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Title: Letter to Emile Armand Author: Victor Serge Date: 19 March 1917 Language: en Topics: letter; E. Armand Source: Retrieved on 28th October 2022 from https://www.marxists.org/archive/serge/1917/03/letter-armand.htm Notes: From Jean Maitron, “De Kibaltchiche à Victor Serge,” in Le Mouvement Social, no. 47, April-June 1964. Translated for marxists.org by Mitchell Abidor.
My Dear Armand:
I ask that you publish these lines, which are addressed both to you and
the comrades who remembered me and assisted me in the present
circumstances. I am infinitely touched by their gesture. I thank them.
You prefer not to publish the letter from Toulouse, where I explained
the reasons that prevent me, though fully one of you, to collaborate in
your work. As you wish. In any case, I don’t want to cause a polemic on
this troublesome theme. I prefer to completely abstain. Before certain
moral situations there is only one thing to do: leave. I’m leaving.
But I want to say to our comrades that it’s neither due to
discouragement or following a divergence in ideas. In this time of
contrary winds that confuse weathervanes, it’s not without use to
specify things in this way. I have lost the sectarian intransigence of
the past. I now attribute less importance to words than to ideas, to
ideas than sentiments – and much less importance to casuistry than to
good will. I feel myself capable of working with all those who, animated
by the same desire for a better life, clearer and more intelligent,
advance towards their future, even by different roads than mine and even
if they give our common goal in reality different names that I don’t
know.
And so I am still one of you, confirmed by harsh personal experience, by
my desire for combat and the opinion that our effort, however feeble it
might be, is necessary. If I currently abstain from your work it’s only
for the reasons I already laid out and that I ask you to make known to
the friends of “Au-dela la melée.”
Yours, V. S. le Retif