Memoirs Of A Revolutionary
  • Published: 15 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781590174517
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $50.00

Memoirs Of A Revolutionary

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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.
  • Published: 15 January 2012
  • ISBN: 9781590174517
  • Imprint: NY Review Books
  • Format: Paperback
  • Pages: 576
  • RRP: $50.00
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Conquered City
Unforgiving Years
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Praise for Memoirs Of A Revolutionary

  • "The work of the writer Victor Serge faultlessly captures the labyrinth of bureaucratic incrimination into which the Soviet Union descended." --The Atlantic
  • "I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth. There have of course been many scrupulously honest writers. But for Serge the value of the truth extended far beyond the simple (or complex) telling of it." --John Berger
  • "Serge, who has been championed by Susan Sontag and many others, was born in Brussels in 1899 to emigre Russians who'd fled the Czar. He became a political activist, was jailed and arrived in Russia in 1919 to support the Bolshevik Revolution. He rose high in the Comintern before falling foul of Stalin and finding himself in jail and then exile. He was steamrolled by history, and out of this experience he crafted a series of extraordinary memoirs and novels." --Los Angeles Times
  • "I can't think of anyone else who has written about the revolutionary movement in this century with Serge's combination of moral insight and intellectual richness." --Dwight MacDonald
  • "Victor Serge is one of the great political and moral heroes of the 20th century. He is akin to George Orwell in the way he combined a wide-ranging passion for justice with great literary skill and with an unrelenting refusal to adhere to any orthodoxy, great or small." --Adam Hochschild, Co-founder and publisher of Mother Jones