Classic in Translation: Unforgiving Years

I read this book for the Back to the Classics Challenge 2018.

Unforgiving Years – Victor Serge, tr. Richard Greeman

An apocalyptic evocation of the Second World War, this posthumous novel finished in 1946 had to wait until 2008 before being published in English by the New York Review of Books. Four narratives evoke the unreal Paris of the last days of the pre-war period; the thousand days of Leningrad, besieged by the Nazis; the Gotterdämmerung of the last days of devastated Berlin; and a Mexican backwater where life and death merge. In this world of catastrophe, the protagonists - Old Bolsheviks without illusions stifled by Stalinist totalitarianism and gangsterism - fight against fascism, try to save their loves and try to “escape from a world without possible escape.”

The Unforgiving Years focuses on two Soviet secret agents D. and Daria. They are not only living through their own inner chaos but are also seeking a possible escape from their employers. Through these two characters and many others, Serge wonders, as he did in other novels, about this process and moment of the "inner break" where doubt and skepticism gradually lead the agent who had abandoned himself to the imperatives of the "cadaveric discipline" imposed by "services" to the rejection of that discipline. Soviet intelligence did a lot of dirty work during the Spanish civil war and this novel chronicles the fallout of anxiety and paranoia among agents that didn’t want to do dirty work anymore but knew leaving the “services” was as easy as leaving the mafia.

This climate where prison, exile, torture, and death threaten all the time, Serge knew personally, not as a spy but as a dissident in the USSR in the 1930s. It was his daily lot in those pre-WWII years when the assassinations and disappearances of Stalin’s opponents were warning signs to a lost generation with blood on its hands but hopeful enough not to despair of the idea of genuine​​ revolution to help the workers and peasants, to protect the revolution from reactionaries, and to defend it from authoritarianism within the revolution itself.

For twenty years, Victor Serge devoted himself to the task of giving us powerful political novels. Conquered City, set in Petrograd in 1919, is about the betrayal of democratic socialists (the Old Bolsheviks) by the Stalinists, though they betrayed their own ideals by going along with savage repression too. The Case of Comrade Tulayev, a remarkable examination of the Stalinist purge in the late 1930s, stands as a must-read for any serious student of the Europe between the wars and revolution betrayed.