What do you think?
Rate this book
Victory-in-Defeat, Defeat-in-Victory #3
Conquered City
1919â€�1920: St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the Revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the city’s new masters seek to cement their control, even as the counterrevolutionary White Army regroups. Conquered City, Victor Serge’s most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime tracks down and eliminates its enemies—the spies, speculators, andÌýtraitors hidden among the mass of common people.Ìý
Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power—police, guns, jails, spies, treachery—in the doomed gamble that by wielding them righteously, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.
Conquered City is about terror: the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power—police, guns, jails, spies, treachery—in the doomed gamble that by wielding them righteously, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament.
196 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1932
21 people are currently reading
1,007 people want to read
About the author
Victor Serge
92Ìýbooks218ÌýfollowersVictor Lvovich Kibalchich (Ð’.Л. Кибальчич) was born in exile in 1890 and died in exile in 1947. He is better known as Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919, and later worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the ideals of socialism until his death.
After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'
After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
August 6, 2012
Conquered City by Victor Serge is the second novel that I’ve read set in the Civil War that followed the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia. The first was The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov which I admired for its clarity, its biting satire and its sheer brilliance. It’s set in and around Kiev in the Ukraine at a particularly troubled and uncertain time in history, just as Serge's book is set in and around Saint Petersburg - then called Petrograd � during the same troubled months.
Conquered City is a slightly different order of literary experience. It has flashes of brilliance, though the overall effect is uneven. At some points it’s clear, at others opaque; at some points satirical, at others laudatory. I do admire Serge, but in a different way; I admire him above all for his honesty and for his integrity which carries this work � the first book of his I’ve ever read � from the mundane realms of propaganda into a far higher aesthetic level.
The thing is Serge was a true believer, a professional revolutionary who identified with the Revolution. To that extent he believed that the suffering he describes which such lucidity in Conquered City could be overcome; that a floor was being constructed on which the future would dance.
But he was also an idealist, not a quality particularly prized among hard-nosed Bolshevik cadres, the sort of man uncomfortable with self-serving cynicism and the betrayals of expediency. He was the sort of man, in other words, who was incapable of settling down to the rigours of Stalinism.
But there is more here. Serge, it seems to me, was not the type of individual who could ever have made a home in any kind of Russia, least of all the one forged by the Bolshevik Revolution, no matter if the flavour was Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. Indeed I begin to wonder if the author really understood the true character of the history he lived through and the ideology he embraced, a dangerous step, I know, on the basis of a single reading of a single novel.
Perhaps I’m not being quite fair; there is startling prescience along with the idealism. I recall having an argument over the precise point in Animal Farm where the degeneracy started. Most see Orwell’s novel as a parable against Stalinism. My interpretation is different. The moral rot clearly sets in before the rise of Napoleon/Stalin; the moral rot sets in when the pigs take the windfall apples for themselves. In Serge’s beleaguered city the goods that are available are not evenly distributed, something he is acutely aware of. The workers starve; or rather they are fed on the fine words of Bolshevik apparatchiks, who claim the sausage and bread for themselves.
And then there is this passage on page 47, a parable of bureaucracy, the rope that was to strangle all hopes that the events of 1917 may have raised;
These were not the same outrages, but they had just cost the lives of forty soldiers who had frozen to death near Dno while the overcoats being sent to them were held up in a railroad station because the shipping order hadn’t been filled out according to regulations.
Overall Serge has an admiral precision with words. He manages to convey so much with great economy of expression. I thought this passage close to the beginning particularly impressive:
…Comrade Ryzhik, was sleeping in his boots on the same divan where, eighteen months earlier, an old epicurean of the race of the Ruriks amused himself by staring full of enchantment and despair at naked girls in this elegant Louis XV room. Now this epicurean was lying somewhere else, who knew where, naked, with a bristly beard, and a hole clean through his head, on an artillery range under two feet of trampled earth, four feet of snow, and the nameless weight of eternity.
It’s history in an instant; it’s about time, near and distant; it’s about personal loss and decay; it’s about change and it’s about irrelevance, not just the irrelevance of the past but the irrelevance of a possible future. What does fate have waiting for Comrade Ryzhik?
As a novel Conquered City is a bit like a painting, impressionist and expressionist at one and the same time. There is no central focus. Rather we move from episode to episode, looking at developments from within and without, caught in the currents and cross-currents of events, dipping in and out of the lives of others, lives within lives, marionettes on the stage of history. “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it�, some lines I remember from Doctor Zhivago. There is no personal life in Serge’s Petrograd; history, and the CHEKA, the first manifestation of the Soviet secret police, are killing it in starvation and terror. Perfection cannot be shaped by ugliness and squalor.
This is an honest novel. Serge’s virtue would almost certainly have led to his death in Stalin’s Great Terror, the sum of all of the little terrors that had gone before, but for his international reputation. Already a persona non grata, he was allowed to leave Russia before the real horror began. As it was he was pursued to the end of his days by the agents of a Revolution that had corrupted beyond recall. There are other novels of Serge’s I’ve still to read, better perhaps, so Conquered City may not stand as his final testament. It’s a commendable one, notwithstanding.
We conquered everything and everything slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an iron discipline � yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen moulds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength � and we are the bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is “fraternity and death� in reality. We have founded the Republic of Labour, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards. We wanted each to give according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of generalised misery, since we are less hungry than others!
Conquered City is a slightly different order of literary experience. It has flashes of brilliance, though the overall effect is uneven. At some points it’s clear, at others opaque; at some points satirical, at others laudatory. I do admire Serge, but in a different way; I admire him above all for his honesty and for his integrity which carries this work � the first book of his I’ve ever read � from the mundane realms of propaganda into a far higher aesthetic level.
The thing is Serge was a true believer, a professional revolutionary who identified with the Revolution. To that extent he believed that the suffering he describes which such lucidity in Conquered City could be overcome; that a floor was being constructed on which the future would dance.
But he was also an idealist, not a quality particularly prized among hard-nosed Bolshevik cadres, the sort of man uncomfortable with self-serving cynicism and the betrayals of expediency. He was the sort of man, in other words, who was incapable of settling down to the rigours of Stalinism.
But there is more here. Serge, it seems to me, was not the type of individual who could ever have made a home in any kind of Russia, least of all the one forged by the Bolshevik Revolution, no matter if the flavour was Lenin, Trotsky or Stalin. Indeed I begin to wonder if the author really understood the true character of the history he lived through and the ideology he embraced, a dangerous step, I know, on the basis of a single reading of a single novel.
Perhaps I’m not being quite fair; there is startling prescience along with the idealism. I recall having an argument over the precise point in Animal Farm where the degeneracy started. Most see Orwell’s novel as a parable against Stalinism. My interpretation is different. The moral rot clearly sets in before the rise of Napoleon/Stalin; the moral rot sets in when the pigs take the windfall apples for themselves. In Serge’s beleaguered city the goods that are available are not evenly distributed, something he is acutely aware of. The workers starve; or rather they are fed on the fine words of Bolshevik apparatchiks, who claim the sausage and bread for themselves.
And then there is this passage on page 47, a parable of bureaucracy, the rope that was to strangle all hopes that the events of 1917 may have raised;
These were not the same outrages, but they had just cost the lives of forty soldiers who had frozen to death near Dno while the overcoats being sent to them were held up in a railroad station because the shipping order hadn’t been filled out according to regulations.
Overall Serge has an admiral precision with words. He manages to convey so much with great economy of expression. I thought this passage close to the beginning particularly impressive:
…Comrade Ryzhik, was sleeping in his boots on the same divan where, eighteen months earlier, an old epicurean of the race of the Ruriks amused himself by staring full of enchantment and despair at naked girls in this elegant Louis XV room. Now this epicurean was lying somewhere else, who knew where, naked, with a bristly beard, and a hole clean through his head, on an artillery range under two feet of trampled earth, four feet of snow, and the nameless weight of eternity.
