Darkness at Noon

The 1940 Club seemed like the perfect opportunity to re-read a novel which had made lasting impression on me when I first encountered it over thirty years ago: Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon. Not only that, but a new translation by Philip Boehm has been available since 2019. I was unaware, however, that this translation was the result of Koestler’s German original – long thought lost – being rediscovered in 2015. The previous English translation, by Daphne Hardy, who was living with Koestler at the time, has been as close as we could get to the original up until this point, but Hardy was not a professional translator and undertook the work in challenging circumstances, in 1939 Paris, without access to dictionaries. (To take one simple example, she titled the first three sections of the novel as ‘hearings’ rather than, as Boehm has done, ‘interrogations’, creating a quite different impression). On the other hand, the loss of the German original is perhaps responsible for the novel being placed in the top ten of the Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20^th century.

Darkness at Noon (Boehm retains the original English title rather than reverting to a literal translation of the German – The Vicious Circle) is set in a country which mirrors the Soviet Union in the late 1930s – Koestler uses Russian names but does not specify the state. Stalin, referred to as ‘Number One’, is intent on removing anyone he considers a threat, no matter how senior their position in the Communist Party, with accusation of sabotage and working for foreign powers. Part of this process was a series of show trials in which participants confessed to these imaginary crimes. Koestler had been a member of the Communist Party, and had also experienced prison (in Spain in 1937); he had visited the USSR in 1932 and met some of the Party leaders who were later put on trial. As Michael Scammel says in his introduction, the novel allows Koestler to ask the question:

“How had Stalin managed to pull of this monstrous coup de theatre so successfully? And why had the victims played their parts so willingly and gone so obediently to their deaths?”

In the novel, Rubashov, a member of the ‘old guard’, scarred from the civil war, is arrested and imprisoned. From the moment he is arrested he is aware it is hopeless: “They’re going to shoot me.” He is initially interrogated by Ivanov, “his former colleague from the university and eventual battalion commander.” Ivanov attempts to persuade Rubashov that it is in his interest to sign a partial confession so he can be tried as otherwise he will simply be found guilty on the testimony of others. He tells his younger colleague, Gletkin, that torture is unnecessary:

“Once he’s thought everything through to his logical conclusion he will capitulate.”

Rubashov is not only being questioned by his interrogator, however, but also by his conscience as he reflects on his past actions. For example, he meets with the leader of a Communist cell in Germany, Richard, whose wife has just been arrested. Richard has been found guilty of altering party propaganda. “You wrote as though nothing had happened,” Richard tells him:

“They smashed the party to a pulp and all we got were empty phrases about the unbroken will for victory, nothing but a heap of lies, just like in the world war. Whoever we showed it too just spat. But you know all that yourself.”

“The party cannot be wrong,” Rubashov tells him, “You or I can make mistakes – but not the party.” He leaves Richard after telling him he has been expelled. Similarly, he is sent to instruct dockworkers in Belgium who have previously been told by the Party to refuse to unload any materials going to Germany, to make an exception for cargo coming from the Soviet Union. One of the group, who has devoted his life to the Party, later hangs himself. Finally, there is the case of his secretary, and lover, Orlova, whom he does not defend when she is accused and killed. Rubashov’s conscience, never overt, is suggested in the novel by a toothache which he refuses to have treated. For example, when Ivanov raises Orlova’s case:

“Rubashov said nothing and noticed that his tooth was again beginning to hurt.”

He both tolerates and suppresses the pain as he does his conscience because, as George Orwell puts it, “he has himself committed worse crimes than the one that is now being perpetrated against him.”

As a counterweight to Rubashov’s logic, Koestler places a Czarist officer in the cell next to him. They communicate to each other by tapping and 402, as he is known after his cell number, is shocked when Rubashov tells him he will capitulate:

“I WAS INCLINED TO THINK YOU WERE AN EXCEPTION. DON’T YOU HAVE EVEN A SPARK OF HONOUR?”

Rubashov dismisses this, replying that “honour means being useful without vanity.” Time and again, Koestler succeeds in dramatizing the central argument of the novel, whether utility comes before humanity or ‘the ends justify the means’. Rubashov’s tragedy is that he has to confess, as do to do otherwise would be to render his life meaningless. The irony is that his confession has the same effect.

Tags: 1940 club, Arthur Koestler, darkness at noon