Unforgiving Years

Victor Serge

Mac 2011 · New York Review of Books

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Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge’s final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer’s works.
 
The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D’s friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.
 
A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, Unforgiving Years is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

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Victor Serge (1890—1947) was born in Brussels, the son of Russian political exiles. Enduring five years of prison in Paris for his anarchist beliefs, in 1919 he went to Russia to support the Bolshevik Revolution. Serge served as the editor of the journal Communist International, but was expelled from the Communist Party and imprisoned for his condemnation of Stalin's growing power. Released but arrested again, his deportation to Central Asia spurred international protests from eminent figures such as Andre Gide, who succeeded in securing Serge's freedom and exile in France. He wrote fiction and aided Trotsky until the German occupation of France, after which he fled to Mexico.

Richard Greeman is based in Montpellier, France, where he is Secretary of the International Victor Serge Foundation. He is a member of Praxis Center (Moscow). He has been a professor at Columbia, Wesleyan and the University of Hartford, and an activist since the 1950s.