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Jump to ratings and reviews. Want to read. Rate this book. Darkness at Noon. Arthur Koestler. 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 , 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. Rubaschow: Roman. 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 s 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. Like The Trial , , and Animal Farm , this is a book you should read as a citizen of the world, wherever you are and wherever you come from. Loading interface About the author. Arthur Koestler books followers. Darkness at Noon , novel of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler , portrays his disillusionment with Communism; his nonfiction works include The Sleepwalkers and The Ghost in the Machine He was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His early career was in journalism. In he joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned, he resigned from it in and in published a devastating anti-Communist novel, Darkness at Noon , which propelled him to instant international fame. Over the next forty-three years he espoused many causes, wrote novels and biographies, and numerous essays. In he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and three years later with leukaemia in its terminal stages. He committed suicide in in London. Write a Review. Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book! Community Reviews. Search review text. Displaying 1 - 30 of 2, reviews. Jeffrey Keeten. Author 6 books k followers. We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you the living life, and where our voices is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov is arrested. Soviet Prison Doors Similar to the one that Rubashov found himself behind. But this must happen in such a way that no one become aware of it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand, to be produced immediately. The young revolutionary Joseph Stalin. Rubashov has been in trouble with the party before, but had always managed to do what was necessary to survive. The new generation of revolutionaries are not as well educated, meaner, and barely recognize the names of those that were once heralded as heroes by the revolution. As Rubashov sits in prison he is left to ponder what has went wrong. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves Rubashov does not have a safety net of friends, most have perished, some were betrayed by his silence when he was in a position to save them. They are less than impressed to find out who he is; in fact, the only use he has to is to share his last sexual encounter GO ON. He has more thinking to do. More explaining to do to himself. He has two interrogators. One is trying to save him and one is trying to kill him. In his diary Rubashov is still justifying his past decisions. He still believes in the movement, but is disenchanted with the people. In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the higher judgment of the people. Lots of people die and more will continue to die and when you ask the peasants if their lives are better than they were four years ago or forty years ago or two hundred and forty years ago the answer is the same The revolutionaries turn out to be as brutal as the Czarist government they overthrew and since we know that Stalin is only warming up by the publication date of this book we know it will get much, much worse. Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention and interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. His mind has been degraded from lack of sleep and he has decided the easiest way to go is to admit guilt on certain points. Now he was to find that powerlessness had as many grads as power; that defeat could become as vertiginous as victory, and that its depths were bottomless. I do though identify with him enough to feel uncomfortable. They overthrow a government, but are generally so paranoid that they resort to the same or worse tactics as the original government to keep control. We were lucky in our revolution in the United States because it was more about expelling a foreign power from our shores than it was about overthrowing a government. Our Revolutionary Heroes, after the war, were willing to share a certain amount of power with the people. Freedom was more important to them than power. Although the revolution was more about greed how dare thee tax me than about being oppressed. This country, by the wisdom of our forefathers,was built on a foundation of freedom and sometimes we have to remind ourselves of those principles. Russia is a country that continues to wrestle with their identity. They need strong leadership confident enough to allow their society to be ruled by freedom rather than by fear. I do hope they find a way to throw off the shackles of their history and become the amazing country I know they are capable of being. Bucket list: grand tour of Russia. Arthur Koestler Arthur Koestler, Hungarian by birth, certainly was a man with a controversial past. He attempted suicide when he thought that his manuscript of this book along with his girlfriend Daphne Hardy had been sunk by the Germans. It turned out not to be true. It is unclear which he was more upset about losing. He became a British citizen and later in life he successfully committed suicide when he found out he was terminally ill with cancer. He convinced his much younger wife to commit suicide as well. Their mutual friends felt that he must have bullied her into it. Despite his failings as a human being he did write an important book that will be read and quoted long past the time when anyone will really remember there ever was a USSR. Ahmad Sharabiani. