Vagabond Witness
Victor Serge and the Politics of Hope
1st Edition
Published on 31. May 2013
125 pages
978-1-78099-478-9 (ISBN)
Description
Victor Serge was the first and the greatest witness of the twentieth century. An anarchist in France, a syndicalist in Spain, a critical Bolshevik in Russia, an agent of the Comintern in Germany and Austria, an exile, Serge once said that people judged history, but they did so without knowing what really happened and who the actors really were. All his work - novels. reportage, poetry, criticism - was an attempt to show what really happened, and why. Serge never lost hope, that ordinary people would act for themselves and take control of their own lives. On the ship taking him to exile in Mexico, where he would die isolated and in poverty, he recalled, "The Russians and Spaniards among us know what it is to take the world into their hands, to set the railways running and the factories working...no kind of predestination impels us to become the offal of the concentration camps."
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05/2013
Zero Books
€32.39
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Person
Paul Gordon is a radical - and sceptical - psychotherapist. He spent many years working in civil liberties/anti-racism and his outlook on the world is still informed by his libertarian socialist politics.
Content
- Intro
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Dedication
- Acknowledgements
- Victor Serge - a life line
- Introduction: the art of not dying away
- 1. In the shadow of madness: the experience of prison
- 2. Yesterday we were nothing: the revolutionary experience
- 3. Building on corpses: the repressive state
- 4. A stranger to no land: the experience of exile
- 5. Magicians of word and thought: the Russian cultural revolution
- 6. A certain sort of courage: the writer as witness
- 7. Shared veins: hope and the soul
- Writings by Victor Serge
- Further reading
- Endnotes
