Darkness at Noon Hardcover - 2015

by Arthur Koestler

About this book

Darkness at Noon, by Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler, 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 understood as an allegory to the USSR in 1938, the Great Purge, and the Moscow Trials. However, the text never mentions the Soviet Union or Russia (just “Country of the Revolution” and “Over There”) or Joseph Stalin (only “Number One,” a menacing dictator). Perhaps the lack of specific references is Koestler’s way of making the story seem more universal, but it’s clear he has in mind actual places, people, and events.

Koestler was actually a proponent of Marxism-Leninism until Stalin’s 1938 Purge and the signing of the Nazi-Soviet pact. Afterwards, he edited an anti-Hitler, anti-Stalin newspaper. Koestler wrote the novel in German while living in Paris, from where he escaped in 1940 just before the Nazi troops arrived. Darkness at Noon owes its publication to the decision of sculptor Daphne Hardy, Koestler’s lover in Paris, to translate the text into English before she herself escaped.

Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon as the second part of a trilogy; the first volume is The Gladiators (1939), first published in Hungarian. It is a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel is Arrival and Departure (1943), about a refugee during World War II. By then living in London, Koestler wrote the third in English.

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. Sidney Kingsley adapted it for Broadway in 1951.

From the publisher

Arthur Koestler's timeless classic, Darkness at Noon, first published in 1941, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Soviet revolutionary who is imprisoned and tortured under Stalin's rule. Of all of Arthur Koestler's works, none demonstrates more vividly his narrative power and uncompromising clarity of vision than this seminal work of twentieth century literature. "Darkness at Noon is the sort of novel that transcends ordinary limitations...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling, and with such persuasive simplicity" (The New York Times, 1941). Set during Stalin's Moscow show trials of the 1930s, Darkness at Noon is an unforgettable portrait of an aging revolutionary, Nicholas Rubashov, who is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the very Party to which he has dedicated his life. As the pressure increases to confess to committing preposterous crimes, he re-lives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary agony, Darkness at Noon asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past, but for the perilous present. It is, as the Times Literary Supplement has declared, "A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships, and at the same time a tense and subtly intellectualized drama."

First Edition Identification

Jonathan Cape published the first English edition of Darkness at Noon — translated by Daphne Hardy — in London in 1940.

Details

Title Darkness at Noon
Author Arthur Koestler
Binding Hardcover
Edition Reissue
Pages 288
Volumes 1
Language ENG
Publisher Scribner Book Company
Date 2015-01
ISBN 9781476785554 / 1476785554
Weight 0.9 lbs (0.41 kg)
Dimensions 8.6 x 5.8 x 0.9 in (21.84 x 14.73 x 2.29 cm)
Library of Congress subjects Legal stories, Historical fiction
Dewey Decimal Code FIC

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