It’s history in an instant; it’s about time, near and distant; it’s about personal loss and decay; it’s about change and it’s about irrelevance, not just the irrelevance of the past but the irrelevance of a possible future. What does fate have waiting for Comrade Ryzhik?
As a novel Conquered City is a bit like a painting, impressionist and expressionist at one and the same time. There is no central focus. Rather we move from episode to episode, looking at developments from within and without, caught in the currents and cross-currents of events, dipping in and out of the lives of others, lives within lives, marionettes on the stage of history. “The personal life is dead in Russia. History has killed it�, some lines I remember from Doctor Zhivago. There is no personal life in Serge’s Petrograd; history, and the CHEKA, the first manifestation of the Soviet secret police, are killing it in starvation and terror. Perfection cannot be shaped by ugliness and squalor.
This is an honest novel. Serge’s virtue would almost certainly have led to his death in Stalin’s Great Terror, the sum of all of the little terrors that had gone before, but for his international reputation. Already a persona non grata, he was allowed to leave Russia before the real horror began. As it was he was pursued to the end of his days by the agents of a Revolution that had corrupted beyond recall. There are other novels of Serge’s I’ve still to read, better perhaps, so Conquered City may not stand as his final testament. It’s a commendable one, notwithstanding.
We conquered everything and everything slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an iron discipline � yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen moulds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength � and we are the bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is “fraternity and death� in reality. We have founded the Republic of Labour, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards. We wanted each to give according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of generalised misery, since we are less hungry than others!
August 24, 2013
is virtually unknown in the West, and that is a shame. Born in Brussels, Serge was a Communist Revolutionary who saw action during the Revolution. is about the years 1919-1920, when the Bolsheviks have largely prevailed but are being assailed from within by Mensheviks and Left SR's and from without by the White Russian armies financed by the Western powers.
Conquered City skips around from one set of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries to another. Although some sections are first person narratives, it is not always easy to know who is speaking. The book is, however, a powerful study of cynicism tempered by starvation. The hero is Petrograd itself, which was at the time threatened from the West by a White army.
Several years ago, I read Serge's The Case of Comrade Tularev, which I found to be one of the best, if not the best, fiction relating to Stalin's purges. (Anatoli Rybakov's Arbat trilogy is another candidate.)
Both books showed Serge to be a superb, if unsung, novelist. He wrote in French. In Russia, he quickly came into conflict with Stalin and was imprisoned by him. It was the pleading of Western writers which led the Chekhists to release him. Like Trotsky, he died in exile in Mexico, though, unlike Trotsky, of a natural death.
Conquered City skips around from one set of revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries to another. Although some sections are first person narratives, it is not always easy to know who is speaking. The book is, however, a powerful study of cynicism tempered by starvation. The hero is Petrograd itself, which was at the time threatened from the West by a White army.
Several years ago, I read Serge's The Case of Comrade Tularev, which I found to be one of the best, if not the best, fiction relating to Stalin's purges. (Anatoli Rybakov's Arbat trilogy is another candidate.)
Both books showed Serge to be a superb, if unsung, novelist. He wrote in French. In Russia, he quickly came into conflict with Stalin and was imprisoned by him. It was the pleading of Western writers which led the Chekhists to release him. Like Trotsky, he died in exile in Mexico, though, unlike Trotsky, of a natural death.
Read
February 1, 2019Conquered City is part three of the 'Victory in Defeat, Defeat in Victory' cycle that Serge wrote detailing in a semi-autobiographical way his experiences of being incarcerated just before the outbreak of WW1, taking part in the Barcelona uprising of 1917 and his eventual journey across a war-torn Europe and into Russia after the Revolution that had occurred there in 1917, being exchanged (as he was a political prisoner) for ex-Tsarist hostages.
St.Petersburg is the conquered city in question. As my 'Birth of our Power' review starts to explain, this is a city, having been the central place during the Russian Revolution, that is now suffering from starvation and extreme poverty due to the Civil War that tried to wrestle back control of Russia from the Bolsheviks during 1918-1922. Lyrically and descriptively portrayed, this once grand city is now in ruins, a shadow of its former proud self; its former rulers and aristocrats (the ex-bourgeoisie) now on the streets selling their remaining jewels for a few more pounds of rations and so on. A city starving, beginning to sound emaciated with floorboards from old Tsarist buildings being ripped up for fuel, no electricity as there was no power - even the chimney stacks from the factories were 'silent'. Serge describes this all too well and, ironically, the same was written by other writers about St.Petersburg only about ten or twelve years after he wrote this novel(he wrote the book between 1930-31) during the Nazi siege of Leningrad during WW2, but that is another story.
What the novels main focus is about however, is the CHEKA - the early Bolshevik secret police. Dissident suppression being its key role, and the dissidents being other left-wing organisations, speculators, sections of the old bourgeoisie et al. Most end up being killed. Serge, through his characters discourse throughout the book have conversations regarding just how far you would go to make sure the revolution survived; do the ends really justify the means, no matter how bloody they turn out to be? Surely if the revolution failed, that would be better to go down in the history books as something that had been attempted, an attempt to make a workers revolution rather than turning it into something else which would be anathema to the high hopes and beliefs that what the Bolsheviks believed they were doing was right in the first instance? If anything you take away from reading this book it must be just how close the revolution came to floundering, how close the Whites were in winning, just how impoverished Russia had become detailing the excesses of grain requisitioning, the barbarity amongst the civilians selling anything to gain an extra loaf of black bread or sugar, and just how murderous and hypocritical the CHEKA were - seemingly at odds with anything the revolution preached about fraternity and humanity.
Conquered City is a book written openly and honestly about the excesses committed in the name of Socialism, or rather just how far should you go in order to win, no matter the consequences in achieving that aim. It also shows a rising bureaucracy being formed amongst the Bolshevik State apparatus, an increasing paranoia that enemies had to be killed even if they just held liberal views. There are both internal (Left-Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists) and external threats (the White armies) threatening the revolution and brutal force against them, creating the 'Terror', seemed the only way of surviving. If that was right, and Serge seems to muse on this point via his characters, then it is open to interpretation.
St.Petersburg is the conquered city in question. As my 'Birth of our Power' review starts to explain, this is a city, having been the central place during the Russian Revolution, that is now suffering from starvation and extreme poverty due to the Civil War that tried to wrestle back control of Russia from the Bolsheviks during 1918-1922. Lyrically and descriptively portrayed, this once grand city is now in ruins, a shadow of its former proud self; its former rulers and aristocrats (the ex-bourgeoisie) now on the streets selling their remaining jewels for a few more pounds of rations and so on. A city starving, beginning to sound emaciated with floorboards from old Tsarist buildings being ripped up for fuel, no electricity as there was no power - even the chimney stacks from the factories were 'silent'. Serge describes this all too well and, ironically, the same was written by other writers about St.Petersburg only about ten or twelve years after he wrote this novel(he wrote the book between 1930-31) during the Nazi siege of Leningrad during WW2, but that is another story.
What the novels main focus is about however, is the CHEKA - the early Bolshevik secret police. Dissident suppression being its key role, and the dissidents being other left-wing organisations, speculators, sections of the old bourgeoisie et al. Most end up being killed. Serge, through his characters discourse throughout the book have conversations regarding just how far you would go to make sure the revolution survived; do the ends really justify the means, no matter how bloody they turn out to be? Surely if the revolution failed, that would be better to go down in the history books as something that had been attempted, an attempt to make a workers revolution rather than turning it into something else which would be anathema to the high hopes and beliefs that what the Bolsheviks believed they were doing was right in the first instance? If anything you take away from reading this book it must be just how close the revolution came to floundering, how close the Whites were in winning, just how impoverished Russia had become detailing the excesses of grain requisitioning, the barbarity amongst the civilians selling anything to gain an extra loaf of black bread or sugar, and just how murderous and hypocritical the CHEKA were - seemingly at odds with anything the revolution preached about fraternity and humanity.