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he had helped to create. That is why I am lost. Due to the controversy of the author I haven't read it sooner which I deeply regret now. Meet Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he helped to create. The novel is set in , during the Great Purge and Moscow trials even though Koestler didn't name directly USSR or Stalin, referring to him as 'Number One', giving the novel less factual historian and vaguer dystopian feeling similar to and Kafkaesquein events. Novel in a way transcends mere historical events and embodies the eternal drama of individual vs. Rubashov is not a typical martyr or a hero, an innocent person persecuted for race or religion, or his opposition to repression, he is a morally gray character that has blood on his hands, a Revolutionist eaten by Revolution he was fighting for, creating a monster that will ultimately destroy him in, which makes his struggles and existential and moral crises even more relatable because we see the destructive aspect of collective mirrored in himself. I have thought and acted as I had to; I destroyed people whom I was fond of, and gave power to others I did not like. History put me where I stood; I have exhausted the credit which she accorded me; if I was right I have nothing to repent of; if wrong, I will pay. From an early age, he was a member of the Party, fought in the civil war, endured 2 years of torture from Gestapo, betrayed other communists who deviated from the Party line and proven over and over again that he is unscrupulously loyal to the cause of communism. That was indeed, his meaning and purpose. He had held to the rules of logical calculation. He had burnt the remains of the old, illogical morality from his consciousness with the acid of reason. And where had it landed him? Perhaps it was not suitable for a man to think every thought to its logical conclusion. Ultimately he finds despair in a revelation that promised utopia is mere dictatorship imposing the suffering on millions of people. Rubashov can no longer cling to Machiavellian philosophies, where historical processes, no matter how vile they may seem, are justified for the cause of socialist utopia and the happiness of future generations. He sees clearly that the vision of a better world is fading and from dread with the promise of a glowing future, there is only death and terror left in the Soviet world. Stripped down from his faith in communism all he has left is the inner voice of his conscience that is condemning him. Rubashov was a logical man that was hiding all his guilt and sense of morality in an entanglement of intellectualization and rationalization. But his reason was adequate shelter only when he was not face to face with human suffering. The soviet prison gives him that side of reality, one that is more difficult to argue with reason, the one that shatters most of the philosophical argument and ends debates, the face of a suffering man. It had always been for him an abstract occurrence; it had left him with a feeling of strong uneasiness, but he had never doubted the logical rightness of his behaviour. Now, in the nausea which turned his stomach and drove the wet perspiration from his forehead, his past mode of thought seemed lunacy. The whimpering of Bogrov unbalanced the logical equation. Up till now Arlova had been a factor in this equation, a small factor compared to what was at stake. But the equation no longer stood. That is the first commandment for us. Sympathy, conscience, disgust, despair, repentance, and atonement are for us repellent debauchery. The greatest temptation for the like of us is: to renounce violence, to repent, to make peace with oneself. Most great revolutionaries fell before this temptation, from Spartacus to Danton and Dostoevsky; they are the classical form of betrayal of the cause. The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan. When the accursed inner voice speaks to you, hold your hands over your ears. Unfortunately, only few people, particularly amongst our fellow countrymen, ever realize that the ecstasies of humility and suffering are as cheap as those induced chemically. But I have not a spark of pity. I drink; for a time, as you know, I drugged myself; but the vice of pity I have up till now managed to avoid. The smallest dose of it, and you are lost. Our greatest poets destroyed themselves by this poison. Up to forty, fifty, they were revolutionaries—then they became consumed by pity and the world pronounced them holy. You appear to have the same ambition, and to believe it to be an individual process, personal to you, something unprecedented. History is a priori amoral; it has no conscience. To want to conduct history according to the maxims of the Sunday school means to leave everything as it is. The debate between Ivanov and Rubashov is one of the most brilliant ones I have ever read. Some things that are almost overemphasized in Dostoyevski, which I know annoy some people, Koestler does in such a subtle, elegant manner. He gives both sides fair argument, without being overly pretentious and patronizing. His arguments are vibrant and lived-through, not merely abstract ideas. The Christian symbolism is not in your face loud, but quietly and naturally embroidered in the story. