Midnight In The Century

"He was an eyewitness of events of world historical importance, of great hope and even greater tragedy. His political recollections are very important, because they reflect so well the mood of this lost generation. His novels will find readers now because they help grant an understanding of the aftermath of the Russian revolution and its impact on militants and intellectuals, a world of yesterday almost as distant from subsequent generations as the Napoleonic wars...His articles and books speak for themselves, and we would be poorer without them." -The Partisan Review

"Whatever he wrote, including his fiction, was a kind of personal history of the Left, in haste, in bloody ink, on bandages." -The New York Times

"Victor Serge was, and remains, unique: the only novelist to describe successfully, from the inside, the now long-lost milieu of the socialist movement in Europe, its Soviet product, and its destruction by Stalinism. He has been described by myself and others as a political Ishmael, comparable to the lone survivor of the wrecked vessel Pequod in Melville's Moby-Dick." --Stephen Schwartz, The New Criterion

"A witness to revolution and reaction in Europe between the wars, Serge searingly evoked the epochal hopes and shattering setbacks of a generation of leftists. Yet under the bleakest of conditions, Serge's optimism, his humane sympathies and generous spirit, never waned. A radical misfit, no faction, no sect could contain him; he inhabited a no-man's-land all his own. These qualities are precisely what make him such an inspiring, even moving figure." --Matthew Price, Bookforum