Conquered City is a book written openly and honestly about the excesses committed in the name of Socialism, or rather just how far should you go in order to win, no matter the consequences in achieving that aim. It also shows a rising bureaucracy being formed amongst the Bolshevik State apparatus, an increasing paranoia that enemies had to be killed even if they just held liberal views. There are both internal (Left-Social Revolutionaries, Mensheviks, Anarchists) and external threats (the White armies) threatening the revolution and brutal force against them, creating the 'Terror', seemed the only way of surviving. If that was right, and Serge seems to muse on this point via his characters, then it is open to interpretation.
May 27, 2012
Victor Serge's Conquered City is an extraordinary novel in every sense. It captures the period of one year in the Russian revolution, when the revolutionaries are in control of St. Petersburg (or, rather, Petrograd) and have begun a period of purges, reprisals, and terror. It is impressionistic, episodic, and truly a communist story, in its root meaning of communal. It is not an individual person's story, but rather a story, told through glimpses of dozens of different lives, of both a people and an idea in a particular moment in history. In Serge's novel, the revolution itself is the main character, a strange, amorphous but unitary creature -- at once rough beast, fighting out of instinct and elemental need, and political-philosophical being, pressing onward through exceptional, sometimes nightmarish, times, driven by a deliberate consciousness of a higher purpose, an intellectually cohesive and morally justified imperative.
Born in Brussels in 1890, a child of Russian exiles, Victor Serge participated in anarchist movements in both France (where he was jailed for several years) and Spain. In 1919, he traveled to Russia to join the revolution. His fortunes in Russia rose and fell with his degree of agreement with the Soviet political establishment. He was expelled from the Party in 1928 and later imprisoned, and eventually permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Conquered City, written in 1931 in quick succession after two other revolutionary-themed novels, is a reflection of what he witnessed during the civil war in St. Petersburg.
The New York Review of Books Classics edition of Conquered City includes a foreword by translator Richard Greeman which illuminates the novel a great deal, providing important context. For example, this excerpt from the foreword quotes Serge to describe both his primary thematic interest in writing the book, and his conscious aim to create a narrative greater than any one character:
Serge's work stands out among other fictional accounts of the revolution. He was committed to the revolution and remained dedicated to its ideals, but was not blind to its contradictions and excesses. The revolution's young idealists often wound up either corrupted by the regime or disenchanted by it, resulting in a literature that either falsely idealizes the revolution, or rejects and condemns it completely. But this piece occupies an unusual middle ground, providing a refreshingly multi-layered picture that encompasses both the hope and the tragedy of the revolution, seen through the eyes of a true believer. Serge's point is that within its own success, the revolution carried its own demise. In remaking society, it remade itself, purging the contaminating elements within itself and in the process becoming many of the very things it fought against.
Beyond the politics, the novel impresses stylistically and narratively. It is filled with deeply evocative images and passages too numerous to count, which convey a full atmosphere of advance, defeat, struggle, hope, resignation and acceptance in the smallest detail. For example: looking out over a still, clear winter morning panorama of the city, at a time when shortages, hunger, and industrial collapse pervade the city, a character observes, “All this beauty was perhaps the sign of our death. Not a single chimney was smoking. The city was thus dying.� (p. 57)
Elsewhere, an official of the new regime reflects on having been stopped and questioned by a sentry guarding a woodpile, and voices his discomfort with his own relative privilege, and its contradictory necessity:
The effect of all this is powerful, an aesthetically complex story that conveys the paradoxical reality of the social and political revolution, communicating the principled idealism that drove it, as well as the individual hardship that it caused.
Born in Brussels in 1890, a child of Russian exiles, Victor Serge participated in anarchist movements in both France (where he was jailed for several years) and Spain. In 1919, he traveled to Russia to join the revolution. His fortunes in Russia rose and fell with his degree of agreement with the Soviet political establishment. He was expelled from the Party in 1928 and later imprisoned, and eventually permitted to leave the Soviet Union. Conquered City, written in 1931 in quick succession after two other revolutionary-themed novels, is a reflection of what he witnessed during the civil war in St. Petersburg.
The New York Review of Books Classics edition of Conquered City includes a foreword by translator Richard Greeman which illuminates the novel a great deal, providing important context. For example, this excerpt from the foreword quotes Serge to describe both his primary thematic interest in writing the book, and his conscious aim to create a narrative greater than any one character:
"His goal in writing Conquered City, he wrote to [French author Marcel] Martinet in 1930, was to 'reconstitute with the greatest accuracy and precision the atmosphere of one period of the Russian Revolution. . . . In [Conquered City], I would like to dramatize the conflict of that power grappling with history and itself -- and victorious.' Serge went on to outline for Martinet his plan for this new novel which he believes will be 'radically different' in its form compared toSerge's work has been largely unknown until recently, but the NYRB Classics series has brought him a new world of readers. Greeman's foreword notes that as a Russian writer who published most of his work in Paris, Serge embodied a dual cultural perspective. Greeman adds, "Ironically, Serge's literary cosmopolitanism and Marxist internationalism has prevented him from being domesticated into the university, where departments are divided into national literatures like Russian and French, both of which apparently ignore his work." I can attest to this personally. I have a Masters degree in Russian literature, with a particular interest in early 20th work, and yet I had never heard of Victor Serge before a friend introduced me to this novel.
'any I have read. . . . It will have a sort of plot, central if you will, but like a narrow thread running through a complicated design. . . . It is not a novel of handful of people but that of a city, which is itself a moment and a fragment of the revolution. I keep rather close to history -- without writing history -- and chronicle, but above all concerned with showing the men who make events and who are carried away by events. From this standpoint, the characters have but a subaltern importance, they appear and disappear as they do in the city without occupying the center of the stage for more than a few instants.'"
Serge's work stands out among other fictional accounts of the revolution. He was committed to the revolution and remained dedicated to its ideals, but was not blind to its contradictions and excesses. The revolution's young idealists often wound up either corrupted by the regime or disenchanted by it, resulting in a literature that either falsely idealizes the revolution, or rejects and condemns it completely. But this piece occupies an unusual middle ground, providing a refreshingly multi-layered picture that encompasses both the hope and the tragedy of the revolution, seen through the eyes of a true believer. Serge's point is that within its own success, the revolution carried its own demise. In remaking society, it remade itself, purging the contaminating elements within itself and in the process becoming many of the very things it fought against.
Beyond the politics, the novel impresses stylistically and narratively. It is filled with deeply evocative images and passages too numerous to count, which convey a full atmosphere of advance, defeat, struggle, hope, resignation and acceptance in the smallest detail. For example: looking out over a still, clear winter morning panorama of the city, at a time when shortages, hunger, and industrial collapse pervade the city, a character observes, “All this beauty was perhaps the sign of our death. Not a single chimney was smoking. The city was thus dying.� (p. 57)
Elsewhere, an official of the new regime reflects on having been stopped and questioned by a sentry guarding a woodpile, and voices his discomfort with his own relative privilege, and its contradictory necessity:
“He had taken me for another wood thief at first. I could have been one. People steal the wood that belongs to everyone, in order to live. Fire is life, like bread. But I belong to the ruling party and I am ‘responsible,� to use the accepted term, that is to say, when all is said and done, in command. My ration of warmth and bread is a little more secure, a little larger. And this is unjust. I know it. And I take it. It is necessary to live in order to conquer; and not for me, for the Revolution.� (p. 35)Also, true to Serge’s intent, while the barest outline of a plot can be discerned among the details, it is not nearly the most important focus of the story. The reader is carried along from chapter to chapter, peeking into rooms and lives that sometimes also bounce tangentially off one another, deflecting the narrative into another room, another scene, another story. Many characters lives� intersect, usually unbeknownst to the characters themselves. Sometimes fates of parties with quite opposing motives and loyalties mirror each other in their crises, if not their intent. Often, the story throws the reader from the end of one chapter into the middle of a unrelated conversation or action in progress at the beginning of the next, leaving the reader to orient herself to the new surroundings and events. And in the end, the entire novel seems to fold back on itself, completing its year-long journey on a night that is almost a perfect stylistic echo of the opening night, which at the same time, it clearly does not parallel in action.