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community—which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb. The first conception could be called anti-vivisection morality, the second, vivisection morality. Humbugs and dilettantes have always tried to mix the two conceptions; in practice, it is impossible. Whoever is burdened with power and responsibility finds out on the first occasion that he has to choose; and he is fatally driven to the second alternative. Do you know, since the establishment of Christianity as a state religion, a single example of a state which really followed a Christian policy? Since the existence of nations and classes, they live in a permanent state of mutual self-defence, which forces them to defer to another time the putting into practice of humanism. Death in the totalitarian regime is impersonal, just a mere means to an end for a governing regime. It was a logical consequence, a factor with which one reckoned and which bore rather an abstract character. The act of dying in itself was a technical detail, with no claim to interest; death as a factor in a logical equation had lost any intimate bodily feature. He regains all parts of himself he had to repress in order to serve the Party perfectly - the emotional, moral, spiritual and even intellectual parts of himself. On his deathbed, he contemplates the vastness of the universe and returns to the key questions of his youth - the meaning of suffering. The novel ends with Rubashov's utopian hopeful vision of a future in which collectivism and individualism, economic and spiritual growth merge, with a painful realization that that is the world he will never get to see and the darkness he is leaving behind in reality. What happened to these masses, to this people? For forty years it had been driven through the desert, with threats and promises, with imaginary terrors and imaginary rewards. But where was the Promised Land? Did there really exist any such goal for this wandering mankind? That was a question to which he would have liked an answer before it was too late. Moses had not been allowed to enter the land of promise either. But he had been allowed to see it, from the top of the mountain, spread at his feet. He, Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov, had not been taken to the top of a mountain; and wherever his eye looked, he saw nothing but desert and the darkness of night. If you like any of mentioned works, I highly recommend you try Koestler. I plead guilty to having followed sentimental impulses, and in so doing to have been led into contradiction with historical necessity. I have lent my ear to the laments of the sacrificed, and thus became deaf to the arguments which proved the necessity to sacrifice them. I plead guilty to having rated the question of guilt and innocence higher than that of utility and harmfulness. Finally, I plead guilty to having placed the idea of man above the idea of mankind. Diventa giornalista proprio in Medio Oriente. Dopo altre peripezie torna nuovamente in Francia, ma in quella occupata, e quindi lo tengono per qualche mese in un campo di detenzione. Poi lo liberano, ma rischia brutto, Petain collabora coi nazisti invasori: allora si arruola nella Legione Straniera e riesce a raggiungere Londra, dove si stabilisce definitivamente, prendendo anche la cittadinanza britannica. A dormire. The back of my copy of Darkness at Noon claims that it is 'one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it. It's almost never on the shelves in bookstores or libraries, and I rarely hear it discussed. I don't think it's taught in schools, at least in my part of the world. Perhaps with the collapse of the Soviet Union and the end of communism and the Cold War, the importance of the great revolutions of the 20th Century and their ensuing brutal authoritarian regimes is appearing less and less relevant to the current and future global political landscape. Maybe they are being interpreted as more of a political aberration - an anomaly, rather than an important and lasting historical trend. Stalin is long gone, taking the immediacy of Darkness at Noon with him. But this is a book to be viewed through a much wider lens. I will concede that Darkness at Noon certainly doesn't resonate as clearly with the current state of the world as does Nineteen Eighty-Four , with which it is often compared. But Darkness at Noon is nonetheless a wonderfully profound and important book. It can be compared to Orwell's novel not only for its vision of a totalitarian political state, but also for its penetrating insights into human nature and psychology. Koestler explores the nature and substance of conviction: how belief in an ideology can skew moral judgement and cause people to rationalise their actions within the ideological framework. He exposes logic as a dangerously unreliable tool - one that can be used to justify any course of action, given a sufficiently corrupt set of starting assumptions. He offers a glimpse into the means by which idealistic intentions can develop into totalitarian realities, and how ideology can propagate throughout the political ranks in a process that selects for proponents and perpetuates and reinforces itself. Although the tone of the writing itself may be somewhat simple and declarative, the execution of these ideas and themes within the narrative is expertly done. There is bleakness, but also humour in the writing. There is a close narrative voice that draws the reader by degrees into the mind of Rubashov. It is a slow untangling of a convoluted web of beliefs, actions and justifications. We observe the internal oscillation in perspective that both creates and dismisses crimes when actions align with or oppose a particular ideological position, and in the next moment we see the inversion of Rubashov's previous judgement when its axioms are called into question. This is a corrupted morality based on the perpetuation of the system, rather than on any real concept of right and wrong. At the core of Rubashov's story is the struggle of youth against age. Those who become old earn the wisdom to see the folly of their own youthful