At Once Archaic and Fresh

...having avoided the critical battles of its own time—as something at once archaic and fresh...

...In the first part, they are active, fighting in the streets of Barcelona, failing In the second part, they are passive, their concentration camp in France a tiny international of the oppressed and dispossessed In the third and shortest part, the revolutionaries return to a land where the revolution has taken place At the border stands a gaunt Red Army soldier They greet him, ask for news "Nothing hunger nothing," is his reply And so they enter the country of hope...

...Memoirs of a Revolutionary, and you will find there are few essential points in which the action of the novel differs from Serge's own experiences during 1917 and 1918...

...This period of Serge's life??from his arrival m Barcelona to his return to Petrograd—for??s the core of Birth of Our Power Read the account of these years in his autobiography...

...There is a threnody strain in Birth of Our Power which at tunes drowns out the heroism The dream is splendid, one exclaims, but then must immediately ask, "Why does it always fail7" Serge devoted the latter part of his life to trying to solve that question The publication of Serge's Memoirs revived his reputation, and we are told that Birth of Our Power is the first of a series of translations of his novels published in France a generation ago that have not yet appeared m English They will be welcome, for despite certain didactic crudities, Birth of Our Power is a moving book, immensely interesting historically It is also bathed in a curious pristine light, due mostly to the fact that it has lain buried for 30 years and now appears...

...There have been very few other men whose experience of the revolutionary world was more varied and complete than Serge's He began as an anarchist-individualist, served a long term in a French prison for his links with the famous Bonnet Gang, went to Spam on his release, and there became involved in a Barcelona workers' uprising led by the cant Reclosing France in 1918 in the hope of reaching revolutionary Russia, he was arrested and interned in one of those squalid, inefficient concentration camps that were a specialty of democratic France long before the Nazis He survived hunger and sickness, and was eventually sent home in exchange for French hostages held by the Bolshevik government...

...Yet is this entirely an autobiographical novel7 The narrator is curiously faceless, and Serge, m fact, is not trying to write a novel about himself or even about a charcater modeled on himself His narrator acts, because in such circumstances action is inevitable, but his action is not personally significant It acquires importance as a strand of a larger action, for Birth of Our Power is concerned mainly with portraying the life of the masses in Europe half a century ago...

...Darkness reigned over the city Not a light anywhere It was a necropolis buried under snow, but at times you could make out the uncertain glow of a night light in some window where people were awake " Darkness, and a few men awake, like everywhere else in the world...

...Both of Our Power was first published in 1931, m French rather than Serge s native Russian It was written while Serge??in real life Victor Kibalchich??moved under heavy shadow as a supporter of Trotsky and the Left Opposition There was no way to publish such books in Russia, so by clandestine means Serge s early novels were sent to the West Serge himself followed m 1936, to live the traditional life of the political exile m France and later in Mexico There he died, in 1947...

...At Once Archaic and Fresh BIRTH OF OUR POWER By Victor Serge Translated by Richard Gleeman Doubleday 284 pp $5 95 Reviewed by GEORGE WOODCOCK Edition "Canadian Literature" Author, "The Wanted and Politics" "If, \all at once, they could rise up, what a clamor1" So, brooding on men rotting in the trenches of 1918, thinks the anonymous hero of Birth of Our Power The thought, like the book, has a heroic quality that belongs not to the 1960s, but to the period when serious men still thought seriously that within the masses lay some great constructive-destructive capability which they could one day exercise m a great spontaneous uprising to overthrow forever the institutions of tyranny...

...Besides being a writer of power and sensitivity, Victor Serge was one of the remarkable personalities among that almost vanished race??the revolutionary intellectuals of the early 20th century He has often been compared with Trotsky, yet the differences were profound Where Trotsky was always governed in a difficult choice by revolutionary expediency, Serge was moved by a moral insight that preserved the essentially libertarian strain in his thought and nature...