The effect of all this is powerful, an aesthetically complex story that conveys the paradoxical reality of the social and political revolution, communicating the principled idealism that drove it, as well as the individual hardship that it caused.
March 14, 2013
"...workers are changing the world, just as they demolish, build, forge, throw bridges across rivers. We will throw a bridge from one universe to the other. Over there: the black and yellow peoples, the brown peoples, the enslaved peoples ..Conquered City tells the story of the prototypical players in the siege of St. Petersburg in 1919. It is a fictional account of the story, written by Victor Serge, himself a witness. Told through direct quote, hearsay, confession, declamation, remembrance and interior monologue, by a gallery of other witnesses. Each is poignant, direct, convincing, and true for the moment-- but the truth is that many of these identities and narrative positions are subject to change. Abrupt change or revision, at the mercy of the events of the day.
Words no longer followed her thoughts in their ineffable flight. The shimmering crosses of the churches attracted her eyes. Old faith, we will break you too. We will take the crucified one down off the cross. We want people to forget him. No more symbols of humiliation and suffering on the earth, no more blindness; knowledge, the clear eye of man, the master of himself and of things, rediscovering the universe afresh.
From the mouth of a pink street surged trucks, bristling with bayonets. They came bounding out, shaking the ground, jolting and pitching, over the broken pavement ..."
A political stance, a moral conviction, a genuine human connection-- all may be sold out to the swings and shifts of the Revolution. No one can be relied upon, and what is true earlier in the week will have changed by the weekend; spies and executions are routine, but the charges may be cooked. The greater-good being used at every stage, whether for good or ill. All of the most perilous kinds of slippery slope there can possibly be. And yet, someone had to witness it, and somehow get it down so that it might be examined later.
There is much to be said about the structure of this book, which might be said to be portmanteau or haphazard, at least until the final chapters when the weight of what is happening bears down on the frame of the narrative. Absolute chaos arrives at the next tick of the clock.
Author Serge wrote the account(s) here from exile throughout the twenties, hounded by the Soviet secret police from country to country. So it is necessarily compartmentalized, densely episodic, but also -- unified. It is the resolution of millions of disparate elements that makes this so impressive.
What must be said is that the Foreward in the Nyrb edition is a glowingly successful example of a well-researched, insightful, Afterword. (There seems little appetite these days to put any 'extras' in books at the end, when they would make sense, when the reader can fully absorb the scholarship at hand. To place this before the text is to mystify a lot of readers, and to place a barrier before almost all excepting the specialist.)
Translator Richard Greeman is an authority on the work of Victor Serge, and the Foreward is comprehensive and thorough, answering a lot of questions that come up over the course of what is a thin (198pp) but richly condensed text. Much of the wide frame of action and political thought that comprises the book is examined, questions answered and discussed, in the Foreward. But save it for an Afterword and dive right in at the deep end. Conquered City is no dusty historical allegory; the history is in brilliant period technicolor, and the themes are still with us in every day's news.
"Dostoevsky..." began Platon Nikolaevich.
"I don't read him. No time, you understand. The Karamazovs split hairs with their beautiful souls; we are carving flesh itself, and the beautiful soul doesn't mean a damn thing to us. What is serious is to eat, to sleep, to avoid being killed, and to kill well. There's the truth. The question has already been decided by the sword and the spirit. A sword which is stronger than ours, a spirit we don't understand. And we don't need to understand, in order to perish. We will all perish with these books, these ideas, Dostoevsky and the rest; precisely, perhaps, on account of these books, of these ideas, of Dostoevsky, of scruples, and of incomplete massacres. And the earth will continue to turn. That's all. Good evening."
The days got longer, heralding white nights. The snow melted on the steppes, revealing patches of black earth and pointed yellow grasses. Streamlets ran in every direction, babbling like birds. They glistened in every fold of earth. Swollen rivers reflected pure skies of still frigid blue. Scattered bursts of laughter hung in the woods among the slim white trunks of birches. Specks of dull silver seemed to hang in the air. The first warm days were tender, caressing...
December 1, 2015
I'm overhauling my initially positive review, for the novel alters very gravely in quality, approximately 1/3 through its length.
This odd little work started out alright. It is a slim volume representing a behind-the-scenes view of the sprawling brigandry and savagery as Kerensky's provisional government battled the first people's Soviet, and the martial law which swept the city.
At first, Serge seems to possess a simple, light, and often poetic touch. He demonstrates an eye for detail, for colorful imagery--'glittering snow'...'brooding rooftops', etc etc etc. But this fount quickly runs dry as other aspects of his prose come to the fore.
There are a set of incompatible goals hashed together in this tale. Graphic bits of concrete, immediate action (one citizen's search for firewood, or another camrade's search for a greatcoat) is interspersed --to very poor effect, I might add--with choppy, personal, inward "musings about the revolutionary process".
It happens increasingly throughout the read. A true case of 'bait-and-switch'. In this book, any character might suddenly halt all his other concerns to strike up a pose, and parrot out a series of rhetorical arguments clearly advanced by Serge himself. This then might be followed by a chapter of the author's own commentary; (very dry and pedantic, as well as vague/airy).
In another chapter, we could (if we're lucky) observe some more action, but then in any chapter which follows on the heels of that, we might easily discover two wholly new characters engaged in a revolutionary dialog, (abstract political debate so artificial and phony that no two people would ever engage in it, were the tale drawn from real life). Such speeches might only be found in correspondence of that era, perhaps. Serge simply writes without any kind of rectitude or discipline. He spews out a jumble.
As the strange narrative draws to a close, none of the characters even seem connected by the plot they are supposed to inhabit. The resolution of the plot doesn't dawn on the very characters involved in the story.
Even if all this were intended--it is done badly. Peering closely at what Serge set out to do--trying to identify some rhyme-or-reason--I suppose the author is attempting to show that as befalls his characters--some sort of 'divine hand of revolutionary justice' intervened in their lives, dealt them their fates, and disposed of their dreams according to the merit of their revolutionary beliefs. There's a lot of prattle about 'pure motives', after all.
But it's simply one of the most nonsensical works I've ever had come my way. I read a lot of authentic revolutionary literature and this agglomeration does no one from that timeperiod, any justice whatsoever in conveying their noble causes.
If--as the cover blurb suggests--Victor Serge is 'the only novelist able to evoke those pre-revolutionary, anarchist years' (immediately before and after the events of 1905) then that is a sorry statement indeed.
I suggest instead one turn to the superb novels of Solzhenitysn, or else go back further to Doyesteovsky, try 'The Secret Agent' by Conrad, or some works of GK Chesterton; or even some of the novels which influenced Lenin himself.
This odd little work started out alright. It is a slim volume representing a behind-the-scenes view of the sprawling brigandry and savagery as Kerensky's provisional government battled the first people's Soviet, and the martial law which swept the city.
At first, Serge seems to possess a simple, light, and often poetic touch. He demonstrates an eye for detail, for colorful imagery--'glittering snow'...'brooding rooftops', etc etc etc. But this fount quickly runs dry as other aspects of his prose come to the fore.
There are a set of incompatible goals hashed together in this tale. Graphic bits of concrete, immediate action (one citizen's search for firewood, or another camrade's search for a greatcoat) is interspersed --to very poor effect, I might add--with choppy, personal, inward "musings about the revolutionary process".
