Men in Prison

Victory-in-Defeat, Defeat-in-Victory #1

by Victor Serge, Richard Greeman (Translator)

Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to Men in Prison . “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.” The author of Men in Prison served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of French anarchism. “While I was still in prison,” Serge later recalled, “fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all… There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.” Ironically, Serge returned to writing upon his release from a GPU prison in Soviet Russia, where he was arrested as an anti-Stalinist subversive in 1928. He completed Men in Prison (and two other novels) in “semi-captivity” before he was rearrested and deported to the Gulag in 1933. Serge’s classic prison novel has been compared to Dostoyevsky’s House of the Dead , Koestler’s Spanish Testament , Genet’s Miracle of the Rose , and Solzhenitsyn’s One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch both for its authenticity and its artistic achievement. This edition features a substantial new introduction by translator Richard Greeman, situating the work in Serge’s life and times.

Genres: Fiction, Russian Literature, Russia, Historical Fiction, France, Novels, French Literature

254 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1930

About the author

Victor Lvovich Kibalchich (В.Л. Кибальчич) was born in exile in 1890 and died in exile in 1947. He is better known as Victor Serge, a Russian revolutionary and Francophone writer. Originally an anarchist, he joined the Bolsheviks five months after arriving in Petrograd in January 1919, and later worked for the newly founded Comintern as a journalist, editor and translator. He was openly critical of the Soviet regime, but remained loyal to the ideals of socialism until his death.

After time spent in France, Belgium, Russia and Spain, Serge was forced to live out the rest of his life in Mexico, with no country he could call home. Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, in Mexico city on 17 November 1947. Having no nationality, no Mexican cemetery could legally take his body, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'

Reviews

[Kevin · Rating 4 out of 5]

Its interesting to see Victor Serge being reviewed and discussed as well as seeing a lot more of his works in print and becoming more prominent than ever before. During his lifetime, he never saw his novels in publication and when I personally began to read him, around the early 1990's, there were still several untranslated works, or at least novels of his that had not seen publication. I believe his skill as a writer has made his works stand out on their own merit, regardless of his political affiliations or beliefs. He is sometimes on par with Orwell, possibly Solzhenitsyn too and at the very least, his novels are of a literate and poetical form that make him unique.

'Men in Prison', written in 1929 deals with a personal experience of being incarcerated for five years in a French Prison; I believe that, at the very least on a personal level, he needed to explain and write about the inhumane five years he spent inside this gaol. He was sentenced to five years because, being a magazine editor for the infamous and notorious anarchist 'bandit' group known as the 'Bonnot Gang', he refused to implicate his comrades when the State caught up with him. This was in 1912.

In a very fluid prose, containing very descriptive scenes, both of the prison as well as of its characters, we get to read about the 'dregs', or the lowest stratum of the then contemporary French society. And its not just the 'lowest stratum' who end up being incarcerated here either; along with the pimps, stool pigeons et al, there are also accountants, priests and some quite wealthy prisoners too. Crimes of passion, embezzlement, counterfeiting. sexual crimes, i.e just about every crime there was a law against, end up here, this microcosm of degenerate human behaviour. Serge, being an anarchist, also tells us of striking miners who flooded their mine, as well as some of his old friends. There seems to be no class distinction here in the nature of the crimes and their perpetrators.

It is a barbaric, dehumanising place, where the concept of individual liberty is totally anathema to the prison experience. All of the inmates have to wear the same uniform, have a very close crew cut, eat the same starvation rations (supplemented with half a pint of wine a day if you have the money); of not being able to talk out loud as well as having no tobacco and if any of these rules are broken, then it was off to 'the hole', solitary confinement which was not pleasant. If anything you take away from this tale, it should be how dehumanising prison was.

Victor Serge wrote this semi-autobiographical work (at the beginning of the book he writes a small note to his son Vlady, essentially saying that everything in the book is fiction, and everything is true) probably to try and outcast and exile this period of his life. Men in Prison is the first of a trilogy of books (all semi-autobiographical), with the theme of victory in defeat, defeat in victory. He was a poetical writer, his words conveying some deep philosophising, an ability to understand the human condition and societal relations, combined with an intelligent sense of personal liberty born from a life that was forged from struggle and a personal morality that probably left him on the fringes and, hence, never saw his novels published during his lifetime. I leave you with a quote from Men in Prison, hopefully trying to convey his depth:

"I think of power. I extend my free hands into the aerial night. Am I not unbelievably free? Everything has been taken from me. I am chained to the Mill. All that remains to me is to end my life, if I want, by a leap over the railing. I can do it if I wish. It is within my power. No one could stop me.
The world I carry within me has a crystal sphere as its symbol: fullness, perfection. I am free because nothing more can be done to me. Chained to the wall by a circle of iron, I will know how to close my eyes, without a whimper. Let necessity run its course; I am all assent. I have divided the world into two parts: chains, things-and my very flesh which is a thing-are in your power. The crystal sphere, my will, my lucidity, my freedom are irrevocably mine."

