About this title: 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.
Note: This is a general synopsis. Each listing is described below.
Description: Good. No dust jacket as issued. Cover has signs of wear with some chips and slight peeling at edges; pages have tanned but are completely unmarked. Translated by Daphne Hardy read more
Binding: Mass Market Paperback
Publisher: Signet Classic, New York
Date Published: 1961
Description: Fair. Wear toe dges of soft cover. Skuff mark to frotn cover from old price removal. Light hint of page tanning from age. 13th printing. read more
"An aging high ranking communist party leader is arrested and subjected to the show trials Stalin used to suppress and control (and ultimately which killed 10s of millions of people) the population during the Great Terror. The entire book takes place during the imprisonment and questioning of the main character. The reader learns of his past through flashbacks.
The author was a communist activist (born in Hungary in 1905, educated in Vienna) who became disillusioned with the Party in the later 1930s when he visited Russia. The book is a work of fiction arising from actual events. The characters are comprised of people the author knew personally who suffered the fates of the people described.
The book is readable and well-written, and a great exposee of a far-too often ignored subject of recent world history: the reality of communism in the Soviet Union, what it aimed to achieve, the means it used, the millions who suffered and were exterminated, and the duality of what it was supposed to represent(throwing off the shackles of the worker) and what it actually did (bind them into poverty, starvation, gulags or simple extermination). I think more Americans, particularly those who romanticize communism or denigrate America's global actions in opposition to it during the years of the Cold War, should become familiar with the contents of books such as these. (Maybe someone should send a copy to Anita Dunn. Wild Swans might be too long for her.)
I thought it was interesting to read an explanation of how Russian communists thought and analyzed the world, and how they in some ways justified (or sought to do so) the horrific things they were a part of. It bothered me, though, that while Koestler (author) was disillusioned with the Party, I don't get the sense that he ever actually renounced communism itself and was unable to separate the evils it actualized with the theories it triumphed."
"I picked it up at the Y book sale because I'd heard of it in an interesting but forgotten context -- and it was 50¢. Not what I expected (was I thinking it concerned the McCarthy era??) but good enough to finish. The trials and subtle torture of Rubashov hardly made pleasant reading, but a solid story with a background well done, especially with a preface to give the Koestler background.
Admission: I was thinking that Darkness at Noon had an Orwellian tint, but a bit of research revealed that Orwell had a Koestlerian hue!"
"I had heard of this book before and knew that I would one day have to read it, given my interest in political science, ideology, and revolutionary movements. It is well written and absorbing. The discussions between the protagonist and his interrogators are the heart of the book and are well done in drawing out the thoughts of the regimes current rulers and the old revolutionaries. The book does an excellent job of interpreting the logic of socialist revolution, in this case through the Russian lens. I imagine it would be applicable to all revolutionary ideologues who have a strict philosophy of how the world must work in an internally logical way, stripping out emotion and humanity. It is, of course, chilling to read the words of these regime insiders, both accusers and accused, working out the logic of the situation. If the protagonist fought his whole life for the ideals of the current regime, then he knows exactly what must be done if he believes that the revolution is scientific and strives to be free of the warping influences of humanity and sentimentality. While he realizes that the situation he is in is absurd, that the charges against him are bogus and only exist to serve the regime and the revolution it claims to be preserving, he still follows them because he seems to still believe at some fundamental level. This is in opposition to the prisoner in the room next door who is from the old regime. He believes in the bourgeois values that the revolution seeks to eliminate. Yet, oddly the regime appears to have no plans to kill him. This hints at the idea that a traitor is worse an adversary. An adversary is one that has always hated or fought against - a defined enemy that one can respect for their attachment to their position. But a traitor is one who turned against you, who betrayed you. That is a more heinous crime. While in this case the crime is bogus, it is required to set an example for the (perceived) simple masses who only respond to direct, simple messages. Highly recommended."
"An excerpt from Darkness at Noon was included in an English class anthology in middle school, and I had always meant to follow up on Rubashov's travails in the face of the Communist purges of the late 1930s. A chance glimpse of this bright red cover at McNally Jackson nearly two decades later served as my madeleine, and who can resist nostalgia?
Rubashov, it turns out, was not the innocent I had imagined from my textbook excerpt, but instead, a lynchpin of the Revolution and the Communist Party, who had helped build the very system that in time would devour him (and who has himself sacrificed many an innocent on the altar of Revolution, and the redemption-by-history it promises). Yet his is no mere youthful revolutionary fervor turned sour: rather, Rubashov remains a true believer almost to the very end, and even as he faces conviction and death remains open to the possibility that "No. 1" (a thinly disguised Stalin) might even be right in liquidating the Rubashovs who represent the Revolution's founding generation.
Rubashov's uncritical acceptance of Marxist-Leninist orthodoxy, in particular the "objective" nature of the Marxist-Leninist view of history, makes Darkness at Noon seem more than a little dated, but the book's representation of a system where the notion that the ends justify the means has been taken to its logical (and monstrous) conclusion, where the individual is a mere speck against the backdrop of History (and the favorable verdict it promises), remains permanently relevant. As does the dramatic tension of Rubashov's various interrogation sequences. But the novel seems a bit abstract when it moves away from those sequences, as if Koestler were working out an intellectual puzzle rather than recounting the the fate of Rubashov (and in him, that of an age). Indeed, this reader found himself wondering whether the book might not have worked better as a play consisting only of the interrogation scenes: their distilled terror and intensity (by virtue of their representation of a looming inevitability that is simply a function of the absolute pitilessness of the system, and of the juxtaposition of the frail individual with that system) is ideally suited to the theatrical space."
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