It happens increasingly throughout the read. A true case of 'bait-and-switch'. In this book, any character might suddenly halt all his other concerns to strike up a pose, and parrot out a series of rhetorical arguments clearly advanced by Serge himself. This then might be followed by a chapter of the author's own commentary; (very dry and pedantic, as well as vague/airy).
In another chapter, we could (if we're lucky) observe some more action, but then in any chapter which follows on the heels of that, we might easily discover two wholly new characters engaged in a revolutionary dialog, (abstract political debate so artificial and phony that no two people would ever engage in it, were the tale drawn from real life). Such speeches might only be found in correspondence of that era, perhaps. Serge simply writes without any kind of rectitude or discipline. He spews out a jumble.
As the strange narrative draws to a close, none of the characters even seem connected by the plot they are supposed to inhabit. The resolution of the plot doesn't dawn on the very characters involved in the story.
Even if all this were intended--it is done badly. Peering closely at what Serge set out to do--trying to identify some rhyme-or-reason--I suppose the author is attempting to show that as befalls his characters--some sort of 'divine hand of revolutionary justice' intervened in their lives, dealt them their fates, and disposed of their dreams according to the merit of their revolutionary beliefs. There's a lot of prattle about 'pure motives', after all.
But it's simply one of the most nonsensical works I've ever had come my way. I read a lot of authentic revolutionary literature and this agglomeration does no one from that timeperiod, any justice whatsoever in conveying their noble causes.
If--as the cover blurb suggests--Victor Serge is 'the only novelist able to evoke those pre-revolutionary, anarchist years' (immediately before and after the events of 1905) then that is a sorry statement indeed.
I suggest instead one turn to the superb novels of Solzhenitysn, or else go back further to Doyesteovsky, try 'The Secret Agent' by Conrad, or some works of GK Chesterton; or even some of the novels which influenced Lenin himself.
December 8, 2023
Victor Serge wrote this novel about life in Petrograd during the most difficult times after the revolution � this is like a literary companion to his non-fiction book Year One of the Russian Revolution. Serge had arrived in Petrograd in 1919, so this is autobiographical, but written down a dozen years later as the Stalinist counterrevolution was crushing all opposition. While Serge’s novels tend to be episodic, with vignettes that are only loosely connected, this one feels downright disjointed. He was writing with the knowledge that he could be arrested at any moment and have his manuscripts confiscated, so he needed to send every fragment to friends abroad as soon as it was written.
This book captures the masses� heroism as the young workers� republic struggles to survive � but it makes no secret of the terrible suffering, the absurd disfunction, and the demoralization as revolutionaries are compelled to carry out repression. A focus is on the activists of the „Special Commission,� better known as the Cheka, entrusted with suppressing the counterrevolutionary plots. We see Bolsheviks struggling not only with the starvation all around them, but also with the relative privileges they enjoy as leaders � this is certainly not what they had counted on while languishing in Tsarist prisons.
Reading this book, I finally understood what Serge meant when he said that literature can give a better understanding of history than scientific works. I’ve read a number of books about the Russian Civil War, but nothing has been as clear as this. Serge presents the different social forces as characters, and thus provides personal and psychological insights that it’s hard to get from any history book.
This book captures the masses� heroism as the young workers� republic struggles to survive � but it makes no secret of the terrible suffering, the absurd disfunction, and the demoralization as revolutionaries are compelled to carry out repression. A focus is on the activists of the „Special Commission,� better known as the Cheka, entrusted with suppressing the counterrevolutionary plots. We see Bolsheviks struggling not only with the starvation all around them, but also with the relative privileges they enjoy as leaders � this is certainly not what they had counted on while languishing in Tsarist prisons.
Reading this book, I finally understood what Serge meant when he said that literature can give a better understanding of history than scientific works. I’ve read a number of books about the Russian Civil War, but nothing has been as clear as this. Serge presents the different social forces as characters, and thus provides personal and psychological insights that it’s hard to get from any history book.
June 14, 2017
This the third of a sequence of novels that took in the themes of imprisonment, the lives of revolutionaries in Barcelona, in an internment camp in France, and on arrival in Red Petrograd, and finally the struggle to hold on to that city during the years of the civil war.
This last volume is a stark portrait of a city gripped in a deep winter, with hunger and disease threatening the population, and with White Russian armies and their foreign allies surrounding the city. A beleaguered Communist party fights to keep the revolution alive but faces strikes and dissent amongst the proletariat whose cause it is supposed to be advancing, as well as splits within its own ranks and outright defections to the other side.
There are no central characters in this novel as such, who might serve to carry the pace of the story forward. Instead the reader returns to groups of individuals who figure as participants in the events. The central tension in the book is the fate of the city itself: will it survive the cold, the hunger, the threat of the war on its doorstep? But within this is the another layer which shapes the events being report: the struggle between the agents of the 'Special Commission' and the people it lists as potential counter-revolutionaries.
The Special Commission - known by its initials at the Cheka - is the paradox at the heart of all Serge's thinking about revolution. On one hand it was made up of the best of the fighters for socialism - men, and a few women, who themselves had been persecuted, imprisoned, threatened with death - by the Czarist police state. Some had seen the world beyond Russian borders, and found it to be as full as cruelty and exploitation as in their own homeland. The idea of freedom from such miseries had taken deep root in their minds; but for the time being they did the work of persecuting police agents.
On the other hand there are those over whom the revolution watches. Supporters of the old regime receive emissaries representing 'greens' - partisans of neither the Reds nor the Whites who fight in bands against both in the forests around the city. They make appeals to anarchists, who fought for the revolution in the old days but now resist the regime that has come into place, but nothing comes of this in the way of reliable alliance. In many ways Serge makes the predicament of these people the true tragedy of revolutionary struggle. They are real human beings in his account, and not merely the wreckers and saboteurs who are denounced in the propaganda of the Special Commission.
Serge the revolutionary lampoons the organs of the revolutionary state. The plethora of executives and committees and commissions with their overlapping authority, reporting crisis and doom to one another and seeming to be deadlocking themselves into inactivity. Food rations are cut back to levels which presage slow starvation. Workers in vital industries down tools and threaten the supply of weapons and ammunition to the frontline. In a room somewhere two men have to consider whether the revolution abandons this northern city in order to better defend its core region. They shrug shoulders and decide it is worth one more effort to push back against the reactionary forces.
The book has a victory for the revolution to report in its concluding sections, but celebration is muted by a parallel account of the latest 'success' of the Special Commission, which announces on wall posters that 34 'counter-revolutionaries, spies, criminals' had been executed by firing squad. The names of people we have been introduced to figure in the list and invite the feeling that the price that has been paid for the survival of the new socialist state has been very high.
Serge wrote this book, together with the others in the trilogy, at a time when the revolution had again on its own children and was consolidating all the powers that would form Stalinism. Despite seeing the seeds of the tyranny in actions that were taken in defence of the new state a decade earlier he resisted the idea that the collapse of revolutionary ideals into totalitarianism had been inevitable. The working people of Russia had in the days of 'Conquered City' finally come out on the side of the Bolsheviks. The fate of the revolution was ultimately sealed by defeats suffered elsewhere which left it isolated and poverty-stricken. As a participant in these struggles, from Spain to Russia, Serge saw that tragic fact more clearly than most.
This last volume is a stark portrait of a city gripped in a deep winter, with hunger and disease threatening the population, and with White Russian armies and their foreign allies surrounding the city. A beleaguered Communist party fights to keep the revolution alive but faces strikes and dissent amongst the proletariat whose cause it is supposed to be advancing, as well as splits within its own ranks and outright defections to the other side.
There are no central characters in this novel as such, who might serve to carry the pace of the story forward. Instead the reader returns to groups of individuals who figure as participants in the events. The central tension in the book is the fate of the city itself: will it survive the cold, the hunger, the threat of the war on its doorstep? But within this is the another layer which shapes the events being report: the struggle between the agents of the 'Special Commission' and the people it lists as potential counter-revolutionaries.
