Last Times by Victor Serge

Last Times by Victor Serge

A story of displacement and resistance during the early days of the Nazi occupation of France.

Last Times, Victor Serge's epic novel of the fall of France, is based-like much of his fiction-on firsthand experience. The author was an eyewitness to the last days of Paris in June 1940 and joined the chaotic mass exodus south to the unoccupied zone on foot with nothing but his manuscripts. He found himself trapped in Marseille under the Vichy government, a persecuted, stateless Russian, and participated in the early French Resistance before escaping on the last ship to the Americas in 1941.

Exiled in Mexico City, Serge poured his recent experience into a fast-moving, gripping novel aimed at an American audience. The book begins in a near-deserted Paris abandoned by the government, the suburbs already noisy with gunfire. Serge's anti-fascist protagonists join the flood of refugees fleeing south on foot, in cars loaded with household goods, on bikes, pushing carts and prams under the strafing Stukas, and finally make their way to wartime Marseille. Last Times offers a vivid eyewitness account of the city's criminal underground and no less criminal Vichy authorities, of collaborators and of the growing resistance, of crowds of desperate refugees competing for the last visa and the last berth on the last-hoped-for-ship to the New World.

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.

SKU	Unavailable
ISBN 13	9781681375144
ISBN 10	1681375141
Title	Last Times
Author	Victor Serge
Condition	Unavailable
Binding Type	Paperback
Publisher	The New York Review of Books, Inc
Year published	2022-08-23
Number of pages	400
Cover note	Book picture is for illustrative purposes only, actual binding, cover or edition may vary.