In The Long Dusk, Victor Serge's novel about the fall of France, his alter ego Dr Ardatov escapes death just as the author did, on a boat out of Marseille in 1941. One of Ardatov's companions, a much younger woman, Hilda, joins him on deck. She says something intense, he counters with something pompous. With a familiar irritation, she thinks: 'I wish you were thirty years younger. I wish you were as you are and also a brute . . . I wish to understand so much less.' Régis Debray echoes her annoyance when he writes, in a 1985 introduction to Serge's notebooks or Carnets: 'I'd have wished, I won't say for more heart and less intelligence, but for him to have been a little less the conscience and a little more the witness of his time, as of himself.'

LRB 22 May 2003 | PDF Download