Revolutionary Resistance: Victor Serge’s Midnight in the Century

Abstract

In this article, I explore some of the key political and aesthetic concerns of Victor Serge’s novel, Midnight in the Century (1939), about the life of Left Oppositionists in one of the many stalinist penal colonies in the Urals. Not only does this novel represent one of the most ambitious early attempts to document the deportation and exile of these revolutionaries, it also dramatizes their rearguard resistance to the stalinist betrayal of the Bolshevik revolution. The novel is also situated in the context of the debate about the radical literary movements within the Soviet Union with which Serge felt himself fully identified.