Birth of Our Power (4 page)

The Levines had gathered in the smallest of the rooms, probably a nursery, furnished with two iron bedsteads with gilded balls on which only the mattresses remained … (one of them appeared stained with blood). This candle-lit room was like a corner in steerage on an immigrant ship. The children had fallen asleep on the baggage, rolled up in blankets. The mother was resting in a low armchair. The young woman, like a solemn child, with large limpid eyes which seemed by turns distended by fear and then victorious over the fleeting shadows, was dreaming before the open stove, the reddish glow of which illuminated from below her graceful hands, her thin neck, and her fine features. Old Levine's footsteps echoed on the floor of the grand salon, plunged in darkness. He entered, his arms loaded with heavy green-covered books which he dropped softly next to the stove. Silent laughter illuminated his ruddy face.

“The laws are burning!” he said.

The friendly warmth in front of which the young woman was stretching out her hands came from the flames which were devouring Tome XXVII of the
COLLECTION OF THE LAWS OF THE EMPIRE.
For fun, I pulled out a half-burned page, edged with incandescent lace. The flames revealed these words forming a chapter heading: C
ONCERNING
L
ANDED
P
ROPERTY
…
and, further down: “…
the rights of collateral heirs
…”

The anecdote of “The Laws Are Burning” is an example of the
petit fait vrai,
the commonplace observation which Stendhal prized so highly for its undeniable authenticity and consequent ability to authenticate a whole idea, description, or emotional effect. Serge has dramatized it and given it symbolic significance by turning it into ‘Jewish humor.' Old Levine's exclamation is the punchline of an elaborately prepared visual pun, albeit a pun which could only be understood in a precise historical situation. Like any pun, this one is based on a verbal ambiguity—the basis of much of the power of poetry as well. Since laws
cannot “burn” in any material sense, the effect created by “The laws are burning!” explodes like a Surrealist poem or an anarchist slogan; a powerful image of the violence and destructive energy of revolution.

Yet, as the text unfolds, the same destructive energy of the flames which “devour” Tome XXVII of the
Laws
is revealed as the “friendly warmth” toward which the young girl stretches out her hands, while the final image, that of
“Landed Property”
and “the
rights of collateral heirs”
framed in the “incandescent lace” of the flames suggests yet another possibility: that the social class represented by the Levine family, merely in order to survive, to keep warm, has been obliged to obliterate the society based on property and all its heirs (the class represented by the senator's family) in the course of its struggle for existence.

The passage evokes a whole complex of interconnected social, political, and historical relationships of individuals and classes which can be understood only in terms of an actual historical event
outside of
the text (the transfer of power of 1917)—an event which is in turn illuminated and made comprehensible for the reader with greater force and with more complexity through this purely “literary” text than it could be through any amount of abstract historical analysis. It is within this context that the passage's climax (beginning with the exclamation “The laws are burning!”) acquires a richness and symbolism that goes far beyond its purely “realistic” function as an authenticating
petit fait vrai.

Victor's achingly romantic vision of his beloved Liouba as she must have appeared in 1919 comes through in this climactic passage, which must, for the author, have already been tinged with nostalgia. For by 1930, when Serge penned this touching portrait of a fearful child-woman, Liouba had already been diagnosed as insane, essentially driven mad by the persecutions to which she and her family had been subject as a result of her husband's refusal to renounce his principled opposition to Stalinism. This is as close as Serge gets to confessional in this ‘autobiographical' novel, whose principle literary quality is its ‘restraint.'

Serge thus brings his final chapter to a climax on a note of ironic lyricism, but it is not the traditionally triumphal lyricism of Red Armies marching into the sunset. The vision is rather one of a necessary but ambiguous victory, of a new class placed precariously and uneasily in the seat of power, beset by internal and external threats and ironically conscious that the power which has been sought for so long and at such great cost will present greater problems in the future than any the powerless have ever dreamed of. Here Serge brings the stamp of
authenticity to his literary text and then moves beyond the mimesis of reality to a realm of vision which includes history and poetry as its poles and where the text can be said to ‘authenticate' history as much as history authenticates the text.

Thus concludes Serge's epic tale of two cities, his fictional Odyssey from Barcelona, where ‘we' could not take power, to Petrograd, where holding onto ‘our power' turns out to be problematical. The hopeful Barcelona theme of ‘victory-in-defeat' is superseded by the ironic Petrograd theme of ‘defeat-in-victory.' And the problem of revolutionary power posed by Serge's fiction remains an open one in our internet age of international revolution (think ‘Arab Spring') and globalized counterrevolution.

1
   Please see the postface in this volume, “Victor Serge, Writer and Revolutionary,” for an overview of his life and works.

2
   The once and future ‘St. Petersburg.' In Soviet times, ‘Leningrad.'

3
   
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
(New York: NYRB Classics, 2012), 53.

4
   
Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
63.

5
   The setting for his first novel,
Men in Prison
(Oakland: PM Press, 2014).

6
   Victor Serge, “Un zar cae,”
Tierra y libertad,
Barcelona, April 4, 1917, 1.

7
   
Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
64–65.

8
   Review of
Birth of Our Power
by Marcel Martinet, the poet and theoretician of of proletarian culture in France, Comptes rendus,
Europe
105, no. 15 (September 1931): 122–23.

9
   See his website at
http://www.vlady.org
. ‘Vlady' (as he signed himself) grew up as Serge's companion in deportation and exile, one of the ‘comrades.' In Mexico, where his father died in 1947, he became a well-known painter and muralist. Part of his work is dedicated to his father, and in the course of many conversations over the years, helped me to understand Serge's life and works.

