Darkness at Noon: A Novel

By Arthur Koestler

The newly discovered lost text of Arthur Koestler’s modern masterpiece, Darkness at Noon—the haunting portrait of a revolutionary, imprisoned and tortured under totalitarian rule—is now restored and in a completely new translation.

Editor Michael Scammell and translator Philip Boehm bring us a brilliant novel, a remarkable discovery, and a new translation of an international classic.

In print continually since 1940, Darkness at Noon has been translated into over 30 languages and is both a stirring novel and a classic anti-fascist text. What makes its popularity and tenacity even more remarkable is that all existing versions of Darkness at Noon are based on a hastily made English translation of the original German by a novice translator at the outbreak of World War II.

In 2015, Matthias Weßel stumbled across an entry in the archives of the Zurich Central Library that is a scholar's dream: “Koestler, Arthur. Rubaschow: Roman. Typoskript, März 1940, 326 pages.” What he had found was Arthur Koestler’s original, complete German manuscript for what would become Darkness at Noon, thought to have been irrevocably lost in the turmoil of the war. With this stunning literary discovery, and a new English translation direct from the primary German manuscript, we can now for the first time read Darkness at Noon as Koestler wrote it.

Set in the 1930s at the height of the purge and show trials of a Stalinist Moscow, Darkness at Noon is a haunting portrait of an aging revolutionary, Nicholas Rubashov, who is imprisoned, tortured, and forced through a series of hearings by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and betrayals of a merciless totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance.

Koestler’s portrayal of Stalin-era totalitarianism and fascism is as chilling and resonant today as it was in the 1940s and during the Cold War. Rubashov’s plight explores the meaning and value of moral choices, the attractions and dangers of idealism, and the corrosiveness of political corruption. Like The Trial, 1984, and Animal Farm, this is a book you should read as a citizen of the world, wherever you are and wherever you come from.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scribner
• Release date: Sep 17, 2019
• ISBN: 9781982135225

Arthur Koestler

ARTHUR KOESTLER (1905–1983) was a novelist, journalist, essayist, and a towering public intellectual of the mid-twentieth century. Writing in both German and English, he published more than forty books during his life. Koestler is perhaps best known for Darkness at Noon, a novel often ranked alongside Nineteen Eighty-Four in its damning portrayal of totalitarianism.

Book preview

INTRODUCTION

Michael Scammell

1.

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon is an intellectual and political thriller about the life and death of a fictional revolutionary leader, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, told as he languishes in prison accused of treason. After repeated interrogations by his two prosecutors—Ivanov, a veteran revolutionary and former colleague of Rubashov’s, and Gletkin, a younger, more ruthless party apparatchik—Rubashov is forced to confess to a series of crimes he has not committed. After a public trial, he is sentenced to death and summarily executed in the prison basement.

Koestler doesn’t identify the country where the story is set. There are several allusions to Nazi Germany, but the names of the characters are mostly Russian and the political system he describes is obviously the Soviet one. His inspiration for writing his book was the show trials of Soviet Communist Party leaders in the late 1930s, when the world was startled by the news that more than half the Soviet leadership had been charged with treason. Koestler had been a loyal member of the party himself until then and on his first and only visit to the Soviet Union in 1932, had met some of the government ministers who were being imprisoned and put on trial. One whom Koestler particularly admired was Nikolai Bukharin, a popular and highly intellectual Bolshevik leader, who had been in and out of power since the October Revolution and was regarded as one of Stalin’s most formidable ideological rivals.

By the time Bukharin was imprisoned, Koestler had had a taste of political prison himself. In 1937, during the Spanish Civil War, he had been sent to Madrid as a communist agent, gathering enough material to publish a volume of strident, anti-Franco propaganda entitled L’Espagne Ensanglantée (Bloodstained Spain). He returned to Spain as a foreign correspondent for a liberal British newspaper, The News Chronicle, but was arrested during the Battle of Málaga and placed in solitary confinement in the city of Seville. He remained there for three months, seeing other prisoners led out for execution and constantly fearing he might be next. He was released after some influential British friends intervened on his behalf and immediately wrote Dialogue with Death about his experiences. His book was highly praised by Thomas Mann, Walter Benjamin, and George Orwell, who praised it as of the greatest psychological interest and probably one of the most honest and unusual documents that have been produced by the Spanish War, among others.

Koestler also resigned from the Communist Party and delivered a passionate speech to the communist-controlled German Writers’ Association in Paris, in which he explained his reasons, quoting André Malraux: A life is worth nothing, but nothing is worth a life, and Thomas Mann: In the long run, a harmful truth is better than a useful lie, two aphorisms that directly contradicted communist ideology. Soon afterward, the third big Soviet show trial got under way. Bukharin and twenty of his Soviet government colleagues were accused of a host of fantastic crimes, among them plotting to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, carve up the Soviet empire, and restore capitalism. Few people outside the Soviet Union believed these accusations, but after first denying the charges, Bukharin and his comrades inexplicably pleaded guilty. Bukharin’s ambiguous words seemed to concede that he was objectively responsible for his criminal behavior, but not for any particular crime cited in the indictment (see Appendix), leaving onlookers to debate the true extent of his confession.

Koestler was electrified by these confessions. How could such a large portion of the Soviet establishment have spent months plotting against the government and Stalin without being discovered? How had powerful leaders such as Bukharin been transformed into impotent defendants and manipulated to confess to crimes they had clearly not committed? How had Stalin managed to pull off his monstrous coup de théâtre so successfully? And why had the victims played their parts so willingly and gone so obediently to their deaths?

2.