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

Victor Serge's Men In Prison is a slightly fictionalized view of life in prison in France around the period of the First World War. What Serge gives us is virtually encyclopedic view of all aspects of life in prison. As grim as his book is, I suspect a current book would be even more harrowing, only because prison life in our day is rougher.

This is one of Serge's first books, and it is a powerful introduction to a literary career that is only now coming to be understood. For years, Serge's work has been brushed under the carpet -- especially by ideologues of all stripes. During his career, Serge managed to tick mot of them off.

[Casey Butcher · Rating 5 out of 5]

If I were teaching a course on prisons I would include this pointed, episodic novel which sketches the journey of a narrator from arrest through trial, a five-year incarceration, and release. Autobiographically inspired and designed to help exorcise him of a trauma--to glean lessons from a dark period and share them with an audience who might one day share a similar fate. To speak for all the ones who die never having found a voice.

Flowering on regular occasion into now musical lyricism, now impassioned social invective, and peppered throughout with brilliant thumbnail sketches of a variety of characters and social types. The prose is clear and direct, the tableaux structure keeps things clipping along.

[Don · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first of the books in Serge's 'Victory-in-Defeat, Defeat-in-Victory' cycle of novels, it is based on his own experiences as a five year inmate in a French prison from 1912-17. Convicted for his association with the anarchist 'Bonnot Gang' (three of his co-defendants went to the guillotine) Serge kept faith with his comrades during these prison years despite increasing estrangement from their anarcho-individualist ideals. But he found amongst the other prisoners he served time with - criminals as well as politcos - the same despair with the conditions of life that had placed both on the other side of the political order.

He meticulously describes the prison regime, with the dominant theme being the requirement of silence between prisoners to the point of complete non-communication with any other living being. Years go by in which the only conversations take the form of brief whispers during the moments when the attention of the guards are diverted. They know almost nothing about what is going on in the outside world, hearing only rumours of the outbreak of war despite the thundering of artillery fire in the countryside around the prison. Madness strikes them all at some point, experienced through distortions of time which turn some minutes into hours, and some days into.s fleeting moments which leave no trace on the memory.

Serge's narrator hunts the patches of sky he is able to view from his cell for a sense of connection with the outside world. From the exercise yards the glimpse of a row of poplars comes to 'symbolise all landscapes' . "In the evening they seem to sigh like waves, bringing a fresh wind of life from the open spaces toward which I yearn from my dark cell. I know they line the bank of a lazy river which I have seen, yet could trace in mt mind..."

Otherwise there is the characters of the other denizens of the prison - guards as well as convicts - to divert him. The former are as much its captive as the latter, and the knowledge that they at least get to go home to their families on a daily basis hardly seems to outweigh the fact that they are all 'lifers' as much as anyone locked in a cell. His fellow prisoners are not graced with any aura of heroism that might redeem their plight. Typically they have no knowledge of what they have done, or if they do, what its significance is or was. Two obsessions rule them: one is sex and their distance from it; the other their cases, constantly re-run in their mind's eye trying to find the flaw in the arguments that proved their guilt. Their time inside the prison walls leaves them physically disfigured with only traces of a once-handsome feature or powerful body remaining. They twitch and slobber; their bodies and clothes give off the bad odours of decay.

The crimes of which most have been convicted mirror human greed and depravity - theft, fraud, sexual violence, murder. They are bad men, but they represent only a small fraction of all the bad men there are in the world. Other forces have been at work that have distinguished their violence and their rape from all the rest of the violence and rape going on in the world. The hint here is that the feature that set them out is their poverty, which has come to shape their frustrations and anger, and also their failure to grasp what forces at work to make them the subjects of such abject misery.

A handful of anarchists are there, pursuing private studies into philosophies which link their actions to the quest for liberty. But Serge wonders if they were not deluding themselves with the belief that this murder, or that act of sabotage was really necessary for their ideals of freedom to be realised. He remarks that they are certainly rebels, but they have failed to rise to the stature of genuine revolutionaries. The process of his own detachment from the anarchist cause in what became his move towards left Bolshevism is visible in this remark.

He leaves the prison on completion of his five year sentence and notes the feelings that return to his limbs as he moves from the experience of the subservience that is required from prisoners to the point of the very way in which they comport their bodies and physical gestures. But the first person he meets on this day, as the war continues to rage, is a man in the uniform of a soldier: another prisoner enmeshed in a different set of chains....

