The Case of Comrade Tulayev

By Victor Serge
Translated from the French by Willard R. Trask
Introduction by Susan Sontag

One cold Moscow night, Comrade Tulayev, a high government official, is shot dead on the street, and the search for the killer begins. In this panoramic vision of the Soviet Great Terror, the investigation leads all over the world, netting a whole series of suspects whose only connection is their innocence—at least of the crime of which they stand accused. But The Case of Comrade Tulayev, unquestionably the finest work of fiction ever written about the Stalinist purges, is not just a story of a totalitarian state. Marked by the deep humanity and generous spirit of its author, the legendary anarchist and exile Victor Serge, it is also a classic twentieth-century tale of risk, adventure, and unexpected nobility to set beside Ernest Hemingway's For Whom the Bell Tolls and André Malraux's Man's Fate.

Reviews

One of the great 20th-Century Russian novels...there are extraordinary passages of natural description, a beauty that defies what takes place within it
— Nicholas Lezard, The Guardian

The brilliance of his novel utterly ineluctable as it sweeps across 1930's Europe from the gulags to the Kremlin, to Paris and to Barcelona.
— The Times (London)

The Case of Comrade Tulayev is in the great tradition of the European novel. It is the Human Comedy of a police state, with a sense of urgency and doom hanging over the winter-bound capital, where the innocent confess their guilt and punishment falls on the guiltless, and where the explanation of an event is given not as historical formula, but with the actuality of flesh and blood.
— Francis Russell, The Christian Science Monitor

I know of no other writer with whom Serge can be very usefully compared. The essence of the man and his books is to be found in his attitude to the truth. There have of course been many scrupulously honest writers. But for Serge the value of the truth extended far beyond the simple (or complex) telling of it.
— John Berger

I have undergone a little over ten years of various forms of captivity, agitated in seven countries and written 20 books. I own nothing, on several occasions a press with a vast circulation has thrown filth at me because I spoke the truth. Behind us lies a victorious revolution gone astray, several abortive attempts at revolution, and massacres in so great a number as to inspire a certain dizziness. And to think that it is not over yet. Let me be done with this digression; those were the only roads possible for us. I have more confidence in mankind and in the future than ever before.
— Victor Serge, 1943

Also see:

Unforgiving Years By Victor Serge Translated from the French and with an introduction by Richard Greeman An unforgettable depiction of worlds in collapse, this first English translation of Victor Serge's last novel is a monumental mural of World War II, taking readers from a paranoid pre-war Paris, to Leningrad under German siege, to a Berlin that is collapsing, and finally, with the war over, to the mountains of Mexico.

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