ideals, but they must now be judged by the young, whose values have been shaped by the systems that those very ideals put into place. There is a twisted irony to this perpetual struggle, and an inevitability which favors the side with energy, boldness and conviction, against that with patience, wisdom and reflection. Stalin may be gone, but human nature remains unchanged. Steven Godin. This just might be the first time I've come across a novel in which it has been translated into many other languages not from the original text but from the English translated version - making it a translation of a translation. I've no idea how this supposedly superior new translated version compares to the original because I didn't read it, and can only go on what was in front of me - which, I believe, is a masterpiece not in terms of plot, but of the human condition. While it isn't specified that the country here is the Soviet Union and that 'No. Now he finds himself arrested again, and through his old friend Ivanov - now an interrogator -is persuaded to confess to a series of questionable crimes against his own. While Ivanov is seen as a cold and distrustful person, he stills makes a genuine attempt to save his friend from the death penalty. It's only when the harder, more brutal interrogator Gletkin enters the scene, that the closer examination of Rubashov highlights that his agreed last service to the party confession was more to do with the eye-stinging bright lights and exhausted sleep deprived state of mind that anything else. Told with horrifying realism, this compelling work drills home what life was really like for millions stuck under repressive rule, and how the Party began to consume its own. While there is nothing wrong with the dialogue - which feels genuine in terms of time and place - it was the tension driven internal monologues that truly stuck in my mind. Apparently one of Orwell's faves - now I can see why. We do not find it that hard to kill. To admit that we have killed for a lie can be much harder. He is an Old Bolshevik, a genuine believer in the ideas of Communism and the final victory of the revolution. The book takes us to The Soviet Union under Stalin, to the times when the notorious Moscow trials against prominent communists were in full swing. Those trials were open to the public and even foreign journalists were allowed. Many could not understand why those respected old Bolsheviks were making harrowing confessions. Were they tortured, blackmailed, or threatened another way? They might be afraid for their family members. Were they drugged? Perhaps disguised actors played the role of the defendants. Among those who were perplexed and wanted to know the explanations for their conduct was the author. By writing this story and inventing a fictional character, he attempted to offer his interpretation of the reasons why some of the accused Bolsheviks agreed to expose themselves to humiliation and disgrace. We are invited to examine the conscience of the Old Bolshevik during the darkest times of his life. After being arrested, he is placed in solitary confinement. He knows too well what is to come. In his single cell, he glances back on his eventful life. Rubashov spent many years serving the revolutionary ideals. On this path, he betrayed those who trusted him. He even sacrificed the woman with whom he had a relationship only to save himself and continue to be useful to the Party. Ultimately, he used his talents to drown the country in a state of terror and fear. Now he himself is arrested and accused of high treason. Like many other old Bolsheviks, he is accused of intending to murder 'Number One. Rubashov thinks in terms of totalitarian ideas - the end justifies the means. These words belong to one of his jailors. Rubashov has very few arguments to fend them off. He faces a moral dilemma. He has been brought to the situation when he must decide between two options. He may comply, say what the Party wants him to be saying, or he may refuse to 'cooperate. That might be too much to swallow. The reason he casts aside the principles of human ethics has always been the infallibility of the Party. It had to have been true and has to remain true. He could not be wrong, could he? Now there is no way back for him. Ironically, if Rubashov wants to stay in the game, he needs to admit that the absurd criminal charges against him are true. They were too deeply entangled in their own past, caught in the web they had spun themselves, according to the laws of their own twisted ethics and twisted logic; they were all guilty, although not of those deeds of which they accused themselves. To sum up, Koestler probes into the nature of totalitarianism and human behavior under extreme conditions. The writing is dense but engaging. Michael Finocchiaro. Author 3 books 5, followers. Darkness at Noon is a haunting picture of life in the darkest era of Stalinist Russia inside a political prison. The protagonist is Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested and tried for treason by the government that he helped create. Vividly realistic, Koestler paints the life of Rubashov in his prison cell, his wall-tapping conversations with other inmates, his memories of life outside and some of the crimes he committed and the rationalizations for them, as well as his confrontation with his jailers - the ill-fated former friend Ivanov, and the brutish and violent neanderthal Gletkin of the starched sleeves and 'harsh' methods. The story moves rather quickly and the reader is drawn into the story almost immediately with the difficulty in positioning with respect to Rubashov - he is a victim of an injustice and we want to feel sorry for him and yet he himself has