Darkness at Noon (, ) is a novel by Austrian-Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. 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.
The novel is set between 1938 and 1940, after the Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Despite being based on real events, the novel does not name either Russia or the Soviets, and tends to use generic terms to describe people and organizations; for example, the Soviet government is referred to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is referred to as "the Dictatorship". Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with Bolshevism, Stalinism, and the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II.
In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, even though Koestler wrote it in German. This is because the German-language version was lost at the time, and the novel was known only from an English translation.
Background Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon as the second part of a trilogy: the first volume was The Gladiators (1939), first published in Hungarian. It was a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel was Arrival and Departure (1943), about a refugee during World War II. Koestler, who was by then living in London, rewrote that novel in English after the original German version had been lost.
Darkness at Noon, which Koestler wrote in German, was begun while he was living in Paris and, as he describes in the first chapter of his memoir Scum of the Earth, was completed in the summer of 1939, just outside the village of Belvédère in the Alpes-Maritimes where he was staying with his companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who translated it into English while she was living with him. For decades the German text was lost and therefore not published. It was thought to have been lost during the escape of Koestler and Hardy from Paris in May 1940, just before the German occupation of France. However, a copy had been sent to Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht. Rupert Hart-Davis, Koestler's editor at Jonathan Cape in London had misgivings about the English text but agreed to publish it when a request to Oprecht for his copy went unanswered. At Hart-Davis' prompting, and unable to reach Koestler, Hardy changed the title from The Vicious Circle to Darkness at Noon. The new title is a reference to : "They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night"—a description of the moral dilemmas faced by the book's protagonist, as well as Koestler's own escape from the Nazis.
In August 2015, Oprecht's copy was identified in a Zurich library by a doctoral candidate of the University of Kassel."Long missing original manuscript of the novel "Darkness at Noon" by Koestler has been found" . Press release by the University of Kassel, 10 August 2015. The original German manuscript was published as Sonnenfinsternis (Solar Eclipse) in May 2018 by Elsinor Verlag. An English translation of the newfound text, retaining the original English title Darkness at Noon, was published in 2019.After 80 years, Darkness at Noon's original text is finally translated The Guardian, 2019.
In his introduction to the 2019 translation, Koestler biographer Michael Scammell wrote that a fresh translation was desirable because Hardy's, although "serving the novel well for over seven decades, had difficulties. According to Scammell, "[Hardy] 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. ... The text she worked on was not quite final either. ... 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." Scammell writes that Philip Boehm "proved the ideal choice for the job"."The Eerily Prescient Lessons of Darkness at Noon"
In his autobiographical The Invisible Writing (1954), Koestler stated that he finished Darkness at Noon in April 1940, after many troublesome months of 1939, caused mainly by financial difficulties and the later outbreak of World War II. Koestler observed:
Koestler then describes the unfolding of what he calls 'Kafkaesque events' in his life; spending four months in the concentration camp in the Pyrenees and being released in January 1940, only to be continuously harassed by the police. "During the next three months I finished the novel in the hours snatched between interrogations and searches of my flat, in the constant fear that I would be arrested again and the manuscript of Darkness at Noon confiscated". After Hardy mailed her translation to London in May 1940, she fled to London. Meanwhile, Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted it in North Africa, and made his way to Portugal.Arthur and Cynthia Koestler, Stranger on the Square, edited by Harold Harris, London: Hutchinson, 1984, pp. 20–22. Waiting in Lisbon for passage to Great Britain, Koestler heard a false report that the ship taking Hardy to England had been torpedoed and all persons lost (along with his only manuscript); he attempted suicide.A&C Koestler (1984), pp. 20–22Anne Applebaum, "Did the Death of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?" Review of Michael Scammell, Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic, in The New York Review of Books (11 Feb. 2010), reprinted in Huffington Post (28 Mar. 2010, updated 25 May 2011) He wrote about this incident in Scum of the Earth (1941), his memoir of that period. Koestler finally arrived in London, and the book was published there in early 1941.
