{"product_id":"men-in-prison-9781604867367","title":"Men in Prison","description":"\u003cp\u003e“Everything in this book is fictional and everything is true,” wrote Victor Serge in the epigraph to \u003cem\u003eMen in Prison\u003c\/em\u003e. “I have attempted, through literary creation, to bring out the general meaning and human content of a personal experience.”\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThe author of \u003cem\u003eMen in Prison\u003c\/em\u003e served five years in French penitentiaries (1912–1917) for the crime of “criminal association”—in fact for his courageous refusal to testify against his old comrades, the infamous “Tragic Bandits” of French anarchism. “While I was still in prison,” Serge later recalled, “fighting off tuberculosis, insanity, depression, the spiritual poverty of the men, the brutality of the regulations, I already saw one kind of justification of that infernal voyage in the possibility of describing it. Among the thousands who suffer and are crushed in prison—and how few men really know that prison!—I was perhaps the only one who could try one day to tell all… There is no novelist’s hero in this novel, unless that terrible machine, prison, is its real hero. It is not about ‘me,’ about a few men, but about men, all men crushed in that dark corner of society.” \u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eIronically, Serge returned to writing upon his release from a GPU prison in Soviet Russia, where he was arrested as an anti-Stalinist subversive in 1928. He completed \u003cem\u003eMen in Prison\u003c\/em\u003e (and two other novels) in “semi-captivity” before he was rearrested and deported to the Gulag in 1933. Serge’s classic prison novel has been compared to Dostoyevsky’s \u003cem\u003eHouse of the Dead\u003c\/em\u003e, Koestler’s \u003cem\u003eSpanish Testament\u003c\/em\u003e, Genet’s \u003cem\u003eMiracle of the Rose\u003c\/em\u003e, and Solzhenitsyn’s \u003cem\u003eOne Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovitch\u003c\/em\u003e both for its authenticity and its artistic achievement.\u003c\/p\u003e\n\u003cp\u003eThis edition features a substantial new introduction by translator Richard Greeman, situating the work in Serge’s life and times.\u003c\/p\u003e","brand":"Victor Serge","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":48286843011323,"sku":"9781604867367","price":18.95,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0779\/3917\/9771\/files\/9781604867367.jpg?v=1772485296","url":"https:\/\/indiepubs.com\/products\/men-in-prison-9781604867367","provider":"IndiePubs","version":"1.0","type":"link"}