Victor Serge was the pseudonym of a Belgian-Russian writer and militant (Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, 1890–1947) whose career spanned three continents and whose literary legacy sheds much light on the world of Marxist politics from 1918 to the end of the Second World War. Writing in French, he is best known for his masterly Memoirs of a Revolutionary (first published 1963), but thanks to his tireless translator Richard Greeman all of his major novels (The Case of Comrade Tulayev, Conquered City, and Midnight in the Century) are available from New York Review Books. In his newly published Notebooks, we witness the raw material that was eventually recycled into fiction, but also are treated to a good deal of information on the world of revolutionary or near-revolutionary intellectuals in both Europe and Mexico. It is a dense volume in which elegant literary reflections alternate with informed political gossip. There are cameo appearances by, inter alia, André Gide, Andrés Nin, André Breton, Claude Lévi-Strauss, Natalya Sedova (Madame Trotsky veuve), Diego Rivera, Gustave Regler, and Anna Seghers.

Serge is sometimes compared to George Orwell or Arthur Koestler in the sense that his oeuvre reflects a kind of disillusionment with Marxist totalitarianism, but unlike them he never abandoned his fundamental commitment to radical revolutionary reconstruction. Born to a family of exiled Russians in Brussels, he went to Russia in 1918, joined the Bolsheviks, and served in the Comintern before announcing his support for Trotsky’s Left