Source for a key image in *1984*

From Victor Serge's *Memoirs*, completed in 1943, where the
acknowledgments mention "it was George Orwell to whom Serge first
transmitted the manuscript of Serge's *Memoirs* for publication in
English..."

This is 1933, inside the legendary Lubianka prison in Moscow:

"...Every time I went to an examining session, the electric signals
operated all along my route, so efficiently that I did not even see any
warder other than my own. One night I noticed that several of the
warders were gazing at me in a peculiarly attentive way as I went out.
When I returned, at dawn, I found them crowded around the
reception-office; they seemed to be looking rather benevolently upon me,
and the one who searched me was so friendly as to venture a little joke.
I discovered later that on that very night the thirty-five agricultural
experts had been executed, along with Konar, Wolfe, and Kovarsky, all of
them prominent officials, and including several influential Communists.
They had gone off just as I had, down these very corridors, summoned
just as I had been 'for the examining session' and the warders knew no
more than that they had been shot somewhere down there in the cellars.
Doubtless they assumed that I was earmarked for the same end -- and so
looked upon me with the humane attentiveness that I had noticed. When I
came back, the warders were both surprised and pleased to see somebody
return from that last 'examining session'. As I went to and from
interrogations, I happened to pass in front of the gaping mouth of a
cement-lined corridor on the ground floor, which was lit with brutal
brilliance. Was that the door to the final descent?..."

c/o M

On 3 sep, 12:19, Martha Bridegam <bride....TakeThisOut@pacbell.net> wrote:
> From Victor Serge's *Memoirs*, completed in 1943, where the
> acknowledgments mention "it was George Orwell to whom Serge first
> transmitted the manuscript of Serge's *Memoirs* for publication in
> English..."
>
> This is 1933, inside the legendary Lubianka prison in Moscow:
>
> "...Every time I went to an examining session, the electric signals
> operated all along my route, so efficiently that I did not even see any
> warder other than my own. One night I noticed that several of the
> warders were gazing at me in a peculiarly attentive way as I went out.
> When I returned, at dawn, I found them crowded around the
> reception-office; they seemed to be looking rather benevolently upon me,
> and the one who searched me was so friendly as to venture a little joke.
> I discovered later that on that very night the thirty-five agricultural
> experts had been executed, along with Konar, Wolfe, and Kovarsky, all of
> them prominent officials, and including several influential Communists.
> They had gone off just as I had, down these very corridors, summoned
> just as I had been 'for the examining session' and the warders knew no
> more than that they had been shot somewhere down there in the cellars.
> Doubtless they assumed that I was earmarked for the same end -- and so
> looked upon me with the humane attentiveness that I had noticed. When I
> came back, the warders were both surprised and pleased to see somebody
> return from that last 'examining session'. As I went to and from
> interrogations, I happened to pass in front of the gaping mouth of a
> cement-lined corridor on the ground floor, which was lit with brutal
> brilliance. Was that the door to the final descent?..."
>
> c/o M

Perhaps this might be one of Orwell's inspirations, I don't know. He
wrote to Fredric Warburg in 1946 regarding the Serge manuscript:

"I am sending under separate cover on Monday Trotsky's Life of Stalin
and Victor Serge's memoirs, which I received yesterday. I have only
looked at the latter to the extent of seeing that it is an untidy
manuscript, but if it is up to the extracts which were printed in
"Politics" it should be a worth-while book. I thought it better to
send it straight on because I might not get time to read it. I have
been called out of London at rather short notice. I am sorry to say
one of my sisters has died unexpectedly..."

At any rate, Warburg published Nineteen Eighty-Four but did not
publish Serge's memoirs (fn, item #3032 CWGO).

B.