Mean City
― Conquered City by Victor Serge is the second novel that I’ve read set in the Civil War that followed the 1917 Bolshevik coup in Russia. The first was The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov which I admired for its clarity, its biting satire and its sheer brilliance. It’s set in and around Kiev in the Ukraine at a particularly troubled and uncertain time in history, just as Serge's book is set in and around Saint Petersburg - then called Petrograd – during the same troubled months. ∙ [...].