Darkness at Noon was Koestler’s attempt at answering these questions and his answers were controversial. It was taken for granted, for example, that torture must have been used to extract these confessions from the Soviet leaders. Koestler by no means ruled out the use of torture in Soviet jails and there are many instances of torture in Darkness at Noon. Rubashov himself is denied sleep and has a blinding light shone in his eyes during his interrogations, but Koestler never shows Rubashov undergoing direct physical torture. He plays it down, not, as some critics have alleged, to soften the crimes of the communist authorities, but because he was more interested in something else. Rubashov represented the old guard of the Bolshevik Party, and Koestler had concluded that after thirty to forty years of suffering every kind of adversity, including various types of torture, they couldn’t be broken by torture alone.

Spain had taught Koestler that the idealistic form of communism that had inspired these men in their youth and had also attracted him to enlist in the party had all but disappeared, giving way to a harshly oppressive regime in which all power was concentrated in the hands of one man—Joseph Stalin. The result was widespread corruption and the establishment of a dictatorship that brutally crushed the people, especially the peasants and workers in whose name the revolution had been carried out. The show trials were both a symptom of this corruption and proof of the rot that was undermining the whole system, and the most loyal party members among the accused had confessed because the ideological ground beneath their feet had been cut away and they had nothing more to believe in. It was their resulting psychological collapse that Koestler wished to explore, rather than the mechanisms of the trials themselves.

Koestler postulated that some of the government’s leaders, such as Bukharin, while conforming outwardly, had never entirely abandoned their revolutionary creed and had retained many of their original communist ideals. Cocooned in their privileged party positions, they had been slow to grasp the radical corruption undermining the country from within, and when they finally acknowledged this truth, were unable to hide their disillusionment. Their instinctive resistance in a police state made their arrests inevitable, and the combination of isolation, exhaustion, disillusionment, and psychological disintegration did more, in Koestler’s view, to bring about their demise than physical mistreatment alone would have done. In turning against the party they had lost their sole source of support and, unable to resist any further, confessed to their crimes as a last service to the party.

In response to his critics, Koestler cited a book called I Was Stalin’s Agent by General Walter Krivitsky, which had described in detail the interrogation and trial of one of Bukharin’s former colleagues, Sergei Mrachkovsky, who had said he was publicly confessing to his crimes out of a sense of duty to the party. Koestler added that he didn’t think all the defendants who confessed had avoided torture, only a certain type of Old Bolshevik with an absolute loyalty to the party, who would succumb without it.

To this theory Koestler attached another, equally controversial suggestion that Rubashov might have undergone a kind of spiritual conversion in prison as well. During his long hours alone Rubashov uses a prison tapping code to make contact with a White Russian prisoner in the cell adjoining his. The code itself was also grounded in reality. Koestler had learned of it from a childhood friend, Eva Zeisel, who had just been expelled to the West after serving sixteen months in a Soviet jail for allegedly plotting to assassinate Stalin. In Koestler’s novel, Rubashov’s tapping exchanges with his neighbor persuade him that the latter is a buffoon, a conventional moralist who prattles on about old-fashioned notions such as honor, decency, and conscience. As time passes, however, Rubashov begins to doubt himself. Looking back, it seemed he had spent forty years in a mad frenzy . . . of pure reason. Perhaps it wasn’t healthy . . . to cut off the old ties, to disengage the brakes of ‘thou shalt not.’

This biblical phrase seems highly uncharacteristic for the communist, Rubashov, but it dovetails with echoes of Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment that appear from time to time in Koestler’s book. Ivanov mentions the novel during his first interrogation of Rubashov and their arguments often resemble Porfiry Petrovich questioning Raskolnikov. While ruminating in his cell, Rubashov recalls the image of a pietà he once saw in a European art gallery while in effect sending one of his party subordinates to his death. These Christian motifs point to themes of martyrdom and absolution, and Koestler suggests that by the time he is ready to confess, Rubashov is prompted by a deeper sense of guilt than simply disloyalty to the party. His crimes are violations of traditional morality and when he finally confesses to Gletkin, it is for reasons Gletkin cannot possibly understand.

Koestler refrains from portraying Rubashov as a full-fledged Christian, however, and at his execution leaves him an agnostic. A dull blow struck the back of his head. It was long expected but nevertheless took him by surprise. . . . A second, shattering blow hit him on the ear. Then all was still. The sea rushed on. A wave gently lifted him up. It came from afar and traveled serenely onward, a shrug of infinity.

3.

Koestler wrote his novel with astonishing speed, starting it in the South of France in the summer of 1939 and finishing it in Paris in April 1940. The last eight months coincided with the time of the Phoney War, a period of calm before the German invasion of France in May 1940, but there was no calm for Koestler. Still in the midst of writing, he was arrested by the French police as an enemy alien and imprisoned in Le Vernet internment camp in the South of France. He thought it was because of his German citizenship, but later learned he had been classified as a Soviet agent, this at a time when he had left the Communist Party and was writing his anti-Soviet novel. The camp regime was lax enough for him to be able to continue writing and after four months, for lack of evidence, he was allowed to return to Paris.

He was condemned to house arrest and ordered to report regularly to the nearest police station, but even so, he was subjected to unannounced police raids and the occasional confiscation of his papers. Once or twice the unfinished text of Darkness at Noon sat on his desk and a carbon copy rested on top of his bookcase, but the French police overlooked them.

Koestler’s English girlfriend, a twenty-one-year-old art student named Daphne Hardy, was sharing the apartment with him at the time and unbeknownst to him, had translated some short passages from the novel to while away the time while Koestler was in Le Vernet. I had started to translate his book for my own consolation, she later wrote. "He chanced to find it and read the first few pages while I squirmed in bed. . . . After a minute or two he turned around and said, ‘Also Schätzchen, das ist sehr gut. Wir werden ein Geschäft machen.’ " (Well, darling, it’s very good. We’ll make some money out of this.)

