Darkness at Noon
Darkness at Noon (German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by 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 helped to create.
For other uses, see Darkness at Noon (disambiguation).Author
The novel is set between 1938 and 1940, after the Stalinist 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 the Bolshevik ideology 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.
Setting[edit]
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.
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".[12] Rubashov is a stand-in for the Old Bolsheviks as a group,[13] and Koestler uses him to explore their actions at the 1938 Moscow Show Trials.[14][15]
Secondary characters include some fellow prisoners:
Two other secondary characters never make a direct appearance but are mentioned frequently:
Rubashov has two interrogators:
Character described in flashbacks and in the third interrogation:
Adaptations[edit]
The novel was adapted as a stage play by Sidney Kingsley circa 1950, which was made into a 1955 television production on the American television series Producer’s Showcase.
Influence and legacy[edit]
Writers interested in the political struggles of the time followed Koestler and other Europeans closely. Orwell wrote, "Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin, Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks".[34] In 1944, Orwell thought that the best political writing in English was being done by Europeans and other non-native British. His essay on Koestler discussed Darkness at Noon.[35] Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, about the Spanish Civil War, sold poorly; he decided after reviewing Darkness at Noon that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism, and wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.[31] When reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Mizener said that Orwell drew on his feelings about Koestler's handling of Rubashov's confession when he wrote his extended section of the conversion of Winston Smith.[36]
In 1954, at the end of a long government inquiry and a show trial, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, the former high-ranking Romanian Communist Party member and government official, was sentenced to death in Romania.[37][38] According to his collaborator Belu Zilber, Pătrăşcanu read Darkness at Noon in Paris while envoy to the 1946 Peace Conference, and took the book back to Romania.[37][38]
Both American and European communists considered Darkness at Noon to be anti-Stalinist and anti-USSR. In the 1940s, numerous scriptwriters in Hollywood were still communists, generally having been attracted to the party during the 1930s. According to Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley in an article published in 2000, the communists considered Koestler's novel important enough to prevent its being adapted for movies; the writer Dalton Trumbo "bragged" about his success in that to the newspaper The Worker.[39]
U.S. Navy admiral James Stockdale used the novel's title as a code to his wife and the U.S. government to fool his North Vietnamese captors' censors when he wrote as a POW during the Vietnam War. He signaled the torture of American POW's by communist North Vietnam: "One thinks of Vietnam as a tropical country, but in January the rains came, and there was cold and darkness, even at noon." His wife contacted U.S. Naval Intelligence and Stockdale confirmed in code in other letters that they were being tortured.[40]
At the height of the media attention during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly referred to Koestler's novel, telling an aide "I feel like a character in the novel Darkness at Noon" and "I am surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out."[41]
The novel is of special interest to historians of British propaganda, due to the heavy financial support that the novel secretly received from the Information Research Department (IRD), a covert branch of the UK Foreign Office dedicated to disinformation, pro-colonial, and anti-communist propaganda.[42][43] The IRD bought thousands of copies to inflate sales statistics, and also used British embassies to translate and distribute the novel to be used as Cold War propaganda.[44][45][46]