Victor Serge (1890-1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his
indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles
in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel
in Barcelona; a Bolshevik in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central
Europe; a comrade of Trotsky's; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely,
Boris Pilnyak, and André Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident
Marxist in exile in Mexico...
Like Serge's extraordinary novels, A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems
bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the
advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the
"immense shipwreck" of Stalin's ascendancy. In poems datelined
Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico, Serge
composed elegies for the fallen--as well as prospective elegies for the
living who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment
in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century:
Night falls, the boat pulls in,
stop singing.
Exile relights its captive lamps
on the shore of time.
Throughout A Blaze in a Desert, Serge draws on the heritage of late-
and post-Symbolist writers like Verhaeren, Rictus, Apollinaire, Blok,
and Bely--themselves authors of messages of a more general resistance by
the human spirit--to express the anguish of the failure of the Russian
Revolution and to search out glimmers of hope in the ruins of the Second
World War.
A Blaze in a Desert comprises Victor Serge's sole published book of
poetry, Resistance (1938), his unpublished manuscript Messages
(1946), and his last poem, "Hands" (1947).