innocent blood on his hands, lots of blood from people he threw overboard in the system knowing it meant the victims' certain death so he is also repulsive. This ambiguity makes the book an engaging read cover to cover. As many countries shift towards authoritarian regimes, this is a timely book to read about the harsh realities for those who are not elites and even those elites who fall out of favor politically and are flattened by the machine of the state. A must. Oh, how I do love those Russians! Plus I'm hoping reading this will make me feel better about my own life, which lately feels like a grim, freezing Stalinist dystopia of gray hopeless days. It could be worse, right? MUCH bigger priority than getting work done, wouldn't you say? Well, so, okay, this book was a little bit bleak. Yeah, not the feel-good date novel of the year, not this one! Darkness at Noon conveys the brutality and claustrophobia of the prison cell and interrogation room, and you kind of do feel like you're there, toothache and hunger and all, and okay let's be honest: it isn't much fun. This story, such as it is, covers the madcap adventures of one Mr. Rubashov, a revolutionary who is in the process of being purged by the vaguely Stalinesque 'Number One,' leader of the Party that Rubashov helped to create. Now, if you think this sounds reminiscent of the delightful s television show The Prisoner, think again! Actually, I bet whoever dreamed up The Prisoner had read this book a few times But don't get excited. There are no bicycles, womb chairs, or hot mod girls in striped shirts here. There is only the cell, and the Party, and Rubashov's thoughts -- oh, and his pince-nez, and the tapping guy next door, and a few tortured memories This was a helpful book for a girl who grew up in Berkeley, California, where they put red diapers on their babies and give the children Che Guevara dolls to play with Barbie's considered counter-revolutionary. As a good homegrown lefty, I've always been a bit baffled by the Red Scare, and why exactly people get soooooo hysterical about communism. I mean, obviously I understand why people get so freaked out about Stalin, but I mean like communism and all that sort of thing more generally I think I do get a bit more what it is that freaky people like Ayn Rand or whoever are reacting against: it's this idea of subordinating one's self -- in this book, the first-person singular pronoun is called a 'grammatical fiction' -- in service of a presumed 'greater good,' and it's about the deeply unpleasant places one arrives at in following that line of thought to its logical conclusion. I didn't love this book, but I thought it was successful at conveying this idea well through the form of the novel. The reader is in Rubashov's head -- truly stuck just with him and his thoughts while he sits in solitary confinement awaiting his torture and death -- and what works well here is that disorienting experience of occupying the person of an individual who's in denial of his and everyone else's own individual personhood. Koestler's really emphasized the individuality and humanity of all the book's characters -- even minor ones -- in a way that makes them each distinctive and memorable, and this heightens the sense that there is something seriously wrong with Rubashov's world view. You get or I got the eerie feeling of this empty character who's hollowed himself out into a sort of vessel for the Party, but who still retains some sense of individual humanity he suddenly experiences while confronting death. Then I think that there's some trick there on the reader when this soulless, unsympathetic character begins experiencing cognitive dissonance in confronting his own sense of individual humanity, and the reader sort of gets sucked along after him, even if we started out ahead On the one hand, this book is agitprop, and on the other, it's a pretty decent novel I mean, there really isn't a novel here without the political stuff, and I sort of feel like I took two main things away from this. First, Darkness at Noon is not just about Stalin but is a specific critique of the left which says that at its extreme, this political philosophy crushes the individual in service of Humanity. Okay, so this is obvious, overly rehearsed stuff, as is its counterpart that the right's extreme crushes Humanity in service of the individual. Blah blah blah blah, who cares, right? I mean, I do. But it's not news. When you turn out the lights, those colors and distinctions go away, and then there you are, in a dark cell. Torture and murder by the state certainly didn't start with Stalin or end with -- ahem -- any recent administrations, and personally if I were arrested and tortured, I wouldn't be too overly concerned with the political nuances of the state doing it. I take Darkness at Noon to be saying, on some level, that the state is just scary. Politics is dangerous, because it leads to this construction of 'ends' and 'means,' and that just doesn't usually go anywhere good. I mean, therein lies the road to extraordinary rendition via unmarked planes to Syria or whatever This book got me thinking about a troubling phenomenon I've always been stuck on, which is how so many activists and such with lovely leftist politics I don't really know any right-wing activists, so I can't speak on that very often treat the individuals in their lives like total shit. I mean, clearly not all, but enough to be noticeable, and I've always really wondered about that. My difficulty dealing with really political people on a personal level is one major reason why I'm not more politically active myself, and this book fed into my bias about that. Can most people only really focus on either the individual in the