[M.R. Dowsing · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although officially a 'novel', it's hard to seriously consider this as a work of fiction - not only does it read far more like an autobiographical account of the author's own years in a French prison c.1911 - 1916, but there's also no plot to speak of. The last few chapters, though, are somewhat different from the bulk of the book and read rather like self-contained short stories. Whatever you might call it, however, this is a brilliant, powerful book without an ounce of sentimentality.

[Daniel Polansky]

The 20th century's premier revolutionary recounts experiences of his time imprisoned for leftist activities/the general experience of incarceration. My admiration for Victor Serge is unbounded, and this is generally strong stuff; that said, there is (tragically) such an impressive variety of books given over to this topic, from Primo Levi to Varlam Shalamov, that I'm not sure I could consider this of the first water. I think Serge is a little better at fiction, actually, where he has more space for his imaginative gifts.

[Mathieu · Rating 3 out of 5]

3 étoiles parce que je n’étais pas tout le temps dedans, des passages un peu traînant n’aidaient pas la concentration, mais globalement à lire même 100 ans après, la prison déshumanise toujours. « Et le système est pire que les hommes. » 👩‍🌾

[Adele PARSONS · Rating 2 out of 5]

Je suis un peu #differente g pas trouvé que ct aussi cool que les autres lecteurices!! J’ai rien appris/ ça ne m’a pas diverti… je conseille pas particulièrement désolée Victor Serge si tu me lis depuis le ciel.. 😔🙏

[Justin Echols · Rating 3 out of 5]

"Prisons will be destroyed. People will come and stare at the stones that are left, and they won't be able to imagine what we are living through. They won't be able to conceive of our misery any more than we can conceive of their grandeur. Life will become large and free."

[Chris · Rating 4 out of 5]

""Man used to live in caves. It's not so long ago that they burned heretics at the stake. Everything ends sometime. Prison will end someday. But men remain, men move on. The structure is cracking. Perhaps only one good blow is needed before everything changes. It's worth living for, and maybe even dying for. When there is enough bread for everybody, no one will steal any more. When women no longer sell themselves, when reason prevails, there will be fewer vices and fewer murders. Prison will be destroyed. People will come and stare at the stones that are left, and they won't be able to imagine what we are living through. They won't be able to conceive of our misery any more than we can conceive of their grandeur. Life will become large and free. It will..."" (241-2)

[Fred Dameron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Victor Serge is a brilliant writer, I have like everything I have read by him and this is no different. The title tells it all and it is very loosely screened autobiography of Serge. The saddest part of this edition is the introduction where we are reminded that in 105 years NOTHING and I mean NOTHING has changed in the world wide penal system. For looking and learning about the evils of the prison system: great primer.

[5greenway · Rating 4 out of 5]

Vivid stuff. At times not 100% sure of the translation style, some of the English vernacular jarred a bit, but that's a quibble. A kind of reportage-y novel, prison, injustice and offstage war. Well worth a read.

[Toni Padilla · Rating 4 out of 5]

Victor Serge entró y salió de prisiones francesas por sus ideas de izquierdas. Luego Stalin también lo persiguió. En este libro cuenta de una forma impactante y humana lo que era entrar en una cárcel. Buen libro.

[Javi · Rating 4 out of 5]

😯😯

[Toby Newton · Rating 5 out of 5]

Serge writes beautifully. This reflection on the cruelty, brutality, stupidity, and crassness of prison is a timeless document. Excellent, fluid translation, too.

[Chris Schaffer · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not the most uplifting book in the world

[Differengenera · Rating 4 out of 5]

prison memoir. vivid impressions of the subjective experience of incarceration

[Derek · Rating 4 out of 5]

Serge’s novels blend together in my memory. But they are all good. He’s a first rate writer who brings great humanity and cosmopolitan experience to all of his subjects. Like most great Russian no end, Serge thought there was no more important character motivator then political conviction.

[Ibrahim Basarir · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hapishane koşullarının ne kadar korkunç olabildiğinin en güzel kanıtı.
Hem de halen aynı acımasız yöntemlerin kullanıldığı düşünülünce insanoğlunun ne kadar acımasız davranabildiği "İçerdekiler"i okuyunca daha da net görülüyor.

[Frank · Rating 3 out of 5]

Similarities in style with Down and Out in London and Paris and The Life of the Automobile but in the end less interesting than either. Writes in a peculiar, episodic style.

[Pippa · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very sad. Angry. Although unquestioning in its approach to the concept of masculinity, it is a powerful document. It reminds me of Narodnik literature, and Serge does come from this tradition.

[Jacob Andrewartha · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very thought-provoking, literary and terrifying exposition on the experiences of imprisonment.