Setting Darkness at Noon is an allegory set in the USSR (not named) during the 1938 purges as Stalin consolidated his dictatorship by eliminating potential rivals within the Communist Party: the military and the professionals. None of this is identified explicitly in the book. Most of the novel occurs within an unnamed prison and in the recollections of the main character, Rubashov. Koestler drew on the experience of being imprisoned by Francisco Franco's officials during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his memoir, Dialogue with Death. He was kept in solitary confinement and expected to be executed. He was permitted to walk in the courtyard in the company of other prisoners. Though he was not beaten, he believed that other prisoners were.
Characters The main character is Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, a man in his fifties whose character is based on "a number of men who were the victims of the so-called Moscow trials", several of whom "were personally known to the author". Rubashov is a stand-in for the Old Bolsheviks as a group, and Koestler uses him to explore their actions at the 1938 Moscow show trials. Secondary characters include some fellow prisoners: No. 402 is a Tsarist army officer and veteran inmate,Koestler (1941), Darkness, p. 27. with an archaic sense of personal honor, as Rubashov would consider it. "Rip Van Winkle", an old revolutionary demoralised and apparently driven to madness by 20 years of solitary confinement and further imprisonment.Koestler (1941), Darkness, pp. 125–126. "Harelip" (), who "sends his greetings" to Rubashov, but insists on keeping his name secret.Koestler (1941), Darkness, p. 57.
Two other secondary characters never make a direct appearance but are mentioned frequently: Number One (), representing Joseph Stalin, dictator of the USSR. He is depicted in a widely disseminated photograph, a "well-known color print that hung over every bed or sideboard in the country and stared at people with its frozen eyes".Koestler (1941), Darkness, p. 15. Old Bolsheviks. They are represented by an image in his "mind's eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party", in which they sat "at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees, bearded and earnest".Koestler (1941), Darkness, p. 59
Rubashov has two interrogators: Ivanov, a comrade from the civil war and old friend. Gletkin, a young man characterised by starching his uniform so that it "cracks and groans" whenever he moves.Koestler (1941), Darkness, pp. 189, 212.
Character described in flashbacks and in the third interrogation: Orlova, Rubashov's secretary and lover.
Plot summary
Structure Darkness at Noon is divided into four parts: The First Hearing, The Second Hearing, The Third Hearing, and The Grammatical Fiction. In the original English translation, Koestler's word that Hardy translated as "Hearing" was "Verhör". In the 2019 translation, Boehm translated it as "Interrogation". In his introduction to that translation, Michael Scammell writes that "hearing" made the Soviet and Nazi "regimes look somewhat softer and more civilized than they really were".
The First Hearing The line "Nobody can rule guiltlessly", by Louis Antoine de Saint-Just, appears as the epigraph. The action begins with Rubashov's arrest in the middle of the night by two men from the secret police (in the USSR, this would be the NKVD). When they came for Rubashov they woke him from a recurring dream, a replay of the first time he was arrested by the Gestapo. One of the men is about Rubashov's age, the other is somewhat younger. The older man is formal and courteous, the younger is brutal.Koestler (1941), Darkness, pp. 9–10.
Imprisoned, Rubashov is at first relieved to be finished with the anxiety of dread during mass arrests. He is expecting to be kept in solitary confinement until he is shot. He begins to communicate with No. 402, the man in the adjacent cell, by using a tap code. Unlike Rubashov, No. 402 is not an intellectual but rather a Tsarist army officer, who hates communists. Their relationship begins on a sour note as No. 402 expresses delight at Rubashov's political misfortune; however, No. 402 has non-political urges too, and he pleads for Rubashov to give him details about the last time he slept with a woman. Rubashov humours him and No. 402 warms up to his political rival. The two grow closer over time and exchange information about the prison and its inmates.Koestler (1941), Darkness, pp. 25–30
Rubashov thinks of the Old Bolsheviks, Number One, and the Marxist interpretation of history. Throughout the novel, Rubashov, Ivanov, and Gletkin speculate about historical processes and how individuals and groups are affected by them. Each hopes that, no matter how vile his actions may seem to their contemporaries, history will eventually absolve them. This is the faith that makes the abuses of the regime tolerable as the men consider the suffering of a few thousand, or a few million people against the happiness of future generations. They believe that gaining the socialist utopia, which they believe is possible, will cause the imposed suffering to be forgiven.