foreground or humanity in the background? Do we lack the lens to see both clearly at the same time? I think Koestler's saying people can't, or at least, people can't in a totalitarian communist state, which is perhaps not a point that needs much belaboring. Anyway, this was a pretty good book, and I'm glad that I read it. While reading Kiss of the Spider Woman afterwards, I couldn't stop drawing parallels between Valentin and Rubashov, and thinking about how much happier Rubashov could have been if only they'd given him a gay cinophile for a cellmate Alas, it was not to be. By the way, apparently Bill Clinton commented during the whole Lewinsky shitshow that he felt like Rubashov in Darkness at Noon, which to me seems like a very shocking and self-indicting statement, considering the details of the novel here's a little article about that. Definitely one of the greatest novels of the 20th century. I am embarrassed, frankly, that I'm 37 and reading this only now. This is a work I should have read in high school, then in college, then again almost every year since. Standing guard silently behind greats like Orwell and Hitchens is Arthur Koestler. Rubashov is one of the best-realized characters and Darkness at Noon is a near-perfect novel. Dostoevsky would have killed Koestler with an axe, and Tolstoy would have pushed his ass in front of a train just to have stolen this one piece. I inherited a copy of this book from my dad, but it had sat on my shelves for many years, mainly because I felt I had read enough about the Stalinist show trials and the Great Terror. Darkness at Noon completely deserves its reputation as a 20th century classic. The main character, Rubashov, is a famous old Bolshevik, one of the leaders of the Revolution, and a hero of the Civil War. The novel is the story of his arrest and interrogation, and his reflections on the society he helped to create. There can be no room for sentiment in the fight to protect the sacred revolution, and Rubashov has never shown any - he has betrayed friends and colleagues many times. The end justifies the means - any means. Now, in the novel, it is Rubashov himself who finds himself in the role of the individual who must be sacrificed for the good of the cause. In his interrogations his own writings are quoted back to him, and he recognises the force of the arguments they use. One of his principal interrogators is a younger man, brought up within the new morality that Rubashov and his comrades have created. He is utterly without sentiment. The situation of one man — a foreign communist - was both touching and believable. Much of the novel involves philosophical debate between Rubashov and his captors. Other parts are very dramatic. I thought the ending was superb, absolutely superb. Author 38 books To protect other comrades from the possibility of being seduced into thought-crime, the review has now been removed from the community area. Amazon has also offered Not a course of reeducation. Their representatives arrived promptly at 4 am yesterday morning, and courteously but firmly helped Not to understand her dialectical misconceptions. Since her reeducation course, Comrade Not's behavior has been much improved. She has not written any more ideologically dubious posts, but sits in front of the TV, watching Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and weeping quietly. It is truly a privilege to count myself a member of the Glorious Amazon Online Republic of Goodreads. Jon Nakapalau. Nicholas Rubashov is about to find out that sometimes it doesn't even take six lines This is most appropriately classified as an autobiographical novel. In came his critique--Darkness at Noon--a novel sharply critical of Communism. Both the author and the central protagonist of the novel, Rubashov, begin with a strong belief in Communism. Both become disillusioned. Rubashov, brimming with the merits and ideals of Communism, has dedicated his life to the Party. Now, he is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the very same Party he had so fervently worked to establish. I appreciate that the book is not filled with excruciating depiction of physical abuse. The psychological torture, as depicted in the book, is adequate. Sleep deprivation, blazing lights, extended interrogations, threats and mock killings. Rubashov is confined to an isolation cell, but prisoners have a means of communicating by tapping. Tension inexorably mounts in the book. The beginning is confusing. The events spoken of are true, but in that they are described in generic terms, confusion arises. The setting is Russia during the Great Purge, and yet Russia is never once mentioned! As you come to understand how the story is told, the confusion clears. How does the story end? It ends as it must end, as it should end. The audiobook I listened to is narrated by Frank Muller. At the beginning I disliked it immensely. As I continued, I grew accustomed to his manner of speaking. By the end it felt OK, but I never grew to like it. I have thus given the audio performance two stars. First, the speed increases more and more and more. Then he concludes the sentence by drawing out the end interminably, with a long drawn out whisper. This drove me nuts. It is more prominent at the beginning than at the end of the audiobook. I do not like narrators to artificially exaggerate suspense. Hossein Bayat. I need reminders from time to time, like those in this novel, of psychological and moral atrocities, of the hyper-viciousness of a pack lead by unstable maniacs and sociopaths. Darkness at Noon is a chilling novel about Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, an old Bolshevik, formerly Commissar of the People, and a leader in the Russian