The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Read The Case of Comrade Tulayev for Free Online

Book: Read The Case of Comrade Tulayev for Free Online
Authors: Susan Sontag, Victor Serge, Willard R. Trask
Tags: Fiction, Historical
flees through the narrow quiet streets.
    Serge makes the murder of Tulayev nearly involuntary, like the murder of an unknown man at the beach for which the protagonist of Camus’s The Stranger (1942) stands trial. (It seems very unlikely that Serge, marooned in Mexico, could have read Camus’s novel, published clandestinely in Occupied France, before finishing his own.) The affectless antihero of Camus’s novel is a kind of victim, first of all in his unawareness of his actions. In contrast, Kostia is full of feeling, and his acte gratuit is both sincere and irrational: his awareness of the iniquity of the Soviet system acts through him. However, the unlimited violence of the system makes his act of violence impossible to avow. When, towards the end of the novel, Kostia, tormented by how much further injustice has been unleashed by his deed, sends a written confession, unsigned, to the chief prosecutor on the Tulayev case, he, Fleischman — only a few steps from being arrested himself — burns the letter, collects the ashes and crushes them under his thumb, and “with as much relief as gloomy sarcasm” says half aloud to himself: “The Tulayev case is closed.” Truth, including a true confession, has no place in the kind of tyranny that the revolution has become.
    To assassinate a tyrant is an accomplishment that may evoke Serge’s anarchist past, and Trotsky was not entirely wrong when he accused Serge of being more anarchist than Marxist. But he had never supported anarchist violence: it was his libertarian convictions that had made Serge, early on, an anarchist. His life as a militant gave him a profound experience of death. That experience is most keenly expressed in Conquered City , with its scenes of killing as compulsion, orgy, political necessity, but death presides over all Serge’s novels.
    â€œIt is not for us to be admirable,” declares the voice of a woeful encomium to revolutionary hardheartedness, “Meditation during an Air-Raid,” in Birth of Our Power . We revolutionaries “must be precise, clear-sighted, strong, unyielding, armed: like machines.” (Of course, Serge is totally committed, by temperament and by principle, to what is admirable.) Serge’s master theme is revolution and death: to make a revolution one must be pitiless, one must accept the inevitability of killing the innocent as well as the guilty. There is no limit to the sacrifices that the revolution can demand. Sacrifice of others; sacrifice of oneself. For that hubris, the sacrificing of so many others in revolution’s cause, virtually guarantees that eventually the same pitiless violence will be turned on those who made the revolution. In Serge’s fiction, the revolutionary is, in the strictest, classical sense, a tragic figure — a hero who will do, who is obliged to do, what is wrong ; and in so doing courts, and will endure, retribution, punishment.
    But in Serge’s best fiction — these are much more than “political novels” — the tragedy of revolution is set in a larger frame. Serge is devoted to showing the illogic of history and of human motivation and the course of individual lives, which can never be said to be either deserved or undeserved. Thus The Case of Comrade Tulayev ends with the contrasting destinies of its two lesser lives: Romachkin, the man obsessed by justice, who lacked the courage, or the absence of mind, to kill Stalin, and has become a valued bureaucrat (so far not purged) in Stalin’s terror state, and Kostia, Tulayev’s assassin, the man who protested in spite of himself, and has escaped into humble agricultural work in Russia’s far east, and mindlessness, and new love.
    The truth of the novelist — unlike the truth of the historian — allows for the arbitrary, the mysterious, the undermotivated. The truth of fiction replenishes: for there is much more than politics, and more than the

Similar Books

Deadeye Dick

Kurt Vonnegut

Simply Shameless

Kate Pearce

The Death Ship

B. Traven