Archivo

Legacies of Totalitarianism

Starting a new section….

“Victor Serge: Pictures from and Inquisition”

Hitchens’ commentary of the life and fiction of Victor Serge – Trotskyite, gulag prisoner, novelist and exile from the Stalin led USSR in the 30s and 40s. Hitchens write that, “Serge was as convinced as Reed of the need for revolution, but he had fewer illusions” and “After Dostoyevsky and slightly before Arthur Koestler, but contemporary with Orwell and Kafka and somewhat anticipating Solzhenitsyn, there was Victor Serge.”…I don’t think Hitchens was trying to be funny here.

Sounds like Serge led an interesting life of USSR insider, early detractor of Stalin and political prisoner He turned his experiencing into a series of novels, the most famous of which is The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

The cover:

The book Hitchens compares this too is Koestler's Darkness at Noon. The 1970 French film "L'aveau" ("The Confession") based on the trial of Artur London in Czechoslovakia has tehems very similar to Serge's novels and Keostler's Darkness at Noon. I watched it in Poli-Sci class in college in 1980.

The book Hitchens compares this too is Koestler's Darkness at Noon.

New learning: The Tsars had their own secret police called the “Okhrana.” It was the Okhrana that produced “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion,” the anti semitic hoax claiming to describe a Jewish plan for world domination.

New word: desiccated = (special usage vs. normal definition of “taking out moisture”) lacking interest, passion or energy…hope that’s now how I feel reading through the entire “Legacies of Totalitarianism” collection.