Hardy had no prior experience in translation and was nervous about her abilities, but agreed to give it a try. After breakfast each day, she later recalled, we would draw the curtain, which partitioned the apartment in two. He would sit at his table in the bigger room with the bookcases, I would sit on the edge of the divan at the round table . . . imprisoned there until lunchtime . . . while he worked with concentrated fury about ten feet away. She completed her work at top speed and mailed her translation to publisher Jonathan Cape in London, and Koestler mailed the carbon copy to a German-language publisher in neutral Switzerland. Days later, when German troops moved to occupy Paris, Hardy and Koestler fled south to escape arrest. Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion to hide his identity while Hardy, a British citizen, made her way to London. Nothing was heard from Switzerland and she believed that to all intents and purposes, her translation was the only copy of the book to survive.

Koestler’s original title for the novel, The Vicious Circle, didn’t appeal to Cape and he asked Hardy to supply a new one. Abashed by the responsibility and fearing Koestler’s wrath if she got it wrong, she consulted a variety of literary sources and settled on Darkness at Noon, a vivid and apt metaphor that proved to be a stroke of genius. Koestler fully approved and was under the impression that the title came from a well-known line in Milton’s Samson Agonistes, Oh dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, an attribution that persists in some circles today, but Hardy’s inspiration was the book of Job: They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night.

4.

Darkness at Noon was published by Cape in London in December 1940, just as German bombs were raining down on the city and there was serious talk of a possible German invasion. Koestler was back in jail again—in England now, having arrived illegally from Lisbon—and again as a suspected agent, this time of the Germans. It was hardly an auspicious moment to launch a political novel about show trials in the prewar Soviet Union. A world war had just broken out and Stalin’s show trials were largely forgotten. Sales of the book were slow to begin with and only a few critics, most of them on the left, understood its importance.

"Who will ever forget the first moment he read Darkness at Noon? wrote Britain’s future Labour Party leader Michael Foot, reviewing the book. For socialists especially, the experience was indelible. Other reviewers deemed the novel the most devastating exposure of Stalinist methods ever written, one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it, and a bitter pill to swallow. George Orwell thought the book brilliant as a novel" and accepted its explanation of the show trials, but was even more impressed by the accuracy of its analysis of communism. Four years later, when writing Animal Farm—inspired in part by Koestler’s ideas—Orwell went further and pronounced Darkness at Noon a masterpiece.

The English public, distracted by the war, was slow to be convinced. In the United States, not yet at war, sales were better, helped by a glowing review in Time by Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy, who knew what Koestler was talking about. Its selection by the Book of the Month Club also boosted sales, but they were still modest compared with what happened after the war, when sales of the English-language edition exploded. A French translation came out and sold 100,000 copies in its first year. Lines of people formed outside the French publisher’s office in Paris waiting for the book to come off the presses and copies were changing hands at eight times their original price. By the middle of the following year it had sold 300,000 copies and went on to sell two million in two years, then a record in French publishing.

This phenomenal success was due in large part to the turbulent political scene in Europe during and after World War II. When Koestler’s novel first appeared, Stalin had just signed a non-aggression pact with Nazi Germany and was regarded as an enemy by the Allies, but after Germany invaded the Soviet Union, Stalin switched sides and his armies were instrumental in helping to secure the Allied victory. The Soviet Union’s stock soared and communists in Western Europe suddenly found themselves seriously competing for power. In France, they were the largest party in the Constituent Assembly and were expected to win the first postwar general election with ease. In this context, the anti-Soviet message of Darkness at Noon erupted with shattering force. There were rumors of a communist delegation visiting the French publisher to demand he cease publication, and of party members being dispatched to bookstores to buy up all available copies. When a constitutional referendum was held in May 1946, the Communist Party narrowly lost by 48 to 52 percent, and experts agreed with the future Nobel Prize winner François Mauriac that the tipping point was the publication of Darkness at Noon.

When Koestler returned to Paris in late 1946, he was greeted as a hero, embraced by Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Malraux as a literary equal. In the United States, which Koestler visited for the first time two years later, he was regarded as the most potent anti-communist writer of his time. Arriving in New York for a US lecture tour on the British luxury liner the Queen Mary, with Clark Gable, Dizzy Gillespie, and Admiral Richard E. Byrd as fellow passengers, Koestler was hailed as Celebrity of the Day in that day’s Celebrity Bulletin.

5.

Within a few years Darkness at Noon had been translated into more than thirty languages and become a worldwide bestseller. For decades it was widely read in American high schools and assigned in undergraduate political science courses, and the accepted English version has always remained in print, despite a falloff in readers since the collapse of Soviet communism. This raises the question of why make a new translation almost eighty years after the novel was written and why publish it now?

One reason is circumstantial. When Koestler and Hardy fled Paris to escape the Germans, they lost their copy of the original German typescript and the carbon copy had apparently disappeared into thin air, leaving Hardy’s translation as the only text in existence. Her English version had introduced Darkness at Noon to the English-speaking public all over the world and had become the ur-text from which all other translations were made, a rare occurrence in modern literature.

This situation changed some four years ago, in 2015, when Matthias Wessel, a German graduate student working on Koestler’s German writings, stumbled across the carbon copy of Darkness at Noon that had seemed to disappear in 1940. He found it in the archive of Emil Oprecht, founder of the Europa publishing house in Zurich, but it wasn’t labeled as such. The name on the title page was simply Rubaschow (the German spelling of Rubashov) and the author’s name was given as A. Koestler. Every page, including the title page, had been stamped by the French censor’s office, confirming that it had come from Paris in wartime, but the title had still meant nothing to Swiss editors at the time. Koestler was little known and it was only when Wessel, well versed in Koestler’s work, came across it that it was recognized as the only copy of the original German text in existence.