REVolution, who is imprisoned during Stalin's purges after he speaks out against the tyranny of his former comrades. These former comrades torture Rubashov and break him psychologically until he confesses to 'crimes' he did not commit. A powerful political classic. This book is oddly relevant to the current political climate of our world. As I have been trying my best to escape that over the past few years, maybe this book was not the best one to read right now! However, it is a very interesting and thought-provoking book with the theater of politics at its core. Friends become enemies and enemies become friends all depending on which leader is saying what is right and what is wrong at the time. We watch one of the fathers of a political philosophy become one of its victims as a new rank of ideas comes to power. In the process, he becomes jailed with the very people he was responsible for putting there. Really it is all just one big chess match where nothing has really changed except for perceptions and which people decide which ideas are going to be executed. It would almost be funny if it is not so scary in its consequences. Darkness at Noon is one of the classics of anti-totalitarian literature, often mentioned alongside novels such as Brave New World and While both these novels are fictions based on an idea of a totalitarian state, Darkness at Noon is a clear allegory of Soviet Russia during the 's - the time of the Moscow show trials and the Great Purge. Although the author openly acknowledges this in the preface, the country in which the book is set is never named - though he includes specific details regarding it, so there never is any doubt. Character are less people than ideas and themes they represent - the main protagonist, Rubashov, is an amalgamation of all of the Old Bolsheviks who were persecuted by Stalin in the 30's. The plot focuses on Rubashov's imprisonment in an unnamed facility, his interaction with fellow inmates and ongoing interrogation. Koestler does a great job with presenting a convincing portrait of a man trying to endure oppression and isolation - he apparently drew inspiration from his own experiences from Spain, where he was imprisoned by Franco's forces during the civil war. It is interesting to note that contrary to many protagonists of anti-totalitarian novels, Rubashov is not an ordinary and innocent citizen persecuted by the overwhelming regime - he is one of the people who have actively participated in bringing this very regime into being, causing suffering and misery for fellow citizens along the way. This question begins to haunt Rubashov - what, exactly, is he fighting for? What is the weight of individual human life when measured against a possibility of prosperity and contentment for generations to come? Can we sacrifice tens, thousands and even millions of such lives if we will ultimately eliminate suffering for all in the future? Does the nobility of the goal excuse the means used to obtain it, and sacrifices required by it? While we might sympathize with Rubashov because of how he is treated and the conditions that he is in, we must also remember that he is reaping exactly what he has sown with his own hands - something that he begins to understand and ultimately accept throughout the novel. It is also important to see the book in its historical context. At the time of publication , it was not uncommon to find many foreigners who were sympathetic to Stalin and his rule of the Soviet Union, praising his achievements of industrializing the country and bettering life for his people - and either ignoring what reports there were of his tyranny, or excusing them as historically inevitable. One of the more famous examples is the American journalist and correspondent for the New York Times Walter Duranty, who in the 's not only tried to justify Stalin's government but openly denounced in his reporting that any famine was taking place in the Ukraine - a result of Stalin's policy of collectivizing agriculture, which took several million lives in an area with some of the world's richest farmland. Many other foreigners - both intellectuals who never worked physically in their life, and laborers who never rested - romanticized the Soviet Union, in which they saw hope for a real and viable alternative to the unfair capitalist order - their memories of the Great Depression were still fresh and strong - but, unlike Duranty, they believed in the ideas of fairness, equality and prosperity for all, which the Soviet government claimed to stand for; as they learned of how a real revolution was hijacked and twisted into a totalitarian nightmare, they denounced it. Walter Duranty was fully aware of the fact that hunger victims could have extended well into millions, but nonetheless continued to report that there was no famine - did he believe in the Soviet vision? Did he believe that Stalin's actions were justified by what he claimed to be his intent - an utopia? Inexplicably, one can find people with views very similar to his decades after Stalin's policy was proven to be a deadly failure, ready to defend him and excuse his actions. What are they defending? A paradise which never arrived? Koehler's book has the distinction of being probably the first book of fiction to address Stalin's brand of totalitarianism almost by name - but in historical context it puts it slightly below novels and Brave New World , as it is inseparably tied to one particular regime and period in history which has since been analyzed by countless scholars - while both Orwell and Huxley had visions of future for the entire world. Nothing is worse in prison than the consciousness of one's innocence; it prevents acclimatization and undermines one's