Why Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon still matters eighty years on
Arthur Koestler in 1937. (Fred Stein 1909-1967)
December marks the 80th anniversary of one of the great novels of the 20th century, Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Together with Animal Farm and 1984 by George Orwell, and The Captive Mind by Czeslaw Milosz, it changed the way a generation thought about Soviet Communism. As George Steiner once observed, Koestler’s career “touches, with uncanny precision, on the hopes and nightmares, on the places and events, which have given the 20th century its flavour.”
Koestler started writing Darkness at Noon in the summer of 1939. He was living in France and completed it in Paris in the spring of 1940, just before the German invasion. The timing of the novel is not accidental. It was inspired by the Soviet show trials – in particular, the trial of Nikolai Bukharin and other members of the Bolshevik Old Guard in the spring of 1938. Koestler left the Communist Party almost immediately.
In Invisible Writing, the second volume of his autobiography, Koestler later wrote, “I was 26 when I joined the Communist Party, and 33 when I left it. The years between had been decisive years, both by the season of life which they filled, and the way they filled it with a single-minded purpose. Never before nor after had life been so brimful of meaning as during these seven years. They had the superiority of a beautiful error over a shabby truth.”
But something else happened to Koestler during these seven years. He was bitterly disillusioned by his visit to the Soviet Union in 1932-33. Then came the Soviet Purges. ‘From that time – the end of 1934 – my conscious retreat from the Party began,” he wrote. “… [T]he war in Spain forged new ties with the Party, as the victory of Hitler had done. Without that, I would probably have left when the Great Purge in Russia began.”
Then two things changed everything for Koestler: the Bukharin show trial and his experience of Communism during the Spanish Civil War. For him, as for Orwell, this was the turning point. Spain brought him face to face with the cruelty and cynicism of the Communist Party. But the Bukharin trial posed a much more complicated question. Why did lifelong Communists like Bukharin, who had given their lives to the Party, confess to “dastardly crimes”, to having “criminally betrayed” the Revolution? There were no evident signs of physical torture, so what could have made them do it?
This is the real subject of Darkness at Noon. The central character, Rubashov, like Bukharin an old Bolshevik, is forced to confess to a series of crimes against the Party he has not committed. He is tried and executed. The book is Koestler’s attempt to solve what he later called “one of the great enigmas of our time”.
The novel was published by Jonathan Cape in December 1940. It didn’t have much impact in Britain. By the end of its first year in print it had sold only 2,500 copies. Its real impact was felt in America and especially in France where it sold two million copies in two years. After the war, Darkness at Noon became one of the key texts of the Cold War, revealing for the first time for many the brutality of the Soviet regime, how it devoured not just kulaks and ethnic minorities but its own elite. What Koestler’s novel showed was a fundamental irrationality at the heart of Soviet Communism. Oddly, its success did not coincide with the Soviet show trials of the late 1930s but with the new wave of show trials in east Europe in the late 1940s and early 1950s.
A few years ago, there was a new twist in the story of Darkness at Noon. Matthias Wessel, a German graduate student working on Koestler’s German writings, discovered the original German manuscript of the novel in the archives of a publishing house in Zurich. It was the only copy of the original German text in existence. A new translation, the first to be based on this original German text, appeared last year. As Adam Kirsch wrote in his review in The New Yorker, “The new edition is the first to return to Koestler’s German text, and aims to replace [Daphne] Hardy’s version, which was the hasty work of an inexperienced translator.”
Hardy, Koestler’s girlfriend, then only 21, had produced the original English translation which for 79 years was the basis of all subsequent editions of Darkness at Noon. It has now been replaced by Philip Boehm’s translation which has given a new life to one of the great political novels of the 20th century. “The prose is tighter,” writes Koestler’s biographer Michael Scammell in his introduction to the new paperback edition, “Koestler’s novel is a crisper read than before. The prose is tighter, the dialogue clearer, the tone more ironic, and the intricacies of Marxist-Leninist dialectic more digestible…The effect for the reader is of chancing upon a familiar painting that has had layers of varnish and dust removed to reveal images and colours in a much brighter light.”
David Herman will be chairing a discussion on the 80th anniversary of Darkness at Noon on Zoom for Jewish Book Week and the Insiders/Outsiders Festival with Michael Scammell, Eva Hoffman and Ariane Bankes at 6pm on Wednesday 2 December, https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83977925303
Meeting ID: 839 7792 5303
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