The unearthing of the manuscript led to a reconsideration of Koestler’s prose in German and a reexamination of Hardy’s key translation into English. Despite her youth and lack of experience, her version has been properly acknowledged as idiomatic and fluent, serving the novel well for over seven decades, but it also reveals signs of the difficulties she had encountered. She had been forced by circumstances to work in haste, with no dictionaries or other resources available for consultation, which exposed her understandable lack of familiarity with the Soviet and Nazi machinery of totalitarianism. Obliged to improvise, she occasionally employed terminology—such as hearing for interrogation—that made these regimes look somewhat softer and more civilized than they really were. The text she worked on was not quite final either, for the Zurich typescript reveals changes Koestler made at the last minute and passages not found in the Hardy translation (such as a paragraph on masturbation in prison), items that Hardy couldn’t possibly have known about or foreseen.

It seemed that a fresh and up-to-date translation of the novel would be helpful, preferably by a seasoned translator with the knowledge and experience to clarify the jargon of Marxism-Leninism and present it in terminology that is both accurate and makes sense to an English-speaking reader. Philip Boehm, a noted translator of over thirty books and plays from German and Polish, who lived for several years behind the Iron Curtain, has proved the ideal choice for the job. In Boehm’s translation, Koestler’s novel is a crisper read than before. The prose is tighter, the dialogue clearer, the tone more ironic, and the intricacies of Marxist-Leninist dialectics more digestible. Boehm captures nuances of status and hierarchy in the relationships between party members and their leaders that weren’t always evident before, along with aspects of the regime’s calculated cruelty that have only been understood in recent years. The effect for the reader is of chancing upon a familiar painting that has had layers of varnish and dust removed to reveal images and colors in a much brighter light.

6.

Twenty years ago, the editors of the Modern Library in New York ranked Darkness at Noon at number eight on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. Setting aside the irony of a translated novel appearing on a list of English-language books, the choice was farsighted, a tribute to the novel’s high quality and to its success in transcending its historical moment.

The historical dimension is important, of course. Though Koestler refused to name the country where his story takes place, it most closely resembles the Soviet Union and Number One is clearly based on Stalin. The novel was highly topical from the moment it first appeared, and it remained so for a long time, thanks in part to its adoption as a weapon in the Cold War. Today, we have only to look at authoritarian regimes in China, North Korea, and scattered across the globe to be reminded that its basic message is still relevant, and that current dictatorships operate in essentially the same way they always have—by terrorizing their subjects and depriving them of their most important freedoms.

It’s important to remember that Koestler was also writing fiction, however, and as the times have changed, contemporary details have fallen away and the novel’s allegorical dimension has moved to the fore. Darkness at Noon is also a dystopia in the mold of Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four, and Rubashov is an archetypal political prisoner, a flawed everyman in search of salvation. Darkness at Noon’s message remains topical but also timeless, a warning to readers that is not to be ignored.

THE FIRST INTERROGATION

It is impossible to reign innocently.

Saint-Just

1.

The cell door clanged shut behind Rubashov.

He lingered for a few seconds leaning against the door and lit a cigarette. To his right was a cot with two tolerably clean blankets and a straw tick that looked freshly stuffed. The washbasin to his left was missing the stopper, but the faucet worked. The bucket next to that had just been disinfected and did not smell. The side walls were solid brick, so they didn’t resonate, but the heating and drainpipe exits were sealed with plaster and tapping there produced a passable tone. The heating pipe itself also seemed to conduct sound quite well. The window began at eye level and Rubashov could see down into the yard without having to hoist himself up by the bars. So far so good.

He yawned, took off his jacket, rolled it up, and set it on the mattress as a pillow. He looked down into the yard; the snow had a yellowish gleam from the double light of the moon and the electric lanterns. A small circular lane for walking had been shoveled out close to the walls. It was still dark, and the stars shimmered brightly in the cold air despite the lanterns. A sentry posted on the outer wall opposite Rubashov’s cell had shouldered his rifle and was counting out his hundred paces. He stamped his feet with every step, as if on parade, and Rubashov couldn’t decide whether he was doing this because of regulations or because of the cold. Now and then his bayonet shaft flashed with the reflected light from the lanterns.

Standing at the window, Rubashov took off his shoes. He put out his cigarette, placed the stub next to the foot of the cot, and sat down on the straw tick for several minutes. Then he returned to the window. The yard was quiet; the sentry was in the middle of an about-face; Rubashov could make out a patch of Milky Way just above the machine-gun tower. He stretched out on the cot and wrapped himself in the top blanket. It was five in the morning; wake-up probably didn’t happen before seven, not in the winter. He was very sleepy; he figured the interrogations wouldn’t begin for another three or four days, so he took off his pince-nez and set it on the stone tiles next to the cigarette stub,

Reviews for Darkness at Noon

[csaavedra_894108 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

My problem with this book is the trivialization of Marxism, Bolshevism, and the Russian revolution on which its premises are built on. One could argue that it is just a work of fiction and as such it doesn't need to be so precise, but then it shouldn't have been considered to be an "excellent account" of totalitarianism and the purges during Stalinism.

I give it three stars because it has some literary merit and as a work of fiction it is indeed entertaining. But in its oversimplification of absolutely everything it is just as anti-revolutionary as the totalitarianism it denounces.

