BOOKS
133
The Case of Victor Serge
VICTOR SERGE: THE COURSE IS SET ON
HopE.
By Susan Weissman. Verso.
$35.
00 .
VICTOR SERGE, MEMOIRES O'UN REVOLUTIONNAIRE ET AUTRES ECRITS
POLITIQUES. Edited by Robert LaHont. Bouquins. 30.30€
VICTOR SERGE, WHO DIED IN MEXICO CITY in 1947, had been forgotten
for a while; the
Village Voice
published an article in the 1980s entitled
"Who is Victor Serge?" But in recent years there has been a Serge revival
in France and, to a certain extent, in the English-speaking world. There
have been biographical studies, dissertations, as well as articles about
him; there is now a Victor Serge Foundation and a Victor Serge library
offering revolutionary literature in Moscow, and his books have been
republished in several countries.
A
leading French publisher recently put
out a massive volume of Serge's nonfiction. This revival has been largely
the work of a small number of devoted admirers, one of which is Ms.
Weissman, the author of the most recent Serge biography.
Serge (whose real name was Kibalchich) was born in Brussels in 1890
to a family of poor Russian political refugees. His uncle had been a key
figure (and the main bomb expert) of the Russian terrorists of 1879 vin–
tage (the Narodnaya Volya). He grew up mainly in Belgium and never
had a systematic education but was taught science by his father and lit–
erature by his mother, and he read an enormous lot. His parents sepa–
rated and from the age of fifteen Serge lived alone, first in Belgium, later
in France. He worked as a photographer's apprentice and from a very
young age was active in anarchist circles . Even in his teens he lectured
and contributed to anarchist periodicals. In 1912 he was arrested in
Paris as the alleged brains of the "bande Bonnot." This was a strange,
semicriminal group of militants specia lizing in bank robberies . They
killed a number of people in the process, and some of the proceeds went
to their cause, some to their own pockets.
Serge was considered the inspiration of the gang and given a five-year
sentence. That he had been involved with the group is beyond doubt,
but the extent of his activity is unclear. Had he truly been the brains of
the gang, the sentence would have been much more severe. Serge's biog–
raphers have not tried very hard to go into this more deeply because
they were apparently not very interested in the libertarian period of his
life. This is regrettable, because Serge was an ardent revolutionary but
