The way in which the Notebooks of Victor Serge came to light in 2010 in a small village in Mexico is nothing short of novelistic: hundreds of pages bound with twine inside a cardboard box, which had remained untouched for nearly sixty years. Through the diary entries, the man, the rebel, the writer Victor Serge emerges with unmatched vitality, along with his thoughts, experiences, mistakes, and hopes.
Always against the backdrop of the great confrontations and historical turning points of the 20th century, from the October Revolution to the defeat of Nazism. “Uncompromisingly realistic,” Victor Serge talks about everything: his collaboration with Trotsky and his subsequent disagreements, the illness of sectarianism, and how he perceives the post-war landscape.
He speaks about Mexico, the volcanoes, the cacti, the architecture, the painting, the folk festivals, as well as the personalities he met, from Lenin and Dzerzhinsky to André Gide, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Breton, and Lévi-Strauss.
He discusses the need to restore democratic freedoms, viewing them as the “prerequisite for the rebirth of the workers' and socialist movements,” and argues that “socialism must reject the idea of dictatorship and the hegemony of the workers and represent the vast number of people in whom a socialist consciousness is incubating, albeit vague and without dogmatic terminology.”
The Notebooks are not a requiem for defeated revolutions but a declaration of faith in the future: “I say that we were defeated only in the sense of the fighters of a great army that has time on its side; that we must not feel defeated, but keep the victory in our souls, that we hold an unpredictable future in our hands and that we have proven our ability to face everything, endure everything, and achieve everything.”
