Product Description

N. S. Rubashov, an old guard Communist, falls victim to an unnamed government; with outstanding psychological insight, Koestler traces his story through arrest, imprisonment and trail in a classic novel which, when first published, famously drew attention to the nature of Stalin's regime.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #20119 in Books
• Published on: 1994-12-01
• Original language: English
• Binding: Paperback
• 224 pages

From the Publisher
'One of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it' New Statesman

About the Author
Arthur Koestler:
Arthur Koestler was born in Budapest in 1905. He attended the university of Vienna before working as a foreign correspondent in the Middle East, Berlin and Paris. For six years he was an active member of the Communist Party, and was captured by Franco in the Spanish Civil War. In 1940 he came to England. He died in 1983 by suicide, having frequently expressed a belief in the right to euthanasia.

Customer Reviews

A book about death
"Darkness at Noon" describes the last days of Rubashov, a former communist party official in an unnamed regime. While waiting for execution, he kills time tapping out coded messages through the walls to fellow inmates, gets interrogated periodically by a former colleague and reminisces about some past experiences.

Accompanying this character on his final steps towards death, the novel is a powerful and terrifying meditation on how this experience feels and what it means - to Rubashov himself, to Koestler's audience and to the world at large. Is he a traitor to the regime or a convenient scapegoat? Will the regime benefit from his death? If it does, does that make death worthwhile? Does his death mean anything at all?

Koestler's answer to this final question is a resounding and crushing 'no' but there is something awe-inspiring and ultimately uplifting about the nihilistic finale, and the journey there is thoroughly absorbing.

"The end justifies the means" ??? :(
"The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real. The life of the man N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscu Trials".That is part of the dedicatory that Koestler wrote for his book, "Darkness at noon".

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was a person that believed in the progress that Communism was supposed to bring, but that became disillusioned in the way in which that dream was being carried out in the URSS. He wrote many books that give expression to his feelings of disenchantment, but "Darkness at noon" is probably the most popular one.

Not overly long, and very easy to read, this book is the story of Rubashov, an old communist who took part in the revolution and who is very loyal to the "Cause". Strangely enough, he is accused of treason, and taken to jail, where he must face harsh interrogatories. While he is in jail, Rubashov experiences flashbacks that allow us to know more about him, and the things he did due to his devotion to the Party. He betrayed people he loved, and those he appreciated, for no other reason than obedience to the Party and fear of going to jail.

We can have an idea of Rubashov's feelings and ideas all throughout his ordeal thanks to the fact that "Darkness at noon" is written in the first person. After a while, we are Rubashov, and like him we are surprised, outraged, desperate and ultimately resigned to our luck.

In the beginning, Rubashov says that he isn't a traitor and that he hasn't done the things he is accused of. But slowly our main character starts to come to terms with the idea that the truth of the accusation isn't really important, what matters is to serve the country. And if the leader (Number one) says he is to be blamed, he must have done something....

The prisioner writes a diary, where he dwells upon the nature of men, and politics. He thinks that after the revolution he defended so passionately, an individual is defined merely as "a multitude of one million divided by one million". The individual doesn't matter because only the "Cause" matters. Regarding politics, he concludes that at the end only one thing is clear: "the end justifies the means". Is it any surprise, then, that the tone that pervades this book is so gloomy?.

On the whole, I highly recommend "Darkness at noon" to all of you, for two reasons. To start with, it is a literary masterpiece, beautifully written and accessible to the average reader. Secondly, and more important, it also shows us once again that every attempt to forget that the end doesn't justifies the means ends in a nightmare.

Belen Alcat

More illuminating than it sounds
Written in 1940, this novel reflects the kind of pessimism which followed the post-revolutionary Soviet period and with which we're now familiar. Koestler, himself only recently released from one of Franco's jails where he was imprisoned under sentence of death, builds his story around Rubashov whom we join at the point of his arrest on the sinister-sounding charge of "political divergences".

As one of the few remaining fathers of the revolution Rubashov knows better than most what lies in store for him at the hands of the new generation of brutal leaders. His downfall was as inevitable as the falling away of faith in the system which preceded it. There was a time when his belief in the power of the revolutionaries to alter irrevocably the course of history was unshakeable so much so that he himself has been the perpetrator of serious crimes, the memory of which now haunts him in his cell.

Because of that he makes an unlikely hero, but nonetheless the reader cannot fail to respect and appreciate his stoicism and to share his ironic realisation that his inquisitors are persecuting him using the very same theories and dogma with which he once suppressed opposition.

It's not difficult to see the influence which this short novel had on Orwell, most obviously in "Animal Farm" and "1984", both published later in the same decade.

The horror of Rubashov's confinement is neither sentimentalised nor over-dramatised leaving "Darkness at Noon" as accessible and relevant as it is important in the development of twentieth century fiction.