[mccaine · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Arthur Koestler's "Darkness at Noon", his magnum opus, is more than just a book. It is not a novel, nor is it an essay; it is a memory and an experience, a warning and a vision. It takes the reader into a nightmare world that is nevertheless real, an alternative history that is more history than alternative, and if he has a sensitivity to questions of history and politics, it is sure to be imprinted on his mind forever. In summary, it's one of the most powerful political books of the 20th Century.The theme of the book is the experience of Stalinism, in particular the Stalinist Great Purges and the show trials during the late 1930s. Arthur Koestler himself was a Party socialist for much of his life, and only left the Soviet Union in 1938. Having known many of the Old Bolsheviks personally, he saw the state of the revolution taken over by Stalin and his henchmen, and witnessed the slow (and sometimes fast) destruction of the revolutionary old guard.It's the experiences of this infamous Great Terror of communism, seen from the eyes of a communist, that form the basic of this book. The plot is rather limited in scope: the protagonist, N.S. Rubashov (probably loosely modelled after Bukharin), is arrested for 'counterrevolutionary crimes', and spends the rest of the book in prison, being interrogated and prepared for the inevitable show trial. This of itself is not particularly clever, but that is not the core of the book.The real core of the book is Rubashov's fundamental theoretical paradoxical position: all his life he has believed in submitting the "subjectivity" of the individual to the demands of the Party, in the knowledge that they were building a future for mankind. All his life he has believed in History working its will, in the inevitable eventual victory of the right over the wrong. Yet now this same history has taken a turn, and he and the works of his generation are destroyed by the progeny of his own revolution. His interrogators, first the cynical intellectual Ivanov and later the farmer's son-turned-cadre Gletkin, want him to sign a series of damning confessions that are palpably false, which all parties involved know. Yet if the Party demands this of him, if this indeed is the will of History, can he resist? And moreover, how is it possible to begin with that the revolution led to the terror of "No. 1", the totalitarian Party leader?Through a series of short but thrilling scenes in interrogation and longer periods of reflection, monologue interieure, and flashbacks, the downfall of a committed revolutionary and intellectual and his generation are painted as vividly and profoundly as one could demand of literature. This book is more powerful than Orwell's "1984" and yet more understanding than any of the common anti-communist works of the last century; it is a testament, dedicated to the generation of Trotsky, Bukharin, Rykov, Tomsky, Rakovsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and all the other fighters for socialism at the birth of that bloodiest of centuries.

[dougwood57 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Set during the Stalinist purges and show trials, `Darkness at Noon' presents a fictionalized account of the interrogation and breaking of a (former) communist leader `Rubashov'. Under Stalin, 'former communists' were limited to those persons about to be executed, already executed, or waiting to be uncovered. As an original Bolshevik, a leader of the 1917 revolution, Rubashov's disillusionment was simply inadmissible to Number One (as Stalin is referred to by Koestler). Koestler explores the journey of Rubashov from the knock at the door through the final denouement. The reader observes Rubashov, who plays the role of narrator, as he undergoes the psychological change from a determination to resist to nearly total capitulation. Rubashov manages to hold to some crumbs of self-respect, but yields to the logic of the revolution as more important than any individual even when the accusations are complete fabrications. `Darkness at Noon' is precisely imagined with its details of Rubashov pacing the floor of his small isolation cell, the coded tapping between adjacent cells, and the deprivation of physical comforts that make the subsequent small graces, such as limited outdoor exercise, become precious by comparison. This much of the tale was informed by Rubashov's experiences as a prisoner during the Spanish Civil War. Koestler's examination of the psychological destruction of the prisoner is fascinating, although at times it briefly lapses into stultifying disquisitions on the distorted Stalinist political philosophy. Koestler himself was a German communist through much of the 1930's before immigrating to Britain, leaving the party and becoming an influential ex-communist. George Orwell's excellent essay about Koestler is readily available on the Internet (google `arthur koestler orwell'). Darkness at Noon was the middle book of an unusual trilogy of loosely related subjects: Gladiators and Arrival and Departure (20th Century Classics). Readers may also wish examine Victor's Serge's The Case of Comrade Tulayev (New York Review Books Classics). Highly recommended for anyone interested in the era of communism in its Stalinist form or more broadly in the perverse ability of humans to place greater meaning in abstract and abstruse ideology than in the actual lives of other humans.

[araridan · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book is about a prisoner named Rubashov who is kept in solitary confinement and subject to trial for "political divergences." Rubashov paces his cell a lot and has recurrent flashbacks of past actions that he is not proud of. He is subject to three hearings; the first two with an interrogator who formerly fought on the same side as him in a previous war. The last has a much stricter stance. The bigger themes of the story are how hypocritical political parties can be, and the mind games that are played, and the fact that forces that are supposed to be on opposite sides of the spectrum often engage in the same horrible behavior. I like this book fine, found the writing to be very straight-forward and the points quite evident right towards the beginning, so I got a little bored after time. In all fairness, this book is based on the Moscow trials, which I know admittedly barely anything about, and mirror actual events in the author's life.

[john257hopper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A masterpiece of psychology, getting behind the motives that led so many Russian revolutionaries to confess falsely to literally fantastic crimes in Stalin's show trials. The words Stalin, Lenin and Soviet are not mentioned in this novel, but the flow of discussion and the assumptions are very clear to anyone who is familiar with mid 20th century totalitarian regimes and the thought processes of their defenders.

