The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Who else has read this book? What did you think? I'm reading it now & finding it unusual. Has Victor Serge written anything else I should know about?

I loved The Case of Comrade Tulayev -- I thought it was brilliant as a portrait of the insanity of police states in general and Soviet purges in particular and as a novel with interesting and varied characters and a quick-moving plot.

As you probably know Victor Serge was a Russian revolutionary who was himself imprisoned by Stalin. He wrote a number of other books, both fiction and non fiction, which you can see on his LT author page and on this Wikipedia page.

I thought it was wonderful as well; I wrote a brief review here:
http://languagehat.com/the-case-of-comrade-tulayev/

Since I read The Case of Comrade Tulayev, I've read everything by Victor Serge I could get my hands on, including the remarkable Memoirs of a Revolutionary.

Same here! I got Memoirs of a Revolutionary as a gift and am very much looking forward to reading it.

i hope you have the NYRB edition; it's the only complete one.

Yup! (It's a source of frustration to me that Serge didn't write in Russian...)

I had no idea he didn't write in Russian. I know he was born in Belgium (which doesn't help me know what language he wrote/spoke) but his parents were both Russian?

Says Wiki:
Serge was born in Brussels, Belgium, to a couple of impoverished Russian anti-Czarist exiles. His father, Leo (Lev) Kibalchich, a former infantry trooper from Kiev ... had fled Russia around 1887 and gone to Switzerland, where he met Serge's mother, Vera Frolova, née Pederowska. She was the daughter of an impoverished petty nobleman of Polish extraction from the Nizhni-Novgorod province. ... the couple wandered Europe, according to their son, "in search of cheap lodgings and good libraries". Victor was born "by chance" in Brussels, where the couple were so poor that Victor's younger brother died of malnutrition before Leonid eventually found work as a teacher at the Institute of Anatomy.

Brussels pretty much means French, especially back then. ;)

Yeah, he wrote in French -- Memoirs of a Revolutionary was originally Mémoires d'un révolutionnaire. Not that there's anything wrong with writing in French, of course, but I love reading in Russian!