Soviet Prison Doors Similar to the one that Rubashov found himself behind. Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov is arrested.

We brought you the promise of the future, but our tongue stammered and barked. We brought you the living life, and where our voices is heard the trees wither and there is a rustling of dry leaves. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. We brought you truth, and in our mouth it sounded a lie. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people.

We diagnosed the disease and its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. In 1976 he was diagnosed with Parkinson's disease and three years later with leukaemia in its terminal stages. In 1968 he was awarded the prestigious and valuable Sonning Prize 'For outstanding contribution to European culture', and in 1972 he was made a 'Commander of the British Empire' (CBE). Over the next forty-three years he espoused many causes, wrote novels and biographies, and numerous essays. In 1931 he joined the Communist Party of Germany but, disillusioned, he resigned from it in 1938 and in 1940 published a devastating anti-Communist novel, Darkness at Noon, which propelled him to instant international fame. He was born into a Hungarian Jewish family in Budapest but, apart from his early school years, was educated in Austria. His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik 1917 revolutionary who is cast out, imprisoned and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create.ĭarkness at Noon (1940), novel of Hungarian-born British writer Arthur Koestler, portrays his disillusionment with Communism his nonfiction works include The Sleepwalkers (1959) and The Ghost in the Machine (1967).Īrthur Koestler CBE was a prolific writer of essays, novels and autobiographies. 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.'ĭarkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary agony, it asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. As the pressure to confess preposterous crimes increases, he relives a career that embodies the terrible ironies and human betrayals of a totalitarian movement masking itself as an instrument of deliverance. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. Darkness at Noon is a fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time.

Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler