Victor Serge_5 Titles (Classic; Russian Rev. Fiction)

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.



1919–1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the new masters of the city seek to cement their control, even as the counter-revolutionary White Army musters its forces. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s toughest and most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime seeks to track down and eliminate its enemies—the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the exhausted mass of common people. Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, about the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power—police, guns, jails, spies, treachery—in the gamble that by wielding them with purity, in a righteous cause, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. And yet those who wield these weapons know that they are doomed. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.



A New York Review Books Original

Victor Serge is one of the great men of the 20th century —and one of its great writers too. He was an anarchist, an agitator, a revolutionary, an exile, a historian of his times, as well as a brilliant novelist, and in Memoirs of a Revolutionary he devotes all his passion and genius to describing this extraordinary—and exemplary—career. Serge tells of his upbringing among exiles and conspirators, of his involvement with the notorious Bonnot Gang and his years in prison, of his role in the Russian Revolution, and of the Revolution’s collapse into despotism and terror. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, where he evaded the KGB and the Nazis before fleeing to Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary recounts a thrilling life on the front lines of history and includes vivid portraits not only of Trotsky, Lenin, and Stalin but of countless other figures who struggled to remake the world.
Peter Sedgwick’s fine translation of Memoirs of a Revolutionary was abridged when first published in 1963. This is the first edition in English to present the entirety of Serge’s book.



Unforgiving Years is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge's final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer's works.

The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D's friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now...



This work, published for the first time by the Bulletin communiste in November 1921, has been carefully completed. The practical and theoretical questions which a study of the workings of such a police force cannot fail to raise in the mind of a worker reading it, are examined in two new sections. In the section Simple advice to revolutionaries, which despite its obvious simplicity experience shows to be very useful, outline the fundamental rules of workers’ defence against surveillance, informing and provocation.