Greeman, Richard; Abidor, Mitchell

Victor Serge : The Writer As Witness

Victor Serge (1890-1947) was famous both as a revolutionary and a novelist. A stateless Russian who wrote in French, he has successively an anarchist, a syndicalist, a Bolshevik, a persecuted anti-Stalinist, and a supporter of the Spanish POUM. Greeman and Abidor's biography seeks the core unity of Serge's multiple facets in his underlying devotion to revolutionary probity and respect for the individual. 'The Writer as Witness' emphasizes Serge's fiction and traces his personal, political and artistic evolution through the series of identity crises that punctuated his eventful life. It is also a work of cultural history, placing Serge in the context of what he called the 'Vanished Worlds' of early 20th Century radicalism. Based on interviews, original letters and archival research collected in five countries over 50 years, this critical biography compliments Serge's justly celebrated 'Memoirs of a Revolutionary' intended as a political-historical rather than autobiographical work.