When this novel was published, it provided an explanation that the rest of the world could understand of the infamous Moscow purge trials. In the Soviet Union, which had not yet entirely withdrawn from the international stage to the secrecy behind the “Iron Curtain,” Joseph Stalin was relentlessly eliminating his opponents in the struggle for power after the death of V. I. Lenin. Incomprehensibly, his colleagues were pleading guilty to outrageous charges of plotting to poison masses of workers, collaborating with capitalists to destroy the new government, and other charges for which there was little evidence and less reason.
Koestler was well positioned to provide the explanation of the mysterious guilty pleas of men who had devoted their lives to the Communist Party, since he had himself been an active member during much of the 1930s, nearly losing his life to the cause during the Spanish Civil War. Put simply, Koestler says that the guilty pleas are a last form of service to the party; his novel explicates the mind of a devotee who would make such a choice.
The protagonist of the story is Nicholas Rubashov, a Soviet official and a longtime member of the party who has toed the party line and who has expelled comrades for not toeing that line, even when doing so had led to others’ deaths. He has been imprisoned and charged with crimes against the state, including plotting against the life of “Number 1” (Stalin), of which he is not guilty. During his imprisonment, he is interrogated twice. Ivanov, his interrogator, does not care about the particulars of the indictment as long as Rubashov confesses to ideologically defective thinking. He allows Rubashov a two-week interval to think over his options; Rubashov uses the time to write out his statement about his experience with and loyalty to the cause, but he does not confess to plotting to kill Number 1. During this time, he remembers his own acts to enforce party discipline, and he sees prisoners—personal friends of his—dragged off to execution.
Just before Rubashov’s deadline has expired, he is hauled under the glare of blinding lights in the office of Gletkin and informed that Ivanov has been executed for the crime of mismanaging Rubashov’s case. Gletkin will accept nothing less than a full confession to all the particulars of the indictment. After a grueling, interminable process, Rubashov signs the trumped-up confession. In the days following, he sees a man who had testified against him dragged to execution before the death squad calls for Rubashov himself. A brief moment in the dungeons of the prison closes another minor incident in the party’s history.
Much of the interest of Darkness at Noon comes from the psychological realism of Rubashov’s thoughts through his imprisonment. He recognizes that he, too, has sacrificed others as a means to an end, and that he now is undergoing what he previously had imposed. But his loyalty to the party survives his ordeal: having been guilty of actions that led to others’ deaths for the good of the party, he can now avoid the full burden of the moral responsibility of those actions only by continuing to serve the party—the agency that bears the responsibility in his stead—and falsely admitting to the crimes he is accused of.
Koestler’s portrait of the totalitarian state is an insightful and compelling one, placing his story in the ranks of dystopian novels such as Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell. It was not well received in all quarters: many artists and intellectuals nurtured hopes that the Soviet Union would lead Europe and the world to a better, more just, and more equitable system of governance and economics, and voices that undermined this optimistic view met stiff opposition.
Koestler’s book had a particularly strong effect in France against the protests of intellectuals such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. It may have influenced the course of France’s political choices by undermining the image of communism in a way accessible to ordinary readers. Not until Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn exposed the abuses of the Communist Party and Soviet Union—especially against artists and intellectuals—in The Gulag Archipelago was the Left’s lingering idealization of the hoped-for Communist worker paradise finally laid to rest.
Bibliography
Pearson, Sidney A. Arthur Koestler. Twayne’s English Authors, 228. Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978.
Sperber, Murray A., ed. Arthur Koestler: A Collection of Critical Essays. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1977.
Sterne, Richard Clark. Dark Mirror: The Sense of Injustice in Modern European and American Literature. New York: Fordham University Press, 1994.
Categories: British Literature, Literature, Novel Analysis, Russian Literature
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