morale Comrade Rubashov has been arrested. But this is nothing. He's been around this block before. He knows, for instance, this truth about the consciousness of innocence - as the unseen man in the neighboring cell clearly does not. The unseen man who taps at the pipe It's a tap-tap-tap one indulges, but fails to politically profit by. Koestler's classic, Darkness at Noon , follows the aging Rubashov through the days and nights of this imprisonment. His time on the political stage is coming to a close. His peers within the regime, once lions of Communist might, have been picked off by the younger cubs of the Revolutionary State. Philosophical Neanderthals, he calls them, and yet they are the future. And in the weeks that follow we will watch him come to terms with this reality in the same manner, it has long been suspected, Arthur Koestler was forced to come to terms with his own socialist past. It is a stark and unforgiving light he shines on Communist Party politics. When coupled with the blinding pain of a man whose incarceration shifts, splits and mutates through the physical, the intellectual, the emotional Written in the 's as Stalin purged the previous politburo members, Darkness at Noon offers a taste of the dark dreary Soviet world where the truth changes depending on who is now in power. In a visionary passage, there is talk about how the books were purged from the library and how the job would only be complete if they had taken the old newspapers and changed the news of the day. Other passages are eerie as well as the individual will is subordinated to the will of the party, whatever that will presently is. For those who think that socialism is paradise, this story is an abrupt awakening. Ultimately it may start out as well-meaning but it becomes all about power. The protagonist has been a party member his whole life, once important, now that tastes has changed, he is accused of being a traitor. And he is Imprisoned along with thousands of other political prisoners, each one by one walked down the hall to confess their sins before execution. Not a normal structured novel. It traces the descent from party boss to prisoner to turncoat to conviction. Dark, haunting, a society been turned upside down. Republished with a new translation based on the original newly discovered manuscript. A classic that is being rediscovered. A masterpiece of world literature, this novel takes a necessary look at Soviet, particularly Stalinist totalitarianism. The little father of the people has killed or had killed more men than Hitler, a sad record that does not forgive the previous one. Based on facts extracted from reality, this novel explains the lack of value of man in totalitarian systems that annihilate him in the name of a so-called cause, which is often none other than the priority of their interests. Dave Russell. At the end of Winston Smith asks O'Brien why the party acts the way it does. His answer always pissed me off: 'Power for power's sake. That's a tautological cop out. It's like Orwell was content to warn us about what a totalitarian state would look like without exploring more deeply why it got there. Thanks George. Darkness at Noon explores this question more fully and in a more honest way. According to Koestler the Soviets were basically a bunch of Raskolnikovs. They believed it right to commit atrocious acts in the name of an idea, namely scientific socialism. They believed the people of their own time would not accept this idea because they have been shaped by socioeconomic conditions to consider morality which leads inevitably to the status quo, which is slavery but future generations would see the rightness of their acts. Rubashov, the protagonist, can't see a middle way between considerations of decency and morality and the logic and reason of the Revolution, so he must choose either to betray his principles or go along with his own physical destruction. This is a much more interesting situation than what we're given in , with its shallow Manichean setup. Was reading this earlier and chatting with Ted about it. He asked me how it was, and I said that I was struggling through it. Can it be just the mood? A bit of digging and I think I got it. I think the mood is similar to the slow, moving-through-molasses quality I was experiencing with The Grapes of Wrath. The things contained in the book are not really a removed fictional adventure for me. I am familiar with the sentiments and I know people in real life that it applies to. With the Steinbeck novel, it was my own experience. With this one, it is the experience of parents, family, and native country folk. But the rest holds up. Kangaroo courts. Sham hearings. Executions at will and forced confessions under duress, after months of psychological and physical torture. But important. And necessary. Arthur Koestler, through this tale, does a fine job explaining the sacrifices, accompanied with labyrinthine lies, necessary to sustain and propel a totalitarian regime. This might all feel ethereally remote, until, one day, you or I are sacrificed, at which point all becomes both immediate and very much lost. Living, as I do, in a nation with the highest incarceration rate per capita, it appears necessary sacrifice may be required even in a cherished democracy, a thought I believe Michel Foucault promoted in Discipline and Punish. While much has been written regarding perverse totalitarian environments, Mr. Koestler published his work at the outbreak of the Second World War, which, I think, makes him a groundbreaking author. More reviews and ratings. Join the discussion. Can't find what you're looking for? Help center.

Darkness at Noon

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