Midnight In the Century

Victor Serge (1890–1947), born Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, was a Russian writer, anarchist, and revolutionary. An outspoken critic of Stalin, Serge published a stream of impassioned, documented exposés of Stalin’s Moscow show trials and machinations in Spain. He wrote three novels, Men in Prison, Birth of Our Power, and Conquered City (available from NYRB Classics), and a history, Year One of the Russian Revolution. Stateless, penniless, hounded by Stalinist agents, Serge lived in precarious exile in Brussels, Paris, Vichy France, and Mexico City, where he died. His classic Memoirs of a Revolutionary and his great last novels, Unforgiving Years and The Case of Comrade Tulayev, written “for the desk drawer” and published posthumously, are all available from NYRB Classics.   Richard Greeman has translated and written the introductions for five of Serge’s novels, including Unforgiving Years and Conquered City. A veteran Socialist and co-founder of the Praxis Center and Victor Serge Library in Moscow, Greeman is the author of Beware of “Vegetarian” Sharks: Radical Rants and Internationalist Essays. He divides his time between France and New York.