{"product_id":"blaze-in-a-desert-book-victor-serge-9781629633824","title":"A Blaze in a Desert","description":"\u003cp\u003eVictor Serge (1890-1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona; a Bolshevik in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central Europe; a comrade of Trotsky's; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely, Boris Pilnyak, and André Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico...\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eLike Serge's extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the \"immense shipwreck\" of Stalin's ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico, Serge composed elegies for the fallen--as well as prospective elegies for the living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century:\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eNight falls, the boat pulls in,\u003cbr\u003e stop singing.\u003cbr\u003e Exile relights its captive lamps\u003cbr\u003e on the shore of time.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eThroughout A Blaze in a Desert, Serge draws on the heritage of late- and post-Symbolist writers like Verhaeren, Rictus, Apollinaire, Blok, and Bely--themselves authors of messages of a more general resistance by the human spirit--to express the anguish of the failure of the Russian Revolution and to search out glimmers of hope in the ruins of the Second World War.\u003c\/p\u003e \u003cp\u003eA Blaze in a Desert comprises Victor Serge's sole published book of poetry, Resistance (1938), his unpublished manuscript Messages (1946), and his last poem, \"Hands\" (1947).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50159753363729,"sku":"CIN1629633828G","price":17.51,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51548874211601,"sku":"CIN1629633828VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":51775325077777,"sku":"GOR012469367","price":10.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52753000595729,"sku":"NIN9781629633824","price":16.89,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1629633828.jpg?v=1750993030","url":"https:\/\/www.worldofbooks.com\/products\/blaze-in-a-desert-book-victor-serge-9781629633824","provider":"World of Books ","version":"1.0","type":"link"}