Victor Serge and the Journey into Defeat: The Case of Comrade Tulayev

Delivering searing criticism on the psychosis of absolute power, Victor Serge’s fifth novel to be featured in my personal blog, For the Desk Drawer, is a masterly work. The Case of Comrade Tulayev was written in 1942 and is situated in the context of the Great Terror in Soviet Russia orchestrated by Joseph Stalin. In the sequence that constitutes the ‘defeat-in-victory’ trilogy (preceded by Midnight in the Century [1939] and succeeded by The Long Dusk [1943-5]), the novel intersects in several subtle ways with Serge’s other books. The Case of Comrade Tulayev is a chronicle of the Moscow arrests and show trials in the 1930s that pulls in a myriad of characters as well as the overbearing appearance of ‘the Chief’, Stalin himself. It does so by offering at least two intersections to aspects present in Serge’s earlier novels. First, it offers a set of intersecting elements linked to specific characters that appear in the earlier books; second, it offers direct intersections on the theme of space and the state. How the spatial logistics of the state, how the modern state organises space, and how the state engenders social relations in space are thus a quintessential feature of The Case of Comrade Tulayev.

Videogame Space: What’s in it for Urban Studies?

There is a rich literature on space in videogames.

(non-specialists should start with M. J. P. Wolf’s The Medium of the Videogame—and the two readers on videogame theory he’s edited with B. Perron).

But how much of this is relevant to urban space specifically, and not merely to space in the abstract?–the answer: some, but not enough (yet).

Which only makes work by Michael Nitsche, for example, stand out more. His book Video Game Space: Image, Play and Structure in 3D Game Worlds with MIT Press even references urban theorist Henri Lefebvre. Here’s a brief online review.

Another book Space Time Play. Computer Games, Architecture and Urbanism provides a number of articles that suggest a dialectical relationship between videogames/digital representation and the practice of urban planning itself. The Introduction to the book can be downloaded here.