User:Chaikney

This is mostly notes to myself and not of interest to anyone else.

Recent and ongoing work

• Victor Serge
  • restore some of the content removed https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Victor_Serge&oldid=1098824773
  • biography is missing everything after arrival in Russia.
• Alice in Sunderland - currently too brief, much scope to expand and link out
  • People who appear as (notable) characters in the book
  • Summary of the Caroll-Sunderland links
  • Overview of the book structure (i.e. framing device)
  • Locations, historical people, legends.
  • Reception of the book
  • Gestation and sources of the book, drawing on the interviews already linked.

Possible future work

• Add more on the https://eu.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marcelino_Ugalde_ikastetxeko_hondamendia disaster.
• Gena Rowlands page seems weak on her work.
• Follow links from the Carmelo Bernaola page, fill gaps of other figures in that group which have material on their Spanish pages.
• Keep an eye on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:WikiProject_Basque I guess

WIP

Victor Serge excision, rescue sourced parts of this

(NB the Soviet piece is totally unsourced, not copied)

Early life

Serge was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a couple of impoverished Russian anti-Czarist exiles. His father, Leo (Lev) Kibalchich, a former infantry trooper from Kiev, has been variously described as a distant relative or a cousin of Nikolai Kibalchich of the People's Will revolutionary organization, who was executed on a charge of being responsible for the bomb used in the assassination of Alexander II in 1881. Leo, himself a Peoples' Will sympathiser, had fled Russia around 1887 and gone to Switzerland, where he met Serge's mother, Vera Frolova, née Pederowska. She was the daughter of an impoverished petty nobleman of Polish extraction from the Nizhni-Novgorod province. Vera had married a Saint Petersburg official and, after giving birth to two daughters, had received permission to go to Switzerland to study and heal her consumptive lungs, but also to escape the reactionary environment of Saint Petersburg. She fell in love with the handsome, feckless Kibalchich, and the couple wandered Europe, according to their son, "in search of cheap lodgings and good libraries". Victor was born "by chance" in Brussels, where the couple were so poor that Victor's younger brother died of malnutrition before Leonid eventually found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy. The "Kibalchich myth" of revolutionary idealism and sacrifice dominated Victor's impoverished childhood. He read a great deal, and became interested in socialism and anarchism along with his friends, including Raymond Callemin and Jean de Boë.

Serge's parents broke up in 1905, when he was 15. Living on his own from then on, he and his friends soon joined the Socialist Young Guards (youth section of the Belgian Workers' Party), but soon came to feel that it was not radical enough, loudly protesting the Party's support for the annexation of the Congo. Meanwhile, he and his friends were hanging out at an anarchist commune in the forest near Brussels, where they learned the printing trades and put out a newspaper. They became increasingly involved in anarchism and increasingly under suspicion in Brussels, especially after defending their Russian comrade Hartenstein, who had made a bomb and shot at Belgian policemen at Gand. Serge left Brussels in 1909 and, after a stay in the Ardennes, moved to Paris, where he made his living teaching French to Russians and anonymously translating Russian novels by Artzybachev.

Serge's first published article was written in September 1908. Under the pen name "Le Rétif" ("The Maverick" or "The Stubborn One"), Serge wrote many articles for Le Révolté and, starting in 1909, L'Anarchie, a journal founded by Albert Libertad, whom Serge and his friends considered to be a hero. Serge at this stage was an outspoken supporter of individualist anarchism and illegalism, often clashing with the editor of L'Anarchie, André Roulot (aka "Lorulot"), who favoured less inflammatory rhetoric. In 1910, after a schism in L'Anarchie, Lorulot departed and Serge was named as the new editor of the paper. During this time, Serge was in a relationship with Rirette Maîtrejean, another anarchist activist.

In 1913, Serge was convicted of conspiracy and sentenced to five years in solitary confinement for his involvement with the Bonnot Gang of anarchist bandits, although he was innocent of participation in any of their robberies. Several of his comrades, including his childhood friend, Raymond Callemin, were executed and others, like Jean de Boë, condemned to Devil's Island. He was thus in prison on the outbreak of the First World War. He immediately forecast that the war would lead to a Russian Revolution: "Revolutionaries knew quite well that the autocratic Empire, with its hangmen, its pogroms, its finery, its famines, its Siberian jails and ancient iniquity, could never survive the war."

In September 1914, Serge was in the Melun prison on an island in the Seine, about 25 miles from the Battle of the Marne. The local population, suspecting a French defeat, began to flee, and for a while Serge and the other inmates expected to become German prisoners.

Expelled from France on his release in 1917, he moved to Spain, which was neutral in World War I but was the scene of an attempted syndicalist revolution. Around this time, he first used the name Victor Serge, as a pen name for an article in the newspaper Tierra y Libertad.

