Pablo Cabañas Díaz
The historian Beatriz Urías Horcasitas, is responsible for the project “Intellectual History of Mexico in the world context (1945-1989)”, which under the sponsorship of the Institute of Historical Research of the National Autonomous University of Mexico examines the links that Mexican intellectuals had and the great currents of European thought in the period covered by World War II until the fall of the Berlin wall. It is in this context that his article appeared: “Victor Serge in Mexico, 1941-1947”, where he analyzes Serge’s latest novel, “The years without forgiveness”, which deals with the murder of two former comrades. Víctor Lvóvich Kibálchich (1890-1947), known as Víctor Serge, was a open critical revolutionary of José Stalin who was forced to abandon the Soviet Union fleeing repression and, like so many other revolutionaries, he died in his Mexican exile.
Urías Horcasitas, mentions that the central characters, of the novel are Sasha and Daria, who believe they have erased their footprints arriving in Mexico and definitely escaped from Stalin’s envoys who were looking to annihilate them. The story takes an unexpected turn when an undercover Stalin agent under the figure of an American archaeological explorer follows his track to a rural region where they hid; during a dinner he puts poison in his wine glasses without anyone suspecting it and finally escapes. Literary critics have referred to this work as “apocalyptic” in the sense that its thematic nucleus is the generalized destruction at the end of the Second War and perception – with which the author also begins his “memories” – that there was a moment in which there was no possible evasion.
The climate of persecution and the feeling of being in a dead end where death would inevitably reach them is a constant in Serge’s work, Urias Horcasitas that this political climate characterized the environment in which a part of the European exile that came to Mexico fleeing from Nazism, Francoism and stalinism at the beginning of the forties characterized. It is known that Serge lived in Mexico in precarious conditions during World War II. In Mexico Serge wrote a newspaper that collects his reflections from the last years of his life, published in French in 2012, under the title of Card (1936-1947); It is a newspaper that is both intellectual, political and sentimental to the extent that many of the author’s thoughts and wishes are directed towards his third wife, Laurette Séjourné (1911-2003). He also ended his “Memoirs of a revolutionary” (1947), emblematic text for the political and intellectual history of the twentieth century.
