Victor Serge, an authentic witness of the political and cultural struggles of this century, wrote these poems of Résistance in Orenburg in Central Asia, where he was sent into exile by Stalin in 1933. He eulogizes close friends and comrades and movingly records and shares the lives of the people he lived among on the steppe, far from the centers of power, intrigue, and history. Richard Greeman writes in his introduction that Serge "spoke the truth aloud and perpetuated the spiritual tradition of the Russian revolutionary intelligentsia at the very moment when the voices of his colleagues were forced into silence [so that] this collection of poems, written in deportation on the Ural, represents a unique strand of continuity between a lost generation and what one hopes will be a new beginning, with 'no blank pages,' in Soviet literature." * "Victor Serge's Memoirs contain the fiber and metaphor of poetry : his novels are replete with the same pulse and rhythm. Even his titles — Birth of Our Power — have a ringing quality. Now, with Resistance, we are at last given the poems that described and survived the midnight of our century, written with balanced passion and sobriety — optimism of the will — from the other shore." — Christopher Hitchens |