The Special Commission - known by its initials at the Cheka - is the paradox at the heart of all Serge's thinking about revolution. On one hand it was made up of the best of the fighters for socialism - men, and a few women, who themselves had been persecuted, imprisoned, threatened with death - by the Czarist police state. Some had seen the world beyond Russian borders, and found it to be as full as cruelty and exploitation as in their own homeland. The idea of freedom from such miseries had taken deep root in their minds; but for the time being they did the work of persecuting police agents.
On the other hand there are those over whom the revolution watches. Supporters of the old regime receive emissaries representing 'greens' - partisans of neither the Reds nor the Whites who fight in bands against both in the forests around the city. They make appeals to anarchists, who fought for the revolution in the old days but now resist the regime that has come into place, but nothing comes of this in the way of reliable alliance. In many ways Serge makes the predicament of these people the true tragedy of revolutionary struggle. They are real human beings in his account, and not merely the wreckers and saboteurs who are denounced in the propaganda of the Special Commission.
Serge the revolutionary lampoons the organs of the revolutionary state. The plethora of executives and committees and commissions with their overlapping authority, reporting crisis and doom to one another and seeming to be deadlocking themselves into inactivity. Food rations are cut back to levels which presage slow starvation. Workers in vital industries down tools and threaten the supply of weapons and ammunition to the frontline. In a room somewhere two men have to consider whether the revolution abandons this northern city in order to better defend its core region. They shrug shoulders and decide it is worth one more effort to push back against the reactionary forces.
The book has a victory for the revolution to report in its concluding sections, but celebration is muted by a parallel account of the latest 'success' of the Special Commission, which announces on wall posters that 34 'counter-revolutionaries, spies, criminals' had been executed by firing squad. The names of people we have been introduced to figure in the list and invite the feeling that the price that has been paid for the survival of the new socialist state has been very high.
Serge wrote this book, together with the others in the trilogy, at a time when the revolution had again on its own children and was consolidating all the powers that would form Stalinism. Despite seeing the seeds of the tyranny in actions that were taken in defence of the new state a decade earlier he resisted the idea that the collapse of revolutionary ideals into totalitarianism had been inevitable. The working people of Russia had in the days of 'Conquered City' finally come out on the side of the Bolsheviks. The fate of the revolution was ultimately sealed by defeats suffered elsewhere which left it isolated and poverty-stricken. As a participant in these struggles, from Spain to Russia, Serge saw that tragic fact more clearly than most.
May 8, 2012
This is a round robin of voices and lives in the Civil War period in Petrograd following the Revolution, recognizable political leaders, representative types, it hits the high (and low) points, the great suffering of the working class and the even greater suffering of the non-proletariat, the terrible shortages, the ironic full circle suffered by the Special Commission (CHeKa) is especially premonitory of the Stalinist purges. But as a novel per se, the book suffers the fate of many books written without a clear protagonist--you never surmount a certain distance from the events. However, the perspectives and events really cover the range--the characterizations are painted with a lively quick brush, the feel of Petersburg is gorgeous for such a short book. I've read Serge's "the Year One of the Revolution" and thought it was actually more engaging, but this will be more suitable for people just coming to the literature of the Russian Revolution.
three stars for novel qua novel, but four for the extraordinary unflinching courage of it.
three stars for novel qua novel, but four for the extraordinary unflinching courage of it.
September 24, 2013
Serge was there. It's one thing to read historic accounts based on documentary evidence, but sometimes reading an account by a participant who cared, lost and survived is more immediate.
Read
July 27, 2022I had not done my homework on this one
January 12, 2013
Petrograd (cf. St Petersburg, Leningrad) finds itself at the center of the post Russian revolution civil war. Bandits, thugs and looters associate themselves with whichever side is in ascendancy as the germinating security state begins the grim task of deciding who should live or die in the name of progress. Its officials find themselves seeking out the traitors as part of the Special Commission, the precursor to Stalin's Cheka. For its chilling account of how ordinary well-meaning people turn into the tools of a brutal bureaucracy alone, this is a masterpiece. What pushes it into five-star territory is Serge's beautiful prose as he casts the frost of winter over his bleak story.
June 24, 2016
Inspiring, beautifully written, a work with enviable experimental form. Composed in fragments and therefore easy - pleasurable - to dip in and out of; a prime example of modernist literature, therefore hard to read tiredly, or without your full attention. An interesting literary and historical curiosity (and I mean this as a sincere, not at all dismissive, compliment).
February 4, 2025
Set in a tumultuous, terrorized city caught in the midst of an internal bloodbath, Serge’s Conquered City leverages historical elements and the astonishing landscape of St. Petersburg to convey the ruthless atmosphere of the Russian Civil War. Told through the perspectives of various anguished characters, Serge simultaneously depicts a fear-stricken, famished society forced to prioritize survival over moral foundations, while also portraying all-too-real accounts of devoted Soviet loyalists who find themselves on the Party’s execution list. Imbued with compelling prose, the novel presents readers with the tragic consequences of fervent, radical ideologies that demand total sacrifice for a spurious future.
For Serge, St. Petersburg serves not just as the site of the fateful February Revolution, but as a symbol of conquest and perpetual cultural revolution. Calling upon the city’s origins, Parfenov, a young revolutionary, discusses how Peter the Great exerted his vision upon the marshlands and draws parallels to the current aspirations of the Bolsheviks: “How happy men will be in a hundred years! Sometimes it makes me dizzy to think of it. In fifty years, in twenty years, maybe in ten years... yes! Give us ten years and you'll see! The cold, the night, everything...everything will be conquered.� Parfenov and Professor Lyatev coddle themselves in their own hopeless illusions, while other faithful comrades like Ksenia assure themselves of their commitment to fight until the very end, “Very well, I'll perish, I'm ready.�
Serge, a Marxist revolutionary himself, dispels any ideological sympathy by casting a blinding light on the hypocrisy and misery that engulf the city: “We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house.� Throughout the work, Serge’s economical prose carries dramatic imagery and persuasive argument. One of the most compelling scenes features a workers' protest at a factory, demanding bread and vehemently rejecting empty rhetoric. Despite their collective outrage at the conditions, they remain voiceless and powerless: “A thousand men and not one voice! So much suffering, so much revolt and not one voice!� Instead, the uproar is quelled by Antonov, a smooth-talking demagogue who promises incoming boxcars of food and warns that resisting will only delay their salvation.
At times, the work can feel slightly disconnected due to its fragmented composition, but his evocative, precise language pulls readers' hearts deep into the story. Serge’s ability to penetrate the heart of the conflict and draw upon the architecture of the city is simply superb: “They didn't topple the tall silhouette of Empress Catherine in court dress holding the scepter; but some idiot had scaled the bronze figures and attached a red rag on the scepter—a red rag which was now blackened to the color of old blood, the true color of their red.� Terror across the city continues through accounts of brutal executions by the White Army and the ambitions of Zvereva, who is willing to add any name to the Party’s list of enemies.
