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Cargando... Conquered City (1932)por Victor Serge
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Inscríbete en LibraryThing para averiguar si este libro te gustará. Actualmente no hay Conversaciones sobre este libro. The conquered city is Leningrad in 1919-1920, ruled by the Communists (Reds), but threatened on all sides by the White Russian army and its western supporters, the "Green" fighters gathering in the forests, hunger, lack of fuel for heating or cooking and, perhaps most of all, by exhaustion from years of fighting. Against the backdrop of Leningrad itself, founded as St. Petersburg by Peter the Great as Russia's window to the west, and its glorious imperial buildings and natural setting, Serge presents interlocking vignettes of the population of the hard-pressed city: the hungry, frustrated, railway plant workers threatening to strike; the enthusiastic and dedicated converts to the communist cause; the cold and hard-working "Special Commission;" the spies, plotters, and informers; the criminals and prostitutes; the soldiers near and far; the remains of the intelligentsia, and more. In terse prose mixed with the language of official proclamations, Serge, a committed socialist who had to flee Stalin's Soviet Union, vividly depicts the philosophical and actual conflicts of the time, the hypocrisies and betrayals, the pressure to conform, and the struggle for individuality and meaning. Of the the three novels by Serge I've read, this is certainly the most intense. sin reseñas | añadir una reseña
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"1919-1920- St. Petersburg, city of the czars, has fallen to the revolution. Camped out in the splendid palaces of the former regime, the new masters of the city seek to cement their control, even as the counter-revolutionary White Army musters its forces. Conquered City, Victor Serge's toughest and most unrelenting narrative, is structured like a detective story, one in which the new political regime seeks to track down and eliminate its enemies the spies, speculators, and traitors hidden among the exhausted mass of common people. Conquered City is about terror- the Red Terror and the White Terror. But mainly about the Red, about the Communists who have dared to pick up the weapons of power police, guns, jails, spies, treachery in the gamble that by wielding them with purity, in a righteous cause, they can put an end to the need for terror, perhaps forever. And yet those who wield these weapons know that they are doomed. Conquered City is their tragedy and testament." No se han encontrado descripciones de biblioteca. |
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Google Books — Cargando... GénerosSistema Decimal Melvil (DDC)843.912Literature French French fiction Modern Period 20th Century 1900-1945Clasificación de la Biblioteca del CongresoValoraciónPromedio:
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Serge here writes on the besieged city of St. Petersburg, or Leningrad, or Petrograd. Although there is technically a main plot line, his approach to it is more episodic, a portrait of the city as much as it is of the characters themselves. We see the huddled factory workers, the soldiers, the spies, the smugglers, the naive, the rump parliament.
The novel is a story of when the rhetoric of revolution meets the hard brutality of war. Serge already sees the germs of what would destroy his revolution - the 'necessity' of violent purges, the rise of the secret police, the suspicion and destruction of outsiders. And all of this was written before Stalin.
I'll let the book speak for itself. Here's another quote.
"We have conquered everything and everything has slipped out of our grasp. We have conquered bread, and there is famine. We have declared peace to a war-weary world, and war has moved into every house. We have proclaimed the liberation of men, and we need prisons, an "iron" discipline EÂÂE yes, to pour our human weakness into brazen molds in order to accomplish what is perhaps beyond our strength ÂEÂÂE and we are the bringers of dictatorship. We have proclaimed fraternity, but it is "ernity and death" in reality. We have founded the Republic of Labor, and the factories are dying, grass is growing in their yards. We wanted to give according to his strength and each to receive according to his needs; and here we are, privileged in the middle of generalized misery, since we are less hungry than others!"ssex ( )