A Blaze in a Desert by Victor Serge

A Blaze in a Desert by Victor Serge

Victor 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...

Like 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:

Night falls, the boat pulls in,
stop singing.
Exile relights its captive lamps
on the shore of time.

Throughout 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.

A Blaze in a Desert comprises Victor Serge's sole published book of poetry, Resistance (1938), his unpublished manuscript Messages (1946), and his last poem, "Hands" (1947).

Victor Serge (1890-1947) was born in Brussels to Russian anti-Tsarist exiles. Victor was imprisoned to five years in a French prison as a young anarchist firebrand in 1912. Serge joined the Bolsheviks in 1919. Serge was purged from the Communist Party and jailed in 1929 after being an outspoken critic of Stalin. Despite this, he was able to finish three novels (Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City) as well as a history (Year One of the Russian Revolution), all of which were published in Paris.

In 1933, he was arrested again in Russia and transported to Central Asia, but after international protests by militants and notable writers such as André Gide and Romain Rolland, he was allowed to leave the USSR in 1936. Serge lived in dangerous exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died in 1947, after being pursued by Stalinist operatives.