A D I S S I D E N T
Vlady is a man in revolt. "What is a man in revolt?" Albert Camus asked. "A man
who says no." For Vlady, it's the opposite. Revolt is a heritage that waves and
snaps in the wind like a banner.
Vlady's grandfather, Leon Kibalchich, was an officer in the Imperial Guard
who went down in history as having participated in the plot to assassinate Czar
Alexander II. He fled to Geneva, then to Brussels, where he had two sons, Victor
and Raoul. The latter died of hunger at the age of eight and a half. Kibalchich
went to Argentina and never returned to Russia.
Victor Lvovich Kibalchich, still a teenager, went to Paris. He joined the Bonnot
gang, did prison time, met Lenin in Petrograd, and helped to create the Komintern.
Deported by Stalin to Orenburg, confined to Kazakhstan and Siberia, he embarked
on a career as a novelist, essayist, and poet under the name Victor
Serge.
Thus, Vlady's revolutionary nature was acquired through the aristocratic tradition
of blood inheritance. But which revolution matters little: that of the Russian
anarchists or the French libertarians -- anything that contrasts with the dull
weight of Stalinist totalitarianism. In the Spanish Civil War, he wanted to
fight in the ranks of the POUM. However, the front was closed to Victor Serge's
son. What was open to him was art.
- 1920
- Born in Petrograd during the civil war. His father, Victor Serge, wrote,
"I spent nights at the defence outposts, with the communists. My pregnant
wife came to sleep in back, in an ambulance. Wrapped in a towel were a few
clothes and our most precious objects, so that we could meet during the battle
and beat a retreat together along the Neva" (Mémoire d'un révolutionnaire,
Seuil, 1951, p. 103; translation).
- 1933
- Under severe pressure from persecution, Vlady's mother, Liuba, goes mad.
She is admitted to the Red Army's psychiatric clinic. Vlady accompanies his
father to the Gulag. His teachers are old Bolsheviks who were Lenin's companions
and deported by Stalin.
- 1936
- Vlady and his parents leave Russia for Belgium, then France. A supporter
of the anarcho-syndicalist cause during the Spanish Civil War, he is not able
to reach the front because of communist hostilities. He decides to become
a painter and spends time in the studios of Joseph Lacasse, Victor Brauner,
Oscar Dominguez, Wifredo Lam, André Masson, and sculptor Aristide
Maillol.
- 1941
- When the Nazis overrun France, Victor Serge and Vlady must flee again.
In Marseilles, they board a ship that takes them on to Martinique, the Dominican
Republic, and Cuba. They are turned away from each port because they are communists.
Only Mexico welcomes them. Vlady's mother remains in a psychiatric asylum
in Aix-en-Provence, where she dies a few years later.
- 1947
- Victor Serge dies. Vlady marries Isabel Díaz Fabela. Since his arrival
in Mexico, he has been going from village to village, drawing scenes of daily
life. He adapts himself to the landscape, the soil, and the light of the country
that is to be his new homeland.
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<BR>Lieu d\'exposition : Musée Trotsky, Mexico'))
