victorserge.net

The Foundation’s Officers:

President: Vlady Kibalchich, (painter Cuernavaca, Mexico);

Vice-President: Isabel Diaz Kibalchich (Cuernavaca);

Secretary: Richard Greeman (writer, translator, Montpellier, France);

Board of Advisors:
Ian Birchall (socialist writer, London);
Aleksandr Buzgalin, (economist, Moscow State University);
Guy Desolre (lecturer, Free University of Brussels, Belgium);
Alain Dugrand (writer, Paris);
John Eden (filmmaker, France);
Alexei Gusev (historian, Moscow University);
Julia Guseva (translator, librarian, Moscow);
Adam Hochschild (writer, San Francisco);
Jeannine Kibalchich (Mexico);
Bill Marshall (University of Southampton, England);
Wildebaldo Solano (Andrès Nin Foundation, POUM, Barcelona);
Susan Weissman (St. Mary’s College, San Francisco);
Sergei Zavarontnii (journalist, Moscow).

The purpose of the Foundation is the preservation, publication and promotion of Serge’s writings and ideas internationally. Although an informal group of “Sergians” - today’s Board of Advisors - has been working together for many years, the actual Foundation was set up by Serge’s son, Vlady Kibalchich, and Serge’s American translator and chronicler, Richard Greeman, in 1995. It was then that we succeeded at long last in finding a safe home for the manuscripts and archives Serge left in Mexico, where he died in 1947.  They were purchased by the Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library of Yale University, where they are now available to readers.  The proceeds of the sale were generously donated by Serge’s children Vlady and Jeannine Kibalchich to create a tax-exempt foundation, which also welcomes contributions from outside sources.

The Foundation’s funds have been used for a variety of “Sergian” projects. The first was to promote archival research and translation of Serge’s works in Russia. Serge’s party and police files have been found, but the search for the manuscripts of two Serge novels seized by the GPU in 1936 continues. Meanwhile Serge’s Memoirs of a Revolutionary have been translated in Russian and published in Moscow and Orenburg, and a translation of Serge’s novel Conquered City is ready for publication.

The Foundation was also instrumental in a related project, the creation of the Victor Serge Public Library in Moscow, which opened its doors in 1997 with a collection of radical and socialist books hitherto unavailable in Russia which were donated by friends in the U.S. The Library now has over 3000 volumes in its computerized catalogue, including works on labor, anarchism, Trotskyism, syndicalism, environmentalism, and the women’s movement in English, French, Spanish, German and Russian. The Library has from the start also been a center for political discussion. For example, the topic of the first meeting held there was the Spanish Civil War. The Library, which is moving to larger quarters in 2002, welcomes donations of books and money.

In 1999 the Praxis Research and Study Center was created at the library to sponsor more formal research and publication, notably of Serge’s Memoirs which were translated by Julia Guseva, who is also the Librarian, and which were published in October 2001 by Praxis in Moscow. On that occasion, Praxis sponsored an International Conference on Serge at the Andrei Sakharov Peace Center in Moscow. Another Conference on the topic “Revolutionary Dissidents and Socialist Heretics” is planned for the Fall of 2002, as are other publications.

The Foundation is the legal owner of the rights to Serge’s writings and works with publishers around the world to bring them to the attention of readers. Recent Serge reprints published in Paris include an anthology of his Memoires d’un révolutionnaire et écrits sur la Russie (Laffont, Coll. Bouquins, 2001), Les Derniers temp s (Grasset 1999), L’An I de la Révolution russe (La Découverte, 2000), with other works in preparation. In the U.S. Serge’s Memoirs will be published by the University of Iowa Press in 2002 and his novel, The Case of Comrade Tulayev, by N.Y. Review of Books in 2003. Other Foundation projects include the translation of Serge’s Memoirs and Raya Dunayevskaya’s Marxism and Freedom into Arabic. The Foundation also sponsors this Victor Serge website.