Men in Prison

Victor Serge

Description

“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.

Sujets

• Dostoyevsky
• Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic
• Literature
• Anti-Stalinist left
• Penology
• Bonnot Gang
• Soviet Union
• Fyodor Dostoyevsky
• Anarchism

Informations

• Publié par: PM Press
• Date de parution: 01 avril 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781604869064
• Langue: English

Extrait

Praise for Men in Prison
"Novel or autobiography, the book is literature, for Serge was a wonderful writer."
New Yorker
"If you know someone headed for prison, this is not the book to give him for a going-away present. It tells what prison is really like."
Book World
"No purer book about the hell of prison has ever been written."
Martin Seymour-Smith, The Scotsman
"There is nothing in any line or word of this fine novel which doesn’t ring true."
Publishers Weekly
"It is a stream of exquisite and refined consciousness undergoing man’s most barbaric experience. Not even in One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich is there such a penetrating and disturbing account of what prison means to the body and soul."
John Riley, Los Angeles Times
"Almost hallucinatory vividness of incident …"
New Society
"This novel, properly so called by its author, being truth worked up as art, is strongly recommended both as a document and as a powerful work of literature."
Robert Garioch, Listener
"He was one of those rare political activists who was also an artist, and his book is poetic and ironic, the account of a spiritual experience rather than a factual record….Serge is almost unique (not quite one remembers Dostoevsky and Koestler) in turning all this into art."
Julian Symons, Sunday Times (London)
"Here is Serge, the model upon whom George Orwell fashioned himself in his descriptive essays and in Homage to Catalonia. Here too, I think, must be the original spring of Jean Genet. Consider the homosexual Moure, alone in his cell, dreaming of boy friends called Georgette, Lucienne and Antionette. Moure links the most brutally obscene, obscene to the point of cruelty, with love words and coquettish diminutives…. Serge is not merely a political writer, he is also a novelist, a wonderfully lyrical writer…. He is a writer young rebels desperately need whether they know it or not…. He does not tell us what we should feel; instead, he makes us feel it."
Stanley Reynolds, New Statesman
"This lucid and beautiful book…. The cool brevity of Serge’s character sketches covers a deeply running sympathy for all human nature, however distorted and ignoble."
Claire Tomalin, Observer Review
"This is a remarkable book…. Capable of Dostoyevskian intensity and power."
Francis King, Sunday Telegraph

Editor: Sasha Lilley
Spectre is a series of penetrating and indispensable works of, and about, radical political economy. Spectre lays bare the dark underbelly of politics and economics, publishing outstanding and contrarian perspectives on the maelstrom of capital and emancipatory alternatives in crisis. The companion Spectre Classics imprint unearths essential works of radical history, political economy, theory and practice, to illuminate the present with brilliant, yet unjustly neglected, ideas from the past.
Spectre
Greg Albo, Sam Gindin, and Leo Panitch, In and Out of Crisis: The Global Financial Meltdown and Left Alternatives
David McNally, Global Slump: The Economics and Politics of Crisis and Resistance
Sasha Lilley, Capital and Its Discontents: Conversations with Radical Thinkers in a Time of Tumult
Sasha Lilley, David McNally, Eddie Yuen, and James Davis, Catastrophism: The Apocalyptic Politics of Collapse and Rebirth
Peter Linebaugh, Stop, Thief! The Commons, Enclosures, and Resistance
Spectre Classics
E.P. Thompson, William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary
Victor Serge, Men in Prison
Victor Serge, Birth of Our Power