[wildbill_1 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

This book was published in 1941. The edition I have is from the Modern Library and cost $1.65 when new.The book is the story of the interrogation and trial of Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov an ex-Commissar of the People. It begins with his arrest and ends as did most of Stalin's purge trials of the 1930's. The front flap describes it as a fictional critique of the ruthlessness of modern revolutionary procedures.The story is not modern and with the fall of Russian communism the ideas discussed are somewhat stale. The book is well written and sets forth the perverse logic of a revolutionary being called on to confess his sins for the good of the revolution.It was a feature of the Russian purges that those on trial were urged to make false confessions as an act of service to the revolution. The real motive of the interrogators was to remove a possible threat to Stalin's power. Still there were those such as Rubashov who made their confessions in the name of the revolution.There is little real conflict in the book. Emotionally it is very drab. The only relationship Rubashov had was with his secretary Arlova. That ended with Rubashov giving her a shove over the edge as she became the subject of denunciation and trial. This book compares well with "1984" and "Brave New World". They all deal with similar subject matter but in my opinion the other two are a little better.

[andreablythe · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Rubashov is a former leader of the revolutionary movement (the novel never says which movement, but makes it clear by comparisons that Russian communism is intended), who is arrested one night and placed in prison for "political divergences." There he ruminates on his life, which has gone hand in hand with the progress of the revolution. When he is not pacing his cell or chain smoking, he is dragged off to a series of interviews with his accusers. Over the course of his stay in prison, he become more firmly in the belief that the revolution has become polluted, that it is no longer "for the people," and that he is right to diverge from the party line. I was drawn into this story almost instantly. Koestler drops overly flowery language (his character Rubashov is certainly eloquent and straight forward) in favor of clarity. The writing flows along easily, and allowed me to fall into story and relate to the characters and events. As Rubashov remembers his past and how it lead him to exactly this point of crisis, I was as fascinated as he was with his development and his formation of thinking. I was equally captivated by the intellectual volleying between Rubashov and his interrogators, both of whom strive to use logic to make their point-of-view clear and thus proven right. This is not a happy story, per se, but I thoroughly enjoyed reading it.

[theampersand · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

It's undoubtedly a powerfully and skillfully written novel, much as I hate to say it, "Darkness at Noon" struck me as somewhat dated. It must have been a powerful anti-Stalinist statement when it was released in 1940, but now that just about nobody attempts to live their lives by the logic of historical determinism, it mostly just seems like a message sent into the future from an era whose ideological coordinates were very different from our own. Not that the writing's bad: Rubashov's is often a strong and fascinating character, and the novel is often enjoyably tense, psychologically acute, and well observed. It has moments of real pathos, and it's easy to see how it influenced Orwell's "1984." But I finished "Darkness at Noon" thinking that that novel's continued relevance may come from is universally applicable science fiction setting, while the polemical content of Koestler's novel seems less immediately relevant to this reader. I suppose it's a reminder that, for much of the twentieth century, ideological struggles weren't just something for intellectuals to dither about : they decided the fates of people's lives. Koestler, to his credit, complements many of his characters' arguments with resonant, well-chose symbolism. But there's only so much musing about living a logically ordered, Marxist-informed life that I can be expected to take. Bring it up at the next Party conference, Comrade.

[victorianh_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A little slow going read, but the message about the way of politics resonates even now.

[charlie68_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A compelling and engrossing book to listen to, very well read and written.

[shawnd_72 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Tightly written, this is not a long book. It's not especially fast read. The story is well thought out. Sort of a Count of Monte Cristo meets Kafka The Trial. Well that might not be a perfect analogy. This is typically rated highly as one of the best books of the 20th century. Use of storytelling to make moral points or make the reader think about conflict between man and punishment and other psychological issues is more direct than say a Coetzee. I would recommend this, even if Russia or Communism is not your bag.

[wewerefiction · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Darkness at Noon, first published in 1941, tells the tale of Rubashov, an old guard and revolutionary who is tried for treason by the government he once helped create. Almost the entire tale is told while the character is in prison for his accusations; the only time we leave the prison is while visiting an avid follower and friend Wassilij in conversation with his daughter Vera about the trial during Rubashov's imprisonment. The location of the book is never mentioned, neither is Joseph Stalin; instead phrases such as "Over There" are used to imply Rubashov's home country, and Stalin is referred to as "No. 1," a man with an "expression of knowing irony." Having absolutely very little knowledge of this time period or the Soviet Union, or even Joseph Stalin himself, I had only a vague idea that perhaps all the above was true. As the setting is never expressly stated, and "No. 1" is only referenced in photographs and memories - he is not an active character himself - early while reading the book I had to do a bit of Wikipedia research to determine what exactly was going on. The time period eluded me. When my brother was reaching an age of discovery, he researched communism and other belief systems. I, on the other hand, read books about dragons. Suffice to say, I did not have knowledge base of the Soviet Union, the history, or the people involved. The point I'm trying to make in this paragraph is that I didn't have to. This book was extremely well-versed in the thoughts and ideas it presented. Yes, there were some references I didn't get, and yes, I probably would have had a much fuller understanding of the text if I had that background knowledge; however, I still enjoyed it. Even without the historical knowledge, you might also.I don't usually get into political fiction. Indeed, I don't usually get into politics. Generally, I might find interest in the ideas, but that's all they are to me: ideas. Abstract thoughts in space that stay in space, and are spoken in discussions but not actually believed. They're theoretical, "rhetorically speaking." I don't believe in anything, and some say that's a fault, but I disagree (for many reasons which aren't appropriate to this post). Darkness at Noon has contained within it a lot of thoughts. Some Rubashov believes, some he thinks he believes, and in the end, some he chooses to agree to, whether or not they're real. Memories are included, as I've stated, but the majority of this book is a man pacing his cell thinking about what he believes in. In the end? I don't think he believes anything. It is a depressing end, I'll admit. He went from being passionate about everything he stood for to being completely demoralized, wanting nothing but to sleep. For a while he wanted nothing but cigarrettes; he wasn't even hungry. They deprived him even of that desire. Like 1984 by George Orwell, I am finding there's no just way to "review" or put down my thoughts on this book without addressing every single thing I had thoughts about. I feel like I should re-skim the novel and point out quotes to discuss, and I suppose in a way that is the purpose of a political novel. It has me thinking. It has me interested. I want to research the surroundings and point out the similarities and differences from this novel to what really happened; I want to dive into thoughts as deep as Rubashov's journal entries. Most of all, I want a friend to read it so we can discuss it. That is the sort of effect this book leaves. It's very well written, though at first you might feel like you're reading a very shaky translation. You probably are. The book, apparently, was translated from the German and then the original German manuscript was lost. All we have to rely on is the original English translation. However, after 25 pages, you're sucked in, and there's no leaving until it's over... Even then, it holds you.

