Darkness at Noon

Known to be the first important book denouncing the Stalinist reign of terror, it had worldwide success and prompted unusually far-reaching discussion when published in London in 1940. Arthur Koestler was a Hungarian Jew who lived in Berlin and Paris and had belonged to the German Communist Party, been a reporter for an English Newspaper during the Spanish Civil War, been imprisoned in Málaga and released through the intervention of his newspaper, and chose to recount the Moscow trials of 1938 in this work of fiction. Darkness at Noon describes an aging Bolshevik's total loss of perspective when faced by the new regime's inquisitors. At given intervals, Rubashov leaves the rumor-ridden limbo of his prison cell for interrogation—or else is appeased with gifts—first by the reproachful ironist, Ivanov, then by his remote and sadistic colleague, Gletkin. The machine of guilt is brought fully to bear; and, in a nightmarish moment of failing logic, Rubashov makes his preposterous and fatal confession. The book reaches the stature of tragedy, from his European angle Koestler can see such things as purges and mass deportations for what they really are...man's spiritual crisis in the twentieth century—the idolatry of the State and the mass enslavement of the mind. View Less