Conquered City remains a neglected, harrowing novel that blends Serge's personal account with fictionalized narratives of a city in turmoil. Empires collapse, cities crumble, and the flames of revolution continue to burn, turning the old world to ashes in order to bring about a new, idealized world in the name of the faceless collective. But, as Serge predicts and history has shown, the new world is often far bleaker than promised, and the ideology turns out to “love men too much, men and things, and Man too little.�
For Serge, St. Petersburg serves not just as the site of the fateful February Revolution, but as a symbol of conquest and perpetual cultural revolution. Calling upon the city’s origins, Parfenov, a young revolutionary, discusses how Peter the Great exerted his vision upon the marshlands and draws parallels to the current aspirations of the Bolsheviks: “How happy men will be in a hundred years! Sometimes it makes me dizzy to think of it. In fifty years, in twenty years, maybe in ten years... yes! Give us ten years and you'll see! The cold, the night, everything...everything will be conquered.� Parfenov and Professor Lyatev coddle themselves in their own hopeless illusions, while other faithful comrades like Ksenia assure themselves of their commitment to fight until the very end, “Very well, I'll perish, I'm ready.�
Serge, a Marxist revolutionary himself, dispels any ideological sympathy by casting a blinding light on the hypocrisy and misery that engulf the city: “We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house.� Throughout the work, Serge’s economical prose carries dramatic imagery and persuasive argument. One of the most compelling scenes features a workers' protest at a factory, demanding bread and vehemently rejecting empty rhetoric. Despite their collective outrage at the conditions, they remain voiceless and powerless: “A thousand men and not one voice! So much suffering, so much revolt and not one voice!� Instead, the uproar is quelled by Antonov, a smooth-talking demagogue who promises incoming boxcars of food and warns that resisting will only delay their salvation.
At times, the work can feel slightly disconnected due to its fragmented composition, but his evocative, precise language pulls readers' hearts deep into the story. Serge’s ability to penetrate the heart of the conflict and draw upon the architecture of the city is simply superb: “They didn't topple the tall silhouette of Empress Catherine in court dress holding the scepter; but some idiot had scaled the bronze figures and attached a red rag on the scepter—a red rag which was now blackened to the color of old blood, the true color of their red.� Terror across the city continues through accounts of brutal executions by the White Army and the ambitions of Zvereva, who is willing to add any name to the Party’s list of enemies.
Conquered City remains a neglected, harrowing novel that blends Serge's personal account with fictionalized narratives of a city in turmoil. Empires collapse, cities crumble, and the flames of revolution continue to burn, turning the old world to ashes in order to bring about a new, idealized world in the name of the faceless collective. But, as Serge predicts and history has shown, the new world is often far bleaker than promised, and the ideology turns out to “love men too much, men and things, and Man too little.�
Read
March 31, 2021“If the human species could achieve a collective sensibility for five minutes, it would either be cured or drop dead on the spot.�
In 1919, the Bolsheviks seized the capital of Tsarist Russia and held it through a year-long siege - a dire, hungry time they survived by coercion and terror as much as idealism and political will. A decade later, revolutionary and writer Victor Serge sought to recapture the events and emotions of the Siege of St Petersburg, to distill a consciousness of what such a revolutionary time was like despite his disillusionment with Stalinist methods.
In short fragments set over the course of a year, Serge creates a chorus of perfectly-crafted minor characters who each testify to the myriad experiences of revolution and chaos. He does the same justice to the motivations of Cheka inquisitors and Party leaders, bandits and mercenary opportunists, meagre gardeners and housekeepers trying to survive. Most striking of all are Serge’s idealist fanatics, young revolutionaries blinded to the horrors they perpetrate on their fellow men by their waking dreams of the Future of Man.
In , wrote that “the most terrifying quality of purity is haste�. In Conquered City, Serge demonstrates how the pressures of a desperate cause will drive true believers to every expediency. wrote that the French Revolution taught him how, surrounded by the intrigues of Leaguers and Huguenots, could “live in such times�. Serge’s sympathetic eye for how people live in such times brings us one of his most poignant scenes. Amidst disappearances, war and famine, a ballet teacher asks after one of his pupils - may she come to practice tonight? “This hurricane will pass, no? But the dance will go on. And the child has talent.�
Bonus: , my introduction to Serge, was one of my favorite books of 2020 and is a profound exploration of ideology and the chaos of life in Stalinist Russia, where everything must be explained and a coincidence is inconceivable.
In 1919, the Bolsheviks seized the capital of Tsarist Russia and held it through a year-long siege - a dire, hungry time they survived by coercion and terror as much as idealism and political will. A decade later, revolutionary and writer Victor Serge sought to recapture the events and emotions of the Siege of St Petersburg, to distill a consciousness of what such a revolutionary time was like despite his disillusionment with Stalinist methods.
In short fragments set over the course of a year, Serge creates a chorus of perfectly-crafted minor characters who each testify to the myriad experiences of revolution and chaos. He does the same justice to the motivations of Cheka inquisitors and Party leaders, bandits and mercenary opportunists, meagre gardeners and housekeepers trying to survive. Most striking of all are Serge’s idealist fanatics, young revolutionaries blinded to the horrors they perpetrate on their fellow men by their waking dreams of the Future of Man.
In , wrote that “the most terrifying quality of purity is haste�. In Conquered City, Serge demonstrates how the pressures of a desperate cause will drive true believers to every expediency. wrote that the French Revolution taught him how, surrounded by the intrigues of Leaguers and Huguenots, could “live in such times�. Serge’s sympathetic eye for how people live in such times brings us one of his most poignant scenes. Amidst disappearances, war and famine, a ballet teacher asks after one of his pupils - may she come to practice tonight? “This hurricane will pass, no? But the dance will go on. And the child has talent.�
Bonus: , my introduction to Serge, was one of my favorite books of 2020 and is a profound exploration of ideology and the chaos of life in Stalinist Russia, where everything must be explained and a coincidence is inconceivable.
January 15, 2025
A remarkable achievement of proletarian modernism, Serge sketches an image of civil war Russia as an apocalypse, defined by famine, disease and autocracy, all while imperialist forces encroach from the west in the form of a wave of pogroms. Dawn is always about to break on the eternal night that lies thick over St. Petersburg. Every victory of the USSR was achieved in such a way that the cost of it must be uttered in the same breath, and Serge spares no detail as to the costs. As each character burns at the hands of the revolution they fought for, their love and desire and dedication to it snuffed out like a match in snow, a cheer goes up from the crowds and the bureaucrats take another drink. The weight of history bears down on them just as the history they lived through bears down on us all today. Yes, it’s victory in the end, but a loveless one, a pyrrhic one which never reaches daybreak. Serge’s building of such an oppressive atmosphere is incredible, and the rich descriptions of the ordinary men and women who fell outside history inscribes a dignity and individuality which was never granted by those who claimed to represent them. Gorgeous prose, rich characters and a startling tragic tone, I’d highly recommend it as a unique historical novel which portrays the erased experience of a very tragic and surreal moment of history in a captivating manner.
August 7, 2022
Serge gives an all round panorama of the Russian revolution in its critical stages by focusing on the 1919-1920 Petrograd when the city is suffering under numerous perils: Famine, lack of of even basic goods, threat of the White Army over the city, draconian measures taken by the communist government, spies, bandits, smugglers, counterrevolutionaries, and so on. In this turmoil, Serge addresses this question: should the revolution turn into the ruthless regime it promised to destroy? This is a key theme throughout the book and obviously relies on the long personal experience of the author. The book also discusses how and why the revolution changes its shape to a bureaucratic and authoritarian form in the face of dangers and opportunistic careerists benefit from that change. I found this book a good read; it sheds light on an era that I am not all too familiar. There are many characters in the book and some of them were shallowly analysed, but I think this can be understood given the difficult circumstances Serge has been while writing the book.
May 28, 2023
Serge 's an amazing witness and wellstone of a writer. This is a barely fictionalized account of the revolution from the vantage of St. Petersburg in the war among the Reds and Whites in Russia thru the siege of the capital of the Bolsheviks. Penetrating, detailed, brief. Lyric, poetic lines strung together like photographs that somehow were not burned, woven together to give an interior and external view of the panic and resilience, the tremendous hunger and greed for food and power, ammo, time. It's a stunning, relentless time capsule hidden like a cyanide pellet, left in the hollowed end of a bullet in a confiscated gun thrown in the river before its owner is led away and shot for something they didn't do. Somehow Serge made it out and was captured and spent much of the later Stalinist Purge years in a camp far, far away. That's where he wrote this. And wrote and wrote. He has so many books. Later he escaped again and made it to fight the fascists in Spain, to fight the Nazi's invading France and then, escaped again to Mexico. He outlived Trotsky and that's amazing, too!
