Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary, with Mitchell Abidor

A video of this November 1, 2025, event is available on the MEP’s YouTube channel.

Mitchell Abidor, author of Victor Serge: Unruly Revolutionary presents the book in conversation with Jacob Plitman, former publisher of Jewish Currents.

Today, thanks to his classic memoirs and novels, Victor Serge is highly esteemed by virtually all segments of the left. But who was this man, who led such a thrilling life on the frontlines of history? An anarchist? A Bolshevik? A Trotskyist? Or did he evolve into something else entirely? In this comprehensive account of Serge’s life, work, and political evolution, Mitchell Abidor rescues his subject, in all his complexity, from the constraints of any single label. Painting a portrait of a man whose political ideas shifted continually in response to the major events of his life, we are introduced to several Victor Serges: the youthful anarchist in Belgium and France; the leading Bolshevik in Moscow; the anti-Stalinist who faced imprisonment and expulsion from the Soviet Union. Examining the lacunae and errors of fact in his memoirs, Abidor reveals the hidden Serge for what he ultimately was: an unruly revolutionary of both great courage and contradictions.

Mitchell Abidor is a writer and translator living in Brooklyn, New York. In addition to his many translation works, he is the author of May Made Me and I’ll Forget It When I Die!: The Bisbee Deportation of 1917. Abidor is the translator and editor of Victor Serge’s anarchist writings, Anarchists Never Surrender, and translated with Richard Greeman Serge’s Notebooks (1936-1947).

A 30% discount code for Victor Serge and other Pluto Press books by Mitchell Abidor will be provided to all ticket purchasers.