{"product_id":"blaze-in-a-desert-9781629633824","title":"Blaze in a Desert","description":"\u003cp\u003eVictor Serge (1890–1947) played many parts, as he recounted in his indelible \u003cem\u003eMemoirs of a Revolutionary\u003c\/em\u003e. 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 André Breton; a prisoner of Stalin; a dissident Marxist in exile in Mexico...\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eLike Serge’s extraordinary novels, \u003cem\u003eA Blaze in a Desert: Selected Poems\u003c\/em\u003e 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:\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eNight falls, the boat pulls in, \u003cbr\u003e stop singing. \u003cbr\u003e Exile relights its captive lamps\u003cbr\u003e on the shore of time.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThroughout \u003cem\u003eA Blaze in a Desert\u003c\/em\u003e, 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.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003e\u003cem\u003eA Blaze in a Desert\u003c\/em\u003e comprises Victor Serge’s sole published book of poetry, \u003cem\u003eResistance\u003c\/em\u003e (1938), his unpublished manuscript \u003cem\u003eMessages\u003c\/em\u003e (1946), and his last poem, “Hands” (1947).\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Victor Serge","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48286854611195,"sku":"9781629633824","price":16.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/9781629633824.jpg?v=1772485558","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/blaze-in-a-desert-9781629633824","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}