Nicholas II was overthrown in February, 1917, and in July Serge decided to travel to Russia for the first time in his life, to participate in the revolutionary activities there. In order to get there, he returned to France and tried to join the Russian troops fighting there. He studied art history for two months, but was then arrested for violating the expulsion order. He was imprisoned without trial for more than a year in wartime concentration camps at Fleury (described by e.e. cummings in The Enormous Room) and at Précigné, where he engaged in political discussions with fellow prisoners and first learned about Bolshevism.

In October 1918, the Danish Red Cross intervened, arranging for Serge and other revolutionaries to be exchanged for Bruce Lockhart and other anti-Bolsheviks who had been imprisoned in Russia.

Later life

In Belgium and France

Soon after Serge's arrival in Belgium, he immediately began corresponding with anti-Stalinist socialists, including Leon Trotsky and his son Leon Sedov. His mail was still often intercepted, both by Stalinist agents and spies for western countries. Trotsky welcomed Serge warmly, gave him work as his French translator, and urged him, through his emissary A. J. Muste, to join the Fourth International. However, Serge found the organization sterile and sectarian. Meanwhile, Trotsky had many disagreements with other non-Stalinist leftists, and was unhappy that Serge continued to associate with his critics. Former GPU operatives like Elsa Reiss also distrusted Serge because they felt that he could not have been released unless Stalin thought that he would be useful. These allegations were untrue, but caused difficulties for Serge.

Serge's escape from the USSR preceded by a few months the outbreak of the Spanish Civil War and Stalin's first Moscow show trial of Lenin's companions. Thanks to his own experience of GPU interrogation, Serge was able to analyse and unmask the 'mystery' of the false confessions, but the big newspapers rejected his truthful testimony for fear of offending the Communists, who were part of the anti-fascist Popular Front alliance. Moreover, until mid-1937, Serge was stuck in Brussels, deprived of his Soviet passport and still banned in France. Serge's testimony about USSR appeared in the Belgian union paper La Wallonie, in the small syndicalist journal La Révolution prolétarienne, and in two books about Soviet Communism, From Lenin to Stalin (1937) and Destiny of a Revolution (1937).

During this time, coinciding with the Spanish Civil War, Serge was the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification (POUM) correspondent in Paris. He warned the POUM leaders, like Andreu Nin Pérez, that Stalin was planning Moscow-style treason trials for them in Spain, but they failed to heed him and take precautions.

Along with his political writings, Serge also published a volume of poems, Resistance (1938). Many of these poems were actually written in Russia, but the manuscripts were among those confiscated from him and he reconstructed them from memory. In 1939, he published Midnight in the Century, his novel about deported Oppositionists in 'Black Waters' (Orenburg).

Around the time of Serge's arrival in France, Mark Zborowski "Etienne" was becoming a powerful person in the French Trotskyist movement, as a confidant of Leon Sedov. Zborowski, who turned out later to be a GPU agent, successfully used Serge's disagreements with other Trotskyists to spread distrust of Serge within the Trotskyist movement, which poisoned Trotsky's relations with Serge. However, their political break was based on differences over two topics: the role of the POUM in the Spanish revolution (which Serge defended) and the Bolsheviks' brutal repression of the 1921 revolt of the Kronstadt sailors (which Serge criticised). The Serge-Trotsky correspondence (including private letters and public polemics) fills a volume, and after Trotsky's death Serge collaborated with his widow, Natalia Sedova, on an authorized biography: Life and Death of Leon Trotsky (1947).

In Mexico

After France was invaded by Germany in 1940, Serge, together with his son, Vlady Kibalchich, and his partner, Laurette Séjourné, managed to escape to the Unoccupied Zone in the South. Serge's wife Liuba had long been confined to a mental institution-their daughter was being cared for by a couple in the country. (Liuba remained in France until her death in 1985. Jeannine was brought to Mexico by Laurette Séjourné in 1942 and lived there until her death in 2011). Serge, Vlady and Laurette spent the winter of 1940–41 at the Villa Air Bel in La Pomme (Marseille), which they were allowed to stay in thanks to the kindness of Varian Fry, of the American Rescue Committee, same as Surrealist André Breton and his family, Daniel Bénédite, Mary Jayne Gold and others. With both the Gestapo and the GPU on his trail, Serge was desperate to leave France, but as an undocumented Russian with a Communist past, he faced the nightmare of what Trotsky famously called 'A world without a visa'. At the last possible moment, thanks to the efforts of Dwight and Nancy Macdonald in New York and Julián Gorkin and Wolfgang Paalen in Mexico, on March 24, 1941, Serge and Vlady took the last ship out of Marseille (on which Breton and the anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss were cabin passengers). After a six-month journey to the Caribbean, they were imprisoned in Martinique and the Dominican Republic, and arrived in Mexico several months after Trotsky's assassination in Mexico City. Vlady and his son Victor, along with Breton and Pierre Mabille stopped at the Dominican Republic in 1940-41. Vlady and his son lived in the capital with the Spanish surrealist painter Eugenio Granell and his wife Amparo. Although the Granell's did not have much money (they were also refugees form the Spanish Civil War where Granell had belonged to the POUM party), Amparo did all she could to get tea and sugar for Victor and his son. When the two parted towards Mexico, Vlady left an important manuscript which now can be found at the Biblioteca Granell in the Fundación Eugenio Granell, Santiago de Compostela. This manuscript, titled and hand written at the time, "L'empire contre le peuple Russe (titre proximaire" -difficult to read the hand written words in French. This book eventually became "Hitler contra Stalin" which was published later on in 1941 in Mexico City.