10
The title
Memoirs of a Revolutionary
was invented by the publisher.

11
By the end of Serge's life, most of the comrades in Europe and Russia whom he had immortalized as a collective hero had been exterminated by Hitler's Gestapo and Stalin's GPU. Serge's posthumous novel,
Unforgiving Years,
depicts the fate of a few survivors of this hecatomb.

12
Serge,
Memoirs of a Revolutionary,
346.

The opening pages of
Birth of Our Power
are steeped in symbolism and poetic beauty, but they may prove exasperating for the reader who does not share the author's intimacy with Spain and Spanish revolutionary history. To point up the universality of his story, for instance, Serge never refers to Barcelona, the setting for the first half of the novel, by name, only as “this city.” And it is only through passing references to World War I that the reader is able to place the events in the early chapters historically.

For most of us, the phrase “Spanish Revolution” brings to mind the 1936–39 Civil War. But in fact the Spanish revolutionary tradition, with all its passion and brutality, goes back much further, to Napoleonic times (cf. Goya's “Disasters of War”). Throughout the nineteenth century, repeated attempts to establish liberal government in Spain resulted only in bloody fusillades and paper reforms. Spain entered the twentieth century, after its stunning defeat by the United States in 1898, as a backward, corrupt, priest- and soldier-ridden monarchy. The anarchism of the Russian Bakunin caught the imagination of the peasants and of the workers in the new industrial centers like Barcelona, and their revolt took the form of
jacqueries
and individual terrorism (a situation quite similar to that in Czarist Russia). The government's response to social unrest was the establishment of a new Spanish Inquisition that was responsible for wholesale arrests and executions, and for the brutal torture of anyone even remotely connected with the revolutionary movement. The judicial murder at Montjuich of Francisco Ferrer, the progressive educationalist, after the 1909 general strike, raised a worldwide storm of protest. Spain was again a land of martyrs.

In
Birth of Our Power,
the citadel of Montjuich, where many rebels had been tortured and shot, becomes the symbol both of the revolutionary past and the oppressive power of the present. Under the shadow of
Montjuich, the masses, led by a handful of anarchists, awaken to their power and prepare to do battle for a better life. Many of the characters are real personages; Dario, Serge's hero, was modeled on the syndicalist leader, Salvador Seguí, who was murdered by government scabs in 1922. The events are all historically true. The confused day of street fighting, described in
Chapter 9
, took place on July 19, 1917. It was followed by a full-scale insurrection in August.

Neutral Spain had been trading profitably with both sides in World War I, but the ancient political forms had not kept pace with the rapidly developing economy. Both the liberal parliamentarians and the anarchistic workers felt that the time had come to put forward their demands. The revolt failed because the liberals abandoned their alliance with the workers at the last minute, leaving them to face the government alone, and because the Barcelona workers were so poorly organized. The workers had failed to co-ordinate their movement with groups in other parts of Spain, and were (with the possible exception of Seguí) so anarchistic that they had no idea what they would do if they actually managed to win.

What is most remarkable in these half-forgotten pages of history is the extent to which the Spanish workers were inspired by the February Revolution in distant Russia, and the fact that the demands of the
Comité Obrero
in Barcelona actually prefigured those of the Soviets in October 1917. On the basis of this historical “coincidence,” Serge develops his theme of power in complex counterpoint. The two cities, Barcelona and Petrograd (the setting for the last part of the novel), at opposite ends of Europe, complement one another. In the first, “that city that we could not take,” the accent is on the revolution in expectation, and on the sudden discovery by the masses that they possess power—a victory that transpires the actual defeat of the insurrection. In Petrograd, the theme of power takes on an entirely new, and terrifying, aspect; the question implicit in the Barcelona chapters—“Can we seize power?”—is replaced by another, truly awesome question—“What will we become when we do take power?”

The collective “we” of these questions brings up another important facet of Serge's work. “The word ‘I,'” wrote Serge, “is repellent to me as a vain affirmation of the self which contains a large measure of illusion and another of vanity or unjustified pride. Whenever it is possible, that is to say when I am able not to feel myself isolated, when my experience illuminates in some manner that of the men to whom I feel tied,
I prefer to use the word ‘we,' which is more general and more true.” The word “Our” in Serge's title reveals this preoccupation. And it is the opposition of “them” and “us,” of “their city” and “ours,” that in fact forms the basic framework for, and gives a consistent point of view to,
Birth of Our Power.
“We”—the collective hero of Serge's novel—are the men to whom the narrator is tied, the poor, the exploited, the downtrodden, the rebels of all places and all times; “they” are the exploiters and the complacent. However, the former are never idealized, and the latter are often treated with great delicacy. Moreover, the basic opposition becomes richly ironic in the final section of the novel when “we” have at last taken power in Russia, and the narrator discovers that “the danger is within us.”

With
Birth of Our Power,
Serge created both a compelling portrait of modem revolution and a probing examination of the problems that attend it. The novel captures in a lyrical, yet powerfully direct, manner the enormous vigor and excitement of the revolutionary spirit of our century, and it is at the same time an historically valuable study of humanity at the crucial moment of upheaval and social change—a study that speaks with the eloquence of deeply felt experience and is full of important implications for our times. For Victor Serge, the revolution did not end with the defeat of the revolution of 1917 or of 1936 in Spain (or with the transformation of the Russia of 1917 into its opposite); in
Birth of Our Power
he wrote, “Nothing is ever lost…. Tomorrow is full of greatness. We will not have brought this victory to ripeness in vain. This city will be taken, if not by our hands, at least by others like ours, but stronger. Stronger perhaps for having been better hardened, thanks to our very weakness. If we are beaten, other men, infinitely different from us, infinitely like us, will walk, on a similar evening, in ten years, in twenty years (how long is really without importance) down this
rambla,
meditating on the same victory. Perhaps they will think about our blood. Even now I think I see them and I am thinking about their blood, which will flow too. But they will take the city.”