Here's a real corker for you. The setting is late 1930s Moscow. Joseph Stalin and his henchmen are in the process of committing one of the twentieth century's greatest crimes in the rounding up, framing, trial and execution of their fellow Bolsheviks. This period has become known as The Great Terror. Wikipedia describes it as a period ". . . of campaigns of political repression and persecution . . . that involved a large-scale purge of the Communist Party and government officials, repression of peasants ("dekulakization"), Red Army leadership, and the persecution of unaffiliated persons. It was characterized by widespread police surveillance, suspicion of "saboteurs", imprisonment, and executions." The toll is estimated to range from 20 to 50 million people. Just think of that for a moment: the difference, 30 million deaths, as a statistical uncertainty.Victor Serge was the son of Russian political exiles who fled the Czar's tyranny. He did not set foot in Russia in support the Bolshevik Revolution until 1919 at age 28. Unlike many of his fellow revolutionaries, Serge had grown up in the democratic West where speech went for the most part unpunished, though even there he was jailed for his political activities. In 1928 he was arrested for criticizing Stalin's rule. André Gide was part of the international literary front that demanded his release. Fortunately Serge had actually been born in Brussels, which made him a foreign national. Yet as a Communist Party functionary for some nine years he came to know the workings of the Soviet government and its players well. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is his novelistic expose about how The Great Terror affected the lives of Soviet citizens of all kinds. The ease with which Stalin's "rivals" were framed and executed is almost beyond belief. Fortunately we have Robert Conquest's superb The Great Terror to corroborate Serge's vision in excruciating detail.The story starts with a young Moscow resident who finds himself in possession of a Colt pistol. When he happens across Colonel Tulayev, who is involved with the current purge, his unhesitating and automatic impulse is to shoot the man dead. Police whistles sound. He flees, is never caught. Stalin and his goons then take advantage of the "public outrage" created by the murder to do away in utterly random fashion with a number of old Bolsheviks. The ease with which they choose others for destruction—and then are subsequently destroyed themselves—takes the breath away. Included in the frame up is Artyem Makeyev who perhaps suffers the least in anticipation of his arrest. He is a peasant lad for whom the Revolution was great fun. Afterward he rises to a position of regional power through relentless ambition and command of the socialist clichés. Kiril Kirillovitch Rublev, by contrast, is a thinker and scholar, a gentle, honest man whom the reader comes to admire. It is through Rublev and others that we begin to understand the terrible campaign of fear and terror they endured while awaiting inevitable arrest. The dread and anticipation of the knock on the door in the middle of the night is something Serge conveys almost too well. He has the gift of making all of the main characters—even the real rats like Intelligence Chief Erchov; Central Committee member Popov; and frameup artist Zvyeryeva—sympathetic.What I found startling was Serge's consistently wonderful writing, originally in French (translated by Willard Trask, who is perhaps best known for the Herculean task of translating all 12 volumes of Casanova's diaries). And to think he wrote the book while on the run between Paris, Agen, Marseille, the Dominican Republic and Mexico during the years 1940-42. The book credited with first bringing the crimes of Stalin's reign to public notice is Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, published in 1941. Victor Serge, it is important to note, was writing his indictment before that, but he languished in exile, died in 1947 and an English translation of the book did not appear until 1950. Susan Sontag writes the informative preface in which she discusses both Serge's fascinating biography, as well as why Koestler and not Serge got all the credit for bringing the show trials to light. This is a fascinating novel that deserves far greater recognition than it has so far received. Many thanks to New York Review Books for republishing this masterpiece.
If you've read both works, you can't talk about The Case of Comrade Tulayev without Koestler's Darkness at Noon. Both books, written by disaffected former Communists, and published within two years of each other, deal with the process of the revolution eating its children. Both books attempt to come to grips with the motivations of old guards revolutionaries who seemingly openly acquiesced with their own murder. Of course Darkness at Noon is much more widely known and widely read. There are pretty rational reasons for this that I won't get in to, but none of those reasons have to do with literary merit. In The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Serge accomplished everything that Koestler did, and perhaps more. Upon discovering Serge's novel, it's hard for the reader to resist the urge to dismiss Koestler's. Susan Sontag, in a way, falls prey to this urge in the introduction to this introduction. However, I'm not sure how necessary it is to emphasize the merits of one book over the other. In fact, while the books seemingly have identical premises and ambitions, further exploration reveals stark differences. I'd argue that the two books relationship is symbiotic, they serve as a exemplary companions to each other. In a way, Serge finishes the thought that Koestler started in Darkness at Noon. If I remember the details correctly, Darkness at Noon takes place at the beginning of the purges, and concerns the history and psychology of one character, Rubashov, a Bukharin stand-in. Comrade Tulayev has a much wider lens. Serge focuses on around half a dozen characters, each with different backgrounds and different reactions. There's the state security functionary, the provincial peasant turned revolutionary leader, the old party ideologue, and the almost-forgotten political prisoner. They all have their differences, and Serge exploits these differences to meditate on the perversion of the ideal, and the loyalty men feel to old ideas even as a warped form of the same threaten oblivion. Furthermore, The Case of Comrade Tulayev takes place well into the purge of the party. These characters, in a way, are familiar with Darkness at Noon, Rubashov's death is firmly in the past at the opening of Serge's work. Most of these men know with a sense of creeping fatalism what is coming to get them. Moreover, the novel doesn't focus on the victims of Stalinist paranoia alone. Serge bookends the novel with two chapters examining the the characters behind the titular case, the assassin of Comrade Tulayev and his neighbor, who bought the gun in order to kill Stalin, but found himself unable to act when presented with the golden opportunity. Serge writes with understanding about the cogs of oppression, the functionaries who are attempting to stage an exhibition of guilt that they know is false, but must treat as if it were of the utmost truth. Even the Stalin stand-in is depicted with some empathy. For my money, the scene where the old veteran has to dance the wire of explaining to his old comrade "the boss", the insanity of what is going on, without going too far and sealing his doom is one of the most thrilling pieces of political fiction I've ever read. The penultimate chapter even deals with the legacy of Stalinism on the future generation of young Russians.Darkness at Noon is the tale of how one man reconciles himself with betrayal and sacrifices himself for a perverted vestige of a dream. The Case of Comrade Tulayev does something similar, but it is also concerned about a broader scope. The two years follwing the publication of Koestler's novel were when Serge did most of his work on Comrade Tulayev. Those two years were not good one's for the Soviet Union. For much of those years the effects of Stalin's paranoia must seem exponentially more cataclysmic than they even do today. Serge may have thought that he was writing Leninism obituary. The Case of Comrade Tulayev reads as a prelude to obliteration. Although Russian Marxism would survive for another half century, The Case of Comrade Tulayev remains an engaging, thoughtful, and often breathtakingly (Serge's prose!)* beautiful account of a people dealing with a reign of scientific insanity. *Not that I have anything to compare it to, but this edition reads as an extraordinary translation.