Victor Serge in Wolfgang Paalen´s Studio in Mexico ca. 1944

The Nazis invaded the Soviet Union during Serge's travels to Mexico, and Gorkin commissioned him to write a book on the subject (Hitler Contra Stalin) which was published in Mexico City. However, agents of the Russian Embassy, furious at Serge's critical analysis, soon bought out the publishing house and made sure that all doors to journalism were closed to Serge, who as a result often had little money for food. He was supported in part by his partner Laurette Séjourné, who arrived from France with his daughter Jeannine, and he developed friendships with some other European exiles including the German Council Communist Otto Ruhle, members of the exiled POUM, the German novelist and hero of the International Brigade, Gustav Regler, the Austrian painter and theorist Wolfgang Paalen, the French Socialist Marceau Pivert, and the Franco-Polish novelist Jean Malaquais. His relations with Trotsky's widow Natalia Sedova were strained at first. He continued to receive support from some American intellectuals, such as Dwight Macdonald and John Dewey, and his writings were published in Partisan Review and the New International in the US; he was also the Mexican correspondent for the New Leader. Wolfgang Paalen and his wife Alice hid Serge occasionally in their house in San Angel and Serge advised Paalen in his planned criticism of the Marxist Dialectics for his review DYN.

The Communist establishment publicly denounced him as a Trotskyist, and he was strongly criticised by the Mexican press and by the veteran Communist propagandists Otto Katz (writing under the pen name André Simone) and Paul Merker. Serge was charged with being a fascist secret agent, like Trotsky had been. A public meeting where Serge was to speak was broken up by an armed mob of thugs sent by the Mexican Communist Party. His friend Enrique Gironella of the POUM was seriously wounded, and Serge barely escaped alive. However, he found support from the International Revolutionary Marxist Centre, participated in the group Socialismo y Libertad, and co-authored Los problemas del socialismo en nuestro tiempo with Marceau Pivert and Julián Gorkin.

After the United States and the Soviet Union became temporary allies in 1942, criticism of Serge spread to the American press, and though he had staunch defenders there, his ability to defend himself was limited by the fact that he was still distrusted by many Trotskyists. Serge and his allies in Mexico were also victims of several assassination attempts by the GPU and Mexican Stalinists.

As Serge became increasingly unable to publish articles, he continued to write novels, including The Long Dusk, concerning the fall of France to the Nazis, and The Case of Comrade Tulayev, about the Stalinist purges (starting with the killing of Sergei Kirov). His autobiography, Memoirs of a Revolutionary, was first published posthumously in Paris in 1951.

Serge's health had been badly damaged by his periods of imprisonment in France and Russia, but he continued to write until he died of heart attack, just after entering a taxi in Mexico City, on 17 November 1947. No Mexican cemetery could legally take his body without a nationality, so he was buried as a 'Spanish Republican.'

Alice in Sunderland

historical characters

People that have a speaking part in the book, not only a passing mention, else the thing would be unwieldy. Entertainers

• Sid James
• Lewis Carroll

Legendary /mythical characters

• Lambton Worm (link to Jabberwocky)
• white lady of Sunderland Empire
• the Cauld Lad of Hylton

History (History of Sunderland)

• Venerable Bede (doesn't talk but many pages)
• Jack Crawford
• John George Lambton / Radical Jack and Penshaw Monument
• Mary Ann Cotton
• cholera epidemic and William Reid Clanny, Isabella Hazard (first victim, made famous in an illustration in The Lancet.
• Caedmon
• Little Spottee / Spottie's hole - Marsden Rock, folk song Roud no. 3143
• Victoria Hall disaster

Contemporary figure, eg the local writers

• Michael Bute (Alice theorist) - no page yet
• Chaz Brenchley crime writer
• Leo Baxendale
• Colin Wilbourn, sculptor - no page yet

genesis of the book

Refer to interviews.

• Longstanding ambition to write about Carroll.
• Discovery of the NE links
• work of Michael Bute
• Time taken to write, support of Mary Talbot.
• lack of suppoort from Arts Council England.

completed

• Carmelo Bernaola
  • transfer of material from the Spanish page.