Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems

Like Serge’s extraordinary novels, 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—as well as prospective elegies for the living 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 lamps on the shore of time. Throughout , Serge draws on the heritage of late- and post-Symbolist writers like Verhaeren, Rictus, Apollinaire, Blok, and Bely—themselves authors of messages of a more general resistance by the human spirit—to express the anguish of the failure of the Russian Revolution and to search out glimmers of hope in the ruins of the Second World War. comprises Victor Serge’s sole published book of poetry, (1938), his unpublished manuscript (1946), and his last poem, “Hands” (1947).