The Life and Death of Leon Trotsky provides an invaluable picture of Leon Trotsky's intimate experience as both a leader of, and outcast exile from, the Russian Revolution. Victor Serge and Natalia Sedova's portrait brings Trotsky's extraordinary life to life in a new way, while Richard Greemanus introduction offers fresh context.

An extraordinary account of the first year of the Russian Revolution, written by its most keen firsthand observer. Serge exposes the heart of the vital first year of the most important working class revolution in history.

A New York Review Books Original. Victor Serge is one of the great men of the twentieth century, anarchist, revolutionary, agitator, theoretician, historian of his times, and a fearless truthteller. He was also a great writer, the author of dazzling works of fiction, including the novel The Case of Comrade Tulayev, perhaps the finest book to emerge from the crucible of Stalinist terror, and of these no less extraordinary memoirs. Here Serge describes his upbringing in Belgium, the child of a family of exiled Russian revolutionary intellectuals, his early life as an activist, his time in a French prison, the active role he played in the Russian Revolution, as well his growing dismay at the Revolutionary regime's ever more repressive and murderous character. Expelled from the Soviet Union, Serge went to Paris, and barely escaped the Nazis to find a final refuge in Mexico. Memoirs of a Revolutionary describes a thrilling life on the frontlines of history and includes brilliant portraits of politicians from Trotsky and Lenin and Stalin and of major writers like Alexander Blok and Andrey Bely. Above all, it captures the sensibility of Serge himself, that of a courageous and singularly appealing advocate of human liberation who remained undaunted in the most trying of times. Peter Sedgwick's fine translation of Serge's Memoirs of a Revolutionary was cut by a fifth when it was first published in 1963. This new edition is the first in English to present the entirety of Serge's book.

In 1933, Victor Serge was arrested by Stalin's police, interrogated, and held in solitary confinement for more than eighty days. Released, he spent two years in exile in remote Orenburg. These experiences were the inspiration for "Midnight in the Century," Serge's searching novel about revolutionaries living in the shadow of Stalin's betrayal of the revolution.
Among the exiles--true believers in a cause that no longer exists--gathered in the town of Chenor, or Black Waters, are the granite-faced old Bolshevik Ryzhik, stoic yet gentle Varvara, and Rodion, a young, self-educated worker who is trying to make sense of the world and history. They struggle in the unlikely company of Russian Orthodox Old Believers who are also suffering for their faith. Against unbelievable odds, the young Rodion will escape captivity and find a new life in the wild. Surviving the dark winter night of the soul, he rediscovers the only real, and most radical, form of resistance: hope.

A New York Review Books Original
"Unforgiving Years" is a thrilling and terrifying journey into the disastrous, blazing core of the twentieth century. Victor Serge's final novel, here translated into English for the first time, is at once the most ambitious, bleakest, and most lyrical of this neglected major writer's works.
The book is arranged into four sections, like the panels of an immense mural or the movements of a symphony. In the first, D, a lifelong revolutionary who has broken with the Communist Party and expects retribution at any moment, flees through the streets of prewar Paris, haunted by the ghosts of his past and his fears for the future. Part two finds D's friend and fellow revolutionary Daria caught up in the defense of a besieged Leningrad, the horrors and heroism of which Serge brings to terrifying life. The third part is set in Germany. On a dangerous assignment behind the lines, Daria finds herself in a city destroyed by both Allied bombing and Nazism, where the populace now confronts the prospect of total defeat. The novel closes in Mexico, in a remote and prodigiously beautiful part of the New World where D and Daria are reunited, hoping that they may at last have escaped the grim reckonings of their modern era.
A visionary novel, a political novel, a novel of adventure, passion, and ideas, of despair and, against all odds, of hope, "Unforgiving Years" is a rediscovered masterpiece by the author of "The Case of Comrade Tulayev"

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence--at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But "The Case of Comrade Tulayev," unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's" For Whom the Bell Tolls" and Andre Malraux's "Man's Fate."

"Birth of Our Power" is an epic novel set in Spain, France, and Russia during the heady revolutionary years 1917-1919. Serge's tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the blood-and-rain-soaked trenches of World War I, when the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain. Although the Spanish uprising eventually fizzles, in Russia the workers, peasants, and common soldiers are able to take power and hold it. Serge's "tale of two cities" is constructed from the opposition between Barcelona, the city "we" could not take, and Petrograd, the starving, beleaguered capital of the Russian Revolution besieged by counter-revolutionary Whites. Between the romanticism of radicalized workers awakening to their own power in a sun-drenched Spanish metropolis to the grim reality of workers clinging to power in Russia's dark, frozen revolutionary outpost. The novel was composed a decade after the revolution in Leningrad, where Serge was living in semicaptivity because of his declared opposition to Stalin's dictatorship over the revolution.

Leon Trotsky and Victor Serge represent the great and tragic oppositional figures to Stalin's dictatorial grip on the Soviet Union in the late 1920s and 1930s. Written during this period, the letters exchanged between these two friends are published here together with material from both the Trotsky Archive at Harvard and the Serge Archive in Mexico.