The name on the title page was Rubaschow, the German spelling of Koestler’s protagonist, Rubashov the author’s name given as A Koestler. The pair fled Paris days later when German troops arrived, with Hardy’s translation believed to have been the only copy to survive.įour years ago, German graduate student Matthias Wessel found Koestler’s original German carbon copy from 1940 in the archive of Emil Oprecht, founder of the Europa publishing house in Zurich. A 21-year-old art student at the time, Hardy had no prior experience of translation, but on finishing the work she sent the English version to publisher Jonathan Cape in London, with Koestler posting his carbon copy in German to a publisher in Switzerland. The only known copy was the English translation made by the author’s girlfriend, the British sculptor Daphne Hardy. “