Do You like book The Case Of Comrade Tulayev (2004)?
Listened to the Audible audiobook narrated by Gregory Linington. Just the introduction/biography of the author is fascinating so far.I had a hell of a time getting through this book. I picked it because it was the highest ranked book from one of the Lists available on Audible. I'm a lover of Russian literature and have read almost all of Solzhenitsyn's novels, which deal with the same themes.I just loved the introductory biography of the author, Victor Serge, written by Susan Sontag. I thought the first chapter was great, too. The writing style is good throughout.Then my trouble began. It's the story of various unrelated people in Stalin's USSR who are (falsely) accused of conspiracy to murder the title character. The chapters are episodic and each one comes with at least 5 new characters and a bunch of dense discussions about the betrayal of the Revolution. I'm had a hard time getting engaged but I figured that the chapters could be tackled one at a time. Also, I kept getting distracted by my beloved Dickens.Unfortunately, by the end the many characters were reappearing and I had no idea who they were anymore.
—Bea
Ok, I confess. I have a macabre penchant for gulag fiction, and this is my favourite of the lot. While Koestler & Solzhenitsyn graphically portray interrogation and exile respectively, Serge takes a panoramic approach showing how a Stalinist purge rippled out from a random incident to ensnare old heroes and young zealots alike. And he ought to know - having spent years in a Russian prison in the 1930s. This is a masterfully constructed tale written in an immensely readable style, but it is the unique window into the remorseless machinery of a totalitarian state and its justifications that make this book essential cautionary reading.Sentus Libri 100 word reviews of overlooked books.
—Brendan
I'm abandoning this one by the roadside like an old shoe or a sack of dead lithium batteries. It probably wasn't fair to Comrade Serge to embark upon his novel immediately after a Chekhov compilation. (It's not likely he would blossom in the shade of the master.) But I had hope. A fictional indictment of (the realities of) Stalinism? What's not to love, right? The Case of Comrade Tulayev may call itself a novel, but it's essentially a collection of related short stories. A Stalinist-era political functionary is killed one night in the streets of Moscow; this murder, carried out by a single man without much premeditation, is subsequently used as a pretext for purging the Communist Party of undesirables. (If you understand anything about Stalin's sociopathic paranoia, then you know that 'undesirables' is a heterogeneous category comprised largely of innocent scapegoats and other unfortunates whose only crime was the inability to read Stalin's mind and to predict his highly changeable political agenda.) The first chapter details the actual murder of Comrade Tulayev, and the following chapters (so far as I read) chronicle the downfall of particular Party members. Some parts of the book are riveting (if predictable, since the reader is apt to know much more about the excesses of Stalinism than Serge's contemporary readers). But last night Victor Serge irritated me. And I wanted him out of my sight. It was the chapter on the Spanish Civil War that did it. A Soviet advisor arrives in Spain to oversee the Communist engagement in the anti-fascist war there. Fine, okay. But Serge, as always, writes in a very ungenerous way. He assumes his readers know more than a little about the Spanish Civil War, and throws around specifics as if he's talking to himself in his own head. Throw us a bone, Serge. Some of us are ignoramuses who maybe wanna be edified, you know? Even the chapters in the Soviet Union, I think, would be somewhat of a challenge for a reader who didn't know anything about the Stalinist era. Sometimes when I read a book that doesn't want to meet its readers halfway, I muscle through anyway, but last night I wasn't in the mood. I was bored, irritable, and a little sick, and I didn't really like Victor Serge taking it for granted that readers' bodies of knowledge and social orientation are the same as his own. His tactic, of course, is mostly immersive. He throws us in the cold water without a life vest, and we're supposed to sink or swim, I guess, based on our abilities and efforts. Well, I choose neither to sink or to swim. I'm climbing back in the metaphorical boat.
—David
