Closing the second informal trilogy that comprises the ‘cycle of resistance’, as defined by Richard Greeman, The Long Dusk [1946] is Victor Serge’s sixth novel translated into English. The book is extremely rare and hard to come across and one cannot wait for NYRB Classics to republish this in its Victor Serge Collection. The Long Dusk is an adieu to Paris, France, and Europe from an assemblage of characters defined by Serge as a ‘family of stateless refugees’ facing Nazi occupied France in 1940. The constellation of characters based in Paris attempt to avoid the abyss of occupation by fleeing to Marseilles, some arriving on railway routes defined by the Paris Lyon Méditerranée Company (PLM), while others are carried by trucks loaded with ‘human potpourri’.
The Long Dusk is a prescient contemplation of the plight of stateless refugees as well as a requiem for Paris that offers further insight on the spatiality of state power. It delivers reflections on different landscapes of statehood and how the spatial form of the French state during the Vichy government extended across diverse zones, locations, places and regions. In The Long Dusk the reader is once again exposed to a narrative treatment of the territorial articulation of state space, the changing geography of state power, and the grip that forces acting in and through the state have on the subjects and agents of history.