[dmcrimson · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

When it comes to fiction about government, the only book that can be compared to it's blend of beautiful prose and haunting message is 1984. However, I find Darkness to be more philosophical and cerebral towards it's message, which is where Koestler truly shines.

[mattviews · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Darkness at Noon, though often overlooked as one of a 20th century classics, stands as a significant fictional portrayal of the nightmarish politics of our time. The protagonist, Rubashov, is an aging revolutionary who was once a partisan commander and is imprisoned by the Party to which he had unconditionally and loyally dedicated his life. The book closely follows Rubashov's arrest and his agonized reflections throughout his imprisonment.Through the reminiscence of a skein of characters, Rubashov re-lived his Party career that embodied the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. The book is meant to be a piece of fiction-a monologue of Rubashov's excruciating reflection of his party career, but reads like a social commentary and historical account as Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the Moscow Trials.Darkness at Noon lays out some of the most inveterate principles of a Communist regime: the Party embodies the will of history even though history itself maybe proven to be defective. The authority of the Party could never be questioned or challenged or else the Party will settle such disparity with death. In other words, the Party prohibits any swerve from its ideals-some theoretical future of happiness that is unattainable save for Party members can envision. As interrogation proceeds, Rubashov is coerced to confess preposterous crimes that he never committed. False accusations are brought forth against him to the point such accusations wreck his nerves. Though Rubashov curtly denies committing any subversive acts in the industry entrusted to him, the accusation simply defines his motive as counter-revolutionary and that he had been in service of a hostile foreign power.Darkness at Noon exposes the bone-chilling tactics the Party operates-it operates without scruples nor accommodation, never caters to any individual needs. The movement is like a river with bends that those who are not ready accommodate the river flow will be inevitably washed ashore. The book also outlines the psychological strategy that such regime uses to manipulate prisoners. A dark tale indeed.

[pickwick817 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Well written book. In reading it I felt as if I lived through the same experiences myself. It was frightening, but not impossible to concieve. A glimpse at what less fortunate people on this planet must live through.

[benfulton · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

A magnificently contemplative novel of the last years of the protagonists of the Russian Revolution. To understand it, one must have at least a surface understanding of Communism as seen from the perspectives of both Vladimir Lenin and Josef Stalin; Rubashov's careful and thoughtful look back on the age of Lenin as he copes with the age of Stalin will be next to impossible to follow otherwise. One of the few books where I'd really love to read the sequel. Whatever would Rubashov make of the age of Putin?

[stefano_18 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This book is so riveting that I had to read it at one sitting even if I was in the middle of a serious crisis at work: deeply moving, helped me keep things in perspective.

[kishields · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

Not a fun read, obviously. Short on plot, but in a tradition of fiction that exposes the evils of Stalinism, fascism and totalitarianism that followed the Russian revolution (along with other similar movements). Grim story of the brief imprisonment of an erstwhile ruthless leader of the Revolution who is now forced to confront his past from the other side. I much prefer Orwell's 1984, but I understand this book helped inspire him in its creation.

[jmoncton_1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A powerful book about the Stalinist purges during the 1930's. The main character, Comrade Rubashov is one of the diehard members of the party, a Communist since his youth who has been decorated many times for his devotion to the party and Mother Russia. Now in his 50's he has been arrested and is being tried for unpatriotic behavior. As Rubashov is repeatedly questioned, his memory flashes back to different times in his past when he was the one arresting and trying traitors - sacrificing friends and lovers all for the good of the party.

The scenes in this book are vividly described and definitely paint a strong picture of foreboding and oppression. Definitely a dark and depressing book, but an interesting look at the mechanisms behind a revolution.

[clara53_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

Crushing of human spirit is at the center of this book, but is it achieved simply by Stalin's paranoia, resulting in horrific deeds and silencing many innocent lives, or by something more on a philosophical level? This is one of the burning questions that Rubashov is tormented with while he is walking up and down his tiny prison cell, as well as during conversations with his first interrogator; we also see parts of Rubashov's diary. (As we learn, Rubashov is a synthesis of numerous victims of Stalin's purges in 1930s, and the author knew many of them).Basically, the whole story is set between the prison cell and interrogation room (with some reminiscences from Rubashov's past as an important member of Central Committee being assigned to travel abroad to stir up and establish Communist movements), and under other circumstances, it might not seem sufficient for a plot. But here, one is glued to the book, as Rubashov, even though it's not his first arrest, tries, in his mind, frantically, to find answers or justifications to whatever is going on in the country; WHY/HOW the purest of ideas turned into something so horrible under Stalin's watch: "All our principles were right but our results were wrong. This is a diseased century. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness.... Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us..."Russia/U.S.S.R is never mentioned (in his foreign comrades' minds it's called "over there" with reverence), Stalin is dubbed "No. 1", Lenin - "the old man", Communist Party is just "Party". And interestingly enough, at the beginning of the book Rubashov identifies Party as "we" ("We brought you truth, but in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hand like a whip" - throughout the book Koestler is very powerful with his metaphors...), while later on in his thought process he separates himself from the Party, or at least from what became of it - after most of old-timers, his fellow comrades with bright ideas had been liquidated.His two interrogators (though using totally different approaches) represent brainwashing at its ugliest. It makes one's skin crawl. Logic (or at least normal human logic) has no place here. Manipulation of prisoners' minds - now that's another story... Arguing is futile. Through his cell walls, and later on his short walks in the yard Rubashov gets to know his co-prisoners - some, by this time, deranged with the idea of revolution, some resigned, some not even understanding why they are there, some resisting, but not for long...I have read a number of accounts (both non-fiction, and fiction - based on facts) about this dark era of Russian history, and yet this is the first time that I encounter such philosophical dissection of ideas in the mind of a political prisoner, such psychologically influenced ruminations. This book will stay with me for a while... I think the validity of this topic can never be lost.

