Midnight in the Century

Series: NYRB Classics
ISBN: 9781590177709
Pages: 240
Publication Date: December 16, 2014

Fiction, for Serge, is truth—the truth of self-transcendence, the obligation to give voice to those who are mute or who have been silenced.... The presumptive case for exempting Serge from the oblivion that awaits most heroes of truth lies, finally, in the excellence of his fiction.
—Susan Sontag

Whatever he wrote, including his fiction, was a kind of personal history of the Left, in haste, in bloody ink, on bandages. Like Koestler in Darkness at Noon, Serge seems to be saying that man, the particular, is more important than mankind, the abstraction.
—John Leonard, The New York Times

Victor Serge was, and remains, unique: the only novelist to describe successfully, from the inside, the now long-lost milieu of the socialist movement in Europe, its Soviet product, and its destruction by Stalinism. He has been described as a political Ishmael, comparable to the lone survivor of the wrecked Pequod.
—Stephen Schwartz, The New Criterion

He was an eyewitness of events of world historical importance, of great hope and even greater tragedy. His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation. His novels will find readers now because they help grant an understanding of the aftermath of the Russian revolution and its impact on militants and intellectuals, a world of yesterday almost as distant from subsequent generations as the Napoleonic wars...His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them.
—Partisan Review

A witness to revolution and reaction in Europe between the wars, Serge searingly evoked the epochal hopes and shattering setbacks of a generation of leftists. Yet under the bleakest of conditions, Serge's optimism, his humane sympathies and generous spirit, never waned. A radical misfit, no faction, no sect could contain him; he inhabited a no-man's-land all his own. These qualities are precisely what make him such an inspiring, even moving figure.
—Matthew Price, Bookforum

A special class of literature that has arisen out of the European political struggle.
—George Orwell

The work of the writer Victor Serge faultlessly captures the labyrinth of bureaucratic incrimination into which the Soviet Union descended.
—The Atlantic

Serge can recognize the range of experience and responses that make up the texture of life in even the most nightmarishly repressive system.
—Scott McLemee

I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth. There have of course been many scrupulously honest writers. But for Serge the value of the truth extended far beyond the simple (or complex) telling of it.
—John Berger