A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems

A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems

2017 • 192 pages

Ratings1

Average rating4

15

Victor Serge (1890-1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible Memoirs of a Revolutionary. The son of anti-czarist exiles in Brussels, Serge was a young anarchist in Paris; a syndicalist rebel in Barcelona; a Bolshevik in Petrograd; a Comintern agent in Central Europe; a comrade of Trotsky's; a friend of writers like Andrei Bely, Boris Pilnyak, and Andr Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico . . . A novelist, a literary critic, a political journalist, and a historian of the Russian Revolution, Serge was also a formidable poet. In A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems, Victor Serge bears witness to decades of revolutionary upheavals in Europe and the advent of totalitarian rule; many of the poems were written during the "immense shipwreck" of Stalin's ascendancy. In poems datelined Petrograd, Orenburg, Paris, Marseille, the Caribbean, and Mexico, Serge composed elegies for the fallen who, like him, endured prison, exile, and bitter disappointment in the revolutions of the first half of the twentieth century: Night falls, the boat pulls in, stop singing. Exile relights its captive lampson the shore of time. A Blaze in a Desert comprises Victor Serge's sole published book of poetry, Resistance (1938), his unpublished manuscript Messages (1946), and his last poem, "Hands" (1947).

Become a Librarian

Tags

Genre


Reviews

Popular Reviews

Reviews with the most likes.

There are no reviews for this book. Add yours and it'll show up right here!


Top Lists

See all (4)

List

10 books

Owned

Приключения Незнайки и его друзей
The AI Revolution in Medicine: GPT-4 and Beyond
Diary of a Wimpy Kid
Strange Pilgrims
Bottlemania
The City of Ember
Rhinocéros

List

10 books

Russian

Приключения Незнайки и его друзей
Crime and Punishment
Everything Is Illuminated
A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems
The Night Before Christmas
Pnin
Chekhov

List

1 book

Giveaways

A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems

List

1 book

Poetry

A Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems