Notes from an Exiled Revolutionary

"The writer and revolutionary Victor Serge was one of the few prominent opponents of Stalin to escape the despot’s wrath. In 1936, in the midst of the Great Terror, Serge fled the Soviet Union for France. When the Nazis took Paris, in 1940, he fled to Mexico, where he spent the rest of his days in an exile rife with poverty and grief. In a sense, his notebooks became his new home, a place where he felt comfortable to contemplate everything from World War II to Russian literature, from the aftermath of the Revolution to the beauty of an erupting volcano. A new volume from New York Review Books Classics, translated by Mitchell Abidor and Richard Greeman, presents for the first time in English Serge’s notebooks in their entirety. Below, in a series of entries from 1944, Serge marvels at the brilliance of his daughter’s art critiques, mourns his friends Antoine de Saint-Exupéry and Max Jacob, and muses on the darkness of a world at war. ..."
The Paris Review
W - Victor Serge
NYRB: Notebooks 1936–1947 by Victor Serge