[marse_4 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

The Moscow purges and show trials of the mid 1930s through the 40s has always seemed baffling to Westerners. Why would such luminaries of the Communist Party and stalwart defenders of the Russian Revolution confess publicly to counter-revolutionary crimes against the State which were so obviously false to the point of utter inanity. Solzhenitsyn in his GULAG Archipelago analizes the techniques used to illicit false confessions from people under the Soviet system, but "Darkness at Noon" takes a more literary and forceful approach. His main character, an operative and fervent believer in the Party, is arrested for being a traitor to the Party. His interrogator is an old comrade of his. Through their conversations/interrogations we learn of the protagonist's history with the Party, his work, his defense of the methods used, his slow dissatisfaction with the results of their work, and his understanding of the role he must play. Koestler, himself, was a Communist and Believer, and his unveiling of this psychology rings true and convincing--and terrifying.

[xuebi-1 · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

Darkness at Noon is Arthur Koestler's most famous work and his most powerful.

The story of Rubashov, a revolutionary and once key figure in the unnamed country's government, who is now imprisoned and on trial for treason is a powerful anti-totalitarian novel. The narrator's reflections on his past life are the heart of the novel's drama and the circumstances of his false imprisonment and trial mirror those of the Stalinist purges in 1938.

[greeniezona · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

In the middle of our read-a-thon, I decided to pull a book from the bookslut 100 list. I ended up pulling Darkness at Noon, even though I knew hardly anything about it.

As a fan of science fiction, I have read dozens of books where the big bad was a totalitarian government that prosecutes people for thoughtcrimes and says things like "It is better to execute 10 innocent people than to let one guilty person go free." These organizations are horrible, clearly, but lost a little bit of their scariness for me as they seemed too unbelievable. How could anyone really believe such a horrible thing? And how could an entire government run on that principle?

Well, this book has changed all that forever. In Darkness, Rubashov, a former party leader and war hero, is imprisoned for treason. During his imprisonment, he thinks back to a past imprisonment, engages in secretive conversations with other prisoners (his wing is all solitary confinement), and is interrogated by two men, one of whom he has a history with. As they try to convince him to plead guilty to several counts of treason, there is a lot of discussion of the philosophy of such a government. Not only did this book thoroughly convince me that such governments have and do exist, but even more horrifyingly, I started to understand how people could talk themselves and others into such behaviors.

This book was so good, I was kind of in awe of it the entire time I was reading it. Definitely worthy of its place on the bookslut 100.

[gregdehler · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a new translation from the recently discovered German manuscript that had been lost for over seventy years. I had read the original years ago and can't comment much on how this new translation really differs from the original, but I will say that it is chilling book and a must read for anyone concerned about totalitarian and authoritarian regimes, be they right or left. Either one seeks to crush the independent spirit of liberty and freedom. I was inspired to re-read this after finishing the second volume of Kotkin's Stalin biography.

[br77rino · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

This is a great companion piece to George Orwell's "1984." Where Orwell took us into the experience of a common worker of the big bad totalitarian state, Koestler takes us into the experience of one of the true believers, Nicolas Rubashov, who is arrested for "counter-revolutionary" activities after being one of the leaders of the Party. Great insight into the thinking process of a Marxist who helped found the Soviet Union (though that state is never mentioned by name) - I'm glad I finally read it, having heard mentions of it for the past several decades. Not a long read, either. Easily digestible I thought.

[barbharper · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

This is one of the most profound books I have ever read about totalitarianism and the Marxist state. Rubashov experiences the brunt of karma as, after a brilliant career of manipulating his loyal party members, he suffers their fate. The ends justifies the means is the party slogan, individuals are sacrificed for the greater good. Spirituality is despised as weakness. As the minutes count down to his execution, Rubashov experiences an epiphany. His perceptions of truth come too late when he realizes that he must sacrifice his life for a state he does not believe in.One thing that struck me was how immediate and timeless the prose was. The book could have been written today. There were interesting parallels to Christ and ironic comments on revolutions (French and Russian).

[thatotter-1 · Rating: 2 out of 5 stars]

Really not my thing.

[jvioland_1 · Rating: 5 out of 5 stars]

One of the creators of a society is its latest victim in this allegory of Soviet life for the power elite. Chilling. Very authentic from what we know occurred based upon document drops after the fall of the Soviet Union.

[behemothing-2 · Rating: 3 out of 5 stars]

i don't like this book as much as other people seem to (especially according to great book lists etc.) but i've enjoyed reading it so far.

[salmondaze · Rating: 4 out of 5 stars]

A good book. It does suffer the pangs of translation, unfortunately, but it's concise reading with a good conceit.