Translated, edited and with an introduction by Al Richardson
This book gathers together for the first time the bulk of Victor Serge’s literary criticism from the 1920s to the 1950s, giving the reader an invaluable contemporary account of the debates about the production of literature in a socialist society, the role of intellectuals, the theory of ‘proletarian’ literature, as well as assessments of Soviet writers: Mayakovsky, Gorky, Alexei Tolstoy, Alexander Blok, and the less well known Korolenko, Pilnyak, Fedin, Bezymensky, Ivanov, amongst others.
Later chapters deal with the ‘massacre of writers’ by Stalin in the late 1930s, the suicides, disappearances and executions, making Serge’s work not just an exercise in literary criticism, but a history of the Russian Revolution itself.
