The novelist and professional revolutionary Victor Serge (1890-1947) spent much of his restless life in exile, often a mere step ahead of murderous pursuers. Even so, Serge cannot really be called an exile. He had no lost homeland to return to. Victor Serge was the pen name of Victor Lvovich Kibalchich. Despite his Russian lineage, he wrote exclusively in French. Born in Brussels to fiercely anti-tsarist parents — an ancestor had been hanged for his involvement in the assassination of Tsar Alexander II — he grew up in poverty, becoming an agitator and provocateur in his teenage years. Wherever he alighted — Paris, Berlin, Vienna, the Soviet Union itself — he ended up either clapped into prison or deported. If he felt at home anywhere, it was in the idea of revolution. The revolution promised the withering away of the state; perhaps that was part of its appeal to the stateless Serge. But the revolution had a way of never arriving; it was always just over the horizon. And the road that led there was red with blood.

“Unforgiving Years” (NYRB Classics, 368 pages, $15.95), translated by Richard Greeman, is Serge’s last novel; posthumously published, it stands as his testament. Here Serge explores, in unflinching detail, all the murderous delusions of the revolutionary mentality. The revolution may devour its own children, as is often said, but in Serge’s novel, it devours them first from inside. For his protagonists, what shimmers before them as a lovely chimera, promising justice and brotherhood for all, quickly shows itself to be a deadly gorgon, turning its followers to stone before it destroys them. In each of four long chapters, which range from Paris to Central Asia, and from Berlin in the last days of the Third Reich to an idyllic coffee plantation in Mexico, Serge follows the attempts of “D,” a secret Comintern agent, and of Daria, his friend and female counterpart, to escape not only from Stalinist hit men in hot pursuit, but from their own compromised pasts.

The novel, in part a thriller and in part a meditation on modern history, is uneven. Unlike “The Case of Comrade Tulayev,” his masterpiece (also available from NYRB Classics), “Unforgiving Years” tends to ramble. The narrative is broken by digressions on everything from military strategy to pre-Columbian sacrificial rites. Serge also indulges in high-flown lyrical interludes — especially when he dilates on the wonders of tropical nature, complete with “phallic bananas” — and these ring false. But his descriptions of war, and especially of its devastating effects on civilians, are probably unsurpassed; only his contemporary Joseph Roth had an equal eye for the small but harrowing detail. In evoking the hunger, the cold, and the filth — as well as the unrelenting dread — which ordinary people suffered under both Hitler and Stalin, he bears witness to a compassion beyond all ideology.

In his “Memoirs of a Revolutionary,” also composed in Mexico in the last years of his life, Serge wrote, “I felt repugnance, mingled with wrath and indignation, towards people whom I saw settled comfortably in this world.” But Serge the novelist was wiser than Serge the memoirist. Driven by repugnance, he still saw small saving foibles, vestiges of a deeper humanity, in the most contemptible of his characters. In Herr Schiff, a rigid German pedant with a sentimental love of lilacs, or in the creepy Monsieur Gobfin, a nosy Parisian hotel clerk eager to betray D to his pursuers, or in a dozen other characters, Serge saw the conflicted individual beneath the tempting stereotype. This led him not to justify his characters but to see them whole; in their desperate meanness and their fitful decency, they may consider themselves as dwelling in “the bottom of a jar where they were waiting to shrivel dry for all eternity,” as one of them says, but even the least of them has an unforgettable presence on the page.

“Unforgiving Years” is harshest toward those who, like Serge himself, were true believers. It is only when D realizes that his Comintern activities lead only from one murder to the next, and not to a better society, or even the promise of one, that he naively submits a letter of resignation to his superiors, and the hunt is on. For D as well as for Daria, the real heroine of the novel (and Serge’s greatest fictional creation), there is no escape from the logic of revolution; however high-minded its premises, it almost always has murder as its conclusion.

In his “Memoirs,” Serge wrote,

Even before I emerged from childhood, I seem to have experienced, deeply at heart, that paradoxical feeling which was to dominate me all through the first part of my life: that of living in a world without any possible escape, in which there was nothing for it but to fight for an impossible escape.

As it turned out, perhaps to his own surprise, there was an escape. It presented itself not in the creation of a new and better world, but in the faithful depiction of this one, wicked and terrible as it is. Only through a merciless exactitude of eye could compassion become possible in such a world. That revolution was real.

eormsby@nysun.com