are those of sincerity, solidarity, and truthfulness.

Serge conceived of writing as an act of witness, 'as a means of expressing for people what most of them live without being able to express, as a means of communion, as a testimony about the vast life that flows through us whose essential aspects we must try to fix for the benefit of those who will come after us.'1 For Serge, literature was a sharing of human experience, and Serge's experience of Revolutionary Russia and its people was profound.

It was only after 1927, when he was expelled from the Party for his membership in the Left Opposition, that he turned to literature as a kind of substitute for political activity. He joined the Communist Party, fought in the Civil War, and participated in the founding of the Communist International. Born of parents who were themselves exiled Russian revolutionaries, Serge had a dozen years of agitation as an anarchist militant behind him (including six spent in captivity) when he entered the Russian Revolution in the bleak winter of 1918-19. In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Ħ1 GREEMAN RICHARD GREEMAN VICTOR SERGE'S THE CASE OF COMRADE TULAYEV The novels of Victor Serge (1890-1947) reflect a rich experience of involvement in revolutionary politics.

The case of comrade tulayev by victor serge