July 9, 2023
enfants perdus[…] méditant l'électrification d'une Amérique future sans chercheurs d'or; car l'or véritable est trouvé (il gît dans le cœur, le cerveau et les muscles de l'homme). Nous en aurons plus que toutes les caves de la Fédéral Reserve Bank. Songez à ces caves remplies de métal jaune: quelle étrange aberration! Nous aurons cent millions, deux cents millions d'hommes libres; deux cent cinquante millions d'Européens se reconnaîtront en nous, tels qu'ils ne furent jamais. Nous réveillerons l'Inde: trois cents millions d'opprimés, la plus vieille sagesse de la terre, bien déchue, bien malade, mais nous l'assainirons, nous, Occident négateur des canons, nous qui, par les machines, libérerons l'homme des machines! Nous réveillerons la Chine: quatre cents millions d'hommes... Un milliard d'Asiatiques vont entendre notre appel. On verra à Changhaï et Bombay les grèves et les insurrections arborer nos emblèmes, appliquer nos méthodes. Millions, centaines de millions d'hommes en marche, voilà ce que nous sommes. Aujourd'hui, ici, nous passons. Qu'est-ce qui importe d'autre ?
February 22, 2021
Victor Serge has created a fine locomotive of a novel with Conquered City; a novel I very much felt possessed by from its opening pages. With its *modern* premise of Petrograd-as-a-character, revolution as its subject, and many disparate perspectives, I occasionally got lost in Serge's fine prose and sparkling chorus-like historical/political scene-setting. I appreciate the craftsmanship of the work, but I am unsure if I enjoyed it- so much as I felt I needed to finish it so as to pay it homage.
Did I enjoy it? While reading - yes, on reflection - no. Though, at under 200 pages (without the foreword), Serge certainly does not waste his reader's time. Do I recommend it? All told, it *is* worth reading, especially if you are interested in modernism, tragedy, or the time period (post-Revolutionary Russian Civil War).
Did I enjoy it? While reading - yes, on reflection - no. Though, at under 200 pages (without the foreword), Serge certainly does not waste his reader's time. Do I recommend it? All told, it *is* worth reading, especially if you are interested in modernism, tragedy, or the time period (post-Revolutionary Russian Civil War).
Read
December 31, 2024escrito en un momento de profunda degeneración del Partido Comunista en la Unión Soviética tras la muerte de Lenin y la persecución polÃtica de Trotsky —que terminó en su asesinato en Ciudad de Méxicoâ€�, Serge profundiza con libertades históricas sobre los graves problemas de la burocracia en el partido y las enormes dificultades materiales en el proceso de la dictadura del proletariado (por el atraso en las fuerzas productivas, la guerra contra las potencias imperialistas, entre otros). Este es el texto de un militante decepcionado, y eso puede resultar peligroso, a la par de beneficioso para la izquierda reformista —y que, por la misma decepción, Serge termina influido por estos ideales burgueses—si no se comprende bien hacia dónde va la crÃtica concreta del libro. Serge, según se relata, fue de los primeros en señalar el autoritarismo de Stalin.
March 22, 2021
serge's short but difficult novel on life in revolutionary petrograd in 1919-1920 is episodic, fragmentary, polyvocal, at once intensely lyrical and deeply historical. what a difficult fucking period to live through tbh:
hatred and famine in the countryside, ready to march on the cities armed with nailed clubs as in the Middle ages. A despairing, decimated proletariat. Paper decrees - impotent, annoying - dropping from the Kremlin towers onto the masses paralyzing the last strength of the Revolution� Opportunists and bureaucrats eliminating enthusiasts. A monstrous state rising from the ashes of the Revolution.serge captures all the gritty, tragic reality of the revolution he committed himself to. well worth a read, tho don't expect a good story.
June 8, 2021
Victor Serge is an author for which I have a great deal of respect, given his refusal to bow down from the revolutionary principles he saw as correct, even in the face of state violence and surveillance. 'Conquered City' gives a detailed and unique insight into not just the events, but the mindset of those involved in the Russian Civil War, be them Bolshevik cadre, factory workers, ordinary citizens or even bourgeoisie supporters of the Whites. The revolutionary problematics of the early days of the Russian Revolution are clearly presented in this text. However, the episodic nature of the novel (which I imagine is largely due to the fact that Serge had to keep smuggling part by part of the novel out of the USSR) and Serge's writing style does make it difficult to keep up with the various different plots and characters involved.
June 13, 2020
With its action taking place in Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in 1919-20, this book portrays the difficult and violent times of the Russian civil war at the early times of the Bolshevik regime, where a very shaky authority was able to hold to power due to their vision and obstinacy, as well as an almost unbelievable degree of violence. Several episodes involving party members, Cheka agents, dissatisfied workers, white conspirators, are masterly interwoven by Serge, an intelligent and articulate participant of the events and someone who knows that, independently of one political stand, choices are rarely between black (or, in this case, red) or white. A very interesting book.
March 1, 2023
Not really a mortal, I think, was Victor Serge. A completely different writer to Kurt Vonnegut but similar in respect to the fact that both men casually throw out brilliant, provocative ideas page after page without pause or ceremony, and leave them there, unexamined, to plague the reader. Conquered City is casually, unceremoniously, ceaselessly stunning, and includes the most succinct epitaph for our evolutionarily ill-starred career: "If the human species could achieve a collective sensibility for five minutes, it would either be cured or drop dead on the spot." We've yet to identify the spot, but it's out there, waiting for us.
February 8, 2025
What makes Serge's books memorable to me is how he captures the psychology of people.
In both this and "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" Serge really puts you (an American reader) into the mind of a Bolshevik. (Not for the length of the whole novel. Serge changes p.o.v. a lot.) He makes you aware of where these very different people are coming from.
"Conquered City" is told in a very disjointed way. (The introduction explains why this is so.) This is not a book a casual reader with little background in Russian history would pick up and enjoy. But I think for students of Russian history, this would be a good read for what it reveals about the attitudes of 1917-21.
In both this and "The Case of Comrade Tulayev" Serge really puts you (an American reader) into the mind of a Bolshevik. (Not for the length of the whole novel. Serge changes p.o.v. a lot.) He makes you aware of where these very different people are coming from.
"Conquered City" is told in a very disjointed way. (The introduction explains why this is so.) This is not a book a casual reader with little background in Russian history would pick up and enjoy. But I think for students of Russian history, this would be a good read for what it reveals about the attitudes of 1917-21.
January 29, 2019
Ever since I read The Case of Comrade Ulyenov I've enjoyed Victor Serge. This quick historical fiction (?) is a great read. One feels as if you are watching the Revolution eat it's along with Serge. A wonderful commentary on what actually happens when a country goes through a revolution. Told by a man who was there to watch. Great read.
June 24, 2019
I really liked this - the effort to render the city itself a protagonist, the treatment of the outcome of the Civil War as a tragedy but perhaps an unavoidable one - I'm really interested in critics of the Soviet Union who retained a fidelity to Bolshevism, and who didn't necessarily see themselves as a defeated faction.
September 20, 2022
Exquisite stuff! Aside from being a riveting story about revolutionaries during the Russian Civil War trying their best not to be among the children devoured by the hopes of 1917, this story is exceptionally well written. It's the first work by Serge that forced me to appreciate him as an elite prose stylist. Some of the paragraphs are just silk!
Read
April 4, 2023I started this one but could not keep going as it is densely written. It took a lot to follow the story.
I think in a different mood, or time, it would be a really good one for understanding the things that went on after the 1917 revolution in Russia.
I think in a different mood, or time, it would be a really good one for understanding the things that went on after the 1917 revolution in Russia.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 53 reviews
Can't find what you're looking for?
Get help and learn more about the design.