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 Camusâs The Stranger (1942) stands trial. (It seems very unlikely that Serge, marooned in Mexico, could have read Camusâs novel, published clandestinely in Occupied France, before finishing his own.) The affectless antihero of Camusâs 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 â only a few steps from being arrested himself â burns the letter, collects the ashes and crushes them under his thumb, and âwith as much relief as gloomy sarcasmâ says half aloud to himself: âThe Tulayev case is closed.â 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 Sergeâs 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 Sergeâs novels.
âIt is not for us to be admirable,â declares the voice of a woeful encomium to revolutionary hardheartedness, âMeditation during an Air-Raid,â in Birth of Our Power . We revolutionaries âmust be precise, clear-sighted, strong, unyielding, armed: like machines.â (Of course, Serge is totally committed, by temperament and by principle, to what is admirable.) Sergeâs 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 revolutionâs cause, virtually guarantees that eventually the same pitiless violence will be turned on those who made the revolution. In Sergeâs fiction, the revolutionary is, in the strictest, classical sense, a tragic figure â 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 Sergeâs best fiction â these are much more than âpolitical novelsâ â 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 Stalinâs terror state, and Kostia, Tulayevâs assassin, the man who protested in spite of himself, and has escaped into humble agricultural work in Russiaâs far east, and mindlessness, and new love.
The truth of the novelist â unlike the truth of the historian â allows for the arbitrary, the mysterious, the undermotivated. The truth of fiction replenishes: for there is much more than politics, and more than the