Birth of Our Power - Softcover

Serge, Victor

4.02

152 ratings by Goodreads

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0904613496 ISBN 13: 9780904613490

Publisher: Pluto Press, 1987

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Serge's tale begins in the spring of 1917, the third year of mass slaughter in the trenches of WWI. When the flames of revolution suddenly erupt in Russia and Spain, Europe is "burning at both ends." 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.

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Review:

"Nothing in it has dated . . . It is less an autobiography than a sustained, incandescent lyric (half-pantheist, half-surrealist) of rebellion and battle." --"Times Literary Supplement"

"Surely one of the most moving accounts of revolutionary experience ever written." --Neal Ascherson, "New York Review of Books"

"Probably the most remarkable of his novels . . . Of all the European writers who have taken revolution as their theme, Serge is second only to Conrad . . . Here is a writer with a magnificent eye for the panoramic sweep of historical events and an unsparingly precise moral insight." --Francis King, "Sunday Telegraph"

"Intense, vivid, glowing with energy and power . . . A wonderful picture of revolution and revolutionaries . . . The power of the novel is in its portrayal of the men who are involved." --"Manchester Evening News"

""Birth of Our Power" is one of the finest romances of revolution ever written, and confirms Serge as an outstanding chronicler of his turbulent era . . . As an epic, "Birth of Our Power" has lost none of its strength." --Lawrence M. Bensky, "New York Times"

About the Author:

Victor Serge was a Russian revolutionary and writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919 and later worked for the Comintern as a journalist, editor, and translator. He is the author of seven novels, including "Birth of Our Power," "Conquered"" City," and "Men in Prison," and the history, "Year One of the Russian Revolution." He was critical of the Stalinist regime and remained a revolutionary Marxist until his death. Richard Greeman is the translator and prefacer of five of Victor Serge's seven novels, most recently "Men in Prison." He is a founding member of the libertarian socialist Praxis Center in Moscow and secretary of the Victor Serge Foundation, which supports the Victor Serge Libraries in Moscow and Kiev and underwrites translations and publication of Serge's books in Russian and Arabic. He has published literary, political, and biographical studies of Serge in English, French, Russian, and Spanish as well as prefaces to French editions of Serge's books. He lives in New York City.

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