Men in Prison
Victor Serge. Translated by Richard Greeman
Copyright © 2014 Victor Serge Foundation
Translation and Introduction © 2014 Richard Greeman
This edition © 2014 PM Press
First published as Les hommes dans la prison. Paris: Les Editions Rieder, 1931.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be transmitted by any means without permission in writing from the publisher.
ISBN: 978–1-60486–736-7
Library of Congress Control Number: 2013911528
Cover by John Yates/Stealworks
Interior design by briandesign
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PM Press
PO Box 23912
Oakland, CA 94623
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Printed in the USA by the Employee Owners of Thomson-Shore in Dexter, Michigan. www.thomsonshore.com
TO VLADY
Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true. I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of personal experience.
V.S.
Contents FOREWORD by David Gilbert INTRODUCTION by Richard Greeman ONE Arrest TWO The Lockup THREE Transitions FOUR Architecture FIVE In a Cell SIX The System SEVEN Burial and Victory EIGHT Yet Life Goes On … NINE Encounters TEN Alms and the Almoner ELEVEN Capital Punishment TWELVE The Souricière and the Conciergerie THIRTEEN Drunken Boat FOURTEEN Arrival FIFTEEN The Mill SIXTEEN The Workshop SEVENTEEN The Will to Live EIGHTEEN Some Men NINETEEN The "Men" TWENTY The Mind Resists TWENTY-ONE The Round TWENTY-TWO Night TWENTY-THREE The Guards TWENTY-FOUR The Years TWENTY-FIVE The War TWENTY-SIX Discipline TWENTY-SEVEN Latruffe TWENTY-EIGHT The Sick TWENTY-NINE Dying THIRTY Surviving THIRTY-ONE Letters THIRTY-TWO More Deaths THIRTY-THREE The Innocent THIRTY-FOUR The Voice of the Living THIRTY-FIVE About to Be Discharged THIRTY-SIX The World Between SERGE IN ENGLISH THE LIFE OF VICTOR SERGE
Foreword
by David Gilbert
Men in Prison tells it like it was and in too many ways still is behind bars. Victor Serge is an inspiring example of revolutionary courage and principles. He gave his all and risked his life to defend the Soviet Republic as a proletarian revolution under ferocious attack by White Russians backed by troops from fourteen imperialist powers. He also gave his all and risked his life to defend dissidents and to oppose the rising repression and brutality of the Russian Communist Party.
Before being deported to Russia, Serge was an anarchist political prisoner in France from 1912 to 1917. This novel is based on those five years. His prose comes across seamlessly in Richard Greeman’s fluid and lively translation. And Serge could write! No "socialist realism" here as we see the nuances, the quirks, and the resiliencies of a variety of individuals. The convicts we meet are neither demonized as depraved monsters nor romanticized as the noble oppressed. Some are sordid, many simply sad; almost all are poor; and a handful are conscious political prisoners.
"The Mill" where Serge did his time was an application of the "Auburn System," designed one hundred years earlier the same two-hundred-year-old Auburn Correctional Facility in New York State where I’m being held today. Of course current conditions in the United States are not exactly the same as in France a century ago. The book’s title would have to change "Men" to "People," as the United States now has over two hundred thousand women behind bars, their numbers growing at a faster rate than men’s. The rights of lesbian, gay, and transgender prisoners are a much more explicit struggle. Serge’s brief mentions of gays are condescending if not negative. That’s not surprising given the dearth of open struggle back then, but nonetheless totally inadequate and unacceptable today.
The rate of incarceration in the United States is totally unprecedented and astronomical at 1 percent of the adult population, with 2.3 million human beings in prisons and jails. Most telling, based on the history of genocide, slavery, and conquest, the U.S. criminal justice system is at the center of the surrounding stinking swamp of racism. The racism isn’t just coincidental. The hyperexpansion of incarceration in the United States with the number behind bars today eight times what it was in 1970 developed in response to the Black Liberation Movement, which was an inspiration and spearhead for a range of struggles and advances by the oppressed. The United States now jails Black males at four times the rate South Africa did under apartheid. The United States also locks up an unconscionable number of women. But the impact of the criminal justice system on women is far more pervasive as many more carry the burden of being single parents in impoverished communities decimated by incarceration, with one in nine Black males between the ages of twenty and thirty-four behind bars. The Latino/a community has also been hit disproportionately hard, and the U.S. mania for mass incarceration has swept up many poor whites as well.
While the numbers and the racial dynamics have changed, the continuities are amazing, and much of what Serge describes rings true today: the humiliations and degradations; the frisks where you have to bend over and spread; the obstacles to maintaining basic hygiene; the totally arbitrary authority the often contemptuous guards have. Serge writes of the terrible boredom; and to counter that, "it is a fundamental rule of mental hygiene to work at all costs, to occupy the mind" ( p.36 ). Men in Prison also provides a couple of delightful vignettes of the creative little ways prisoners find to resist the restrictions and regimentation. Visits often provide warm rays of sunshine, and the vast majority of visitors are women. This holds true at today’s women’s facilities too, as men generally don’t do nearly as well at standing by loved ones.
At the same time, there have been some notable changes due to the prisoners’ rights struggle that flowed out of the Civil Rights and Black Power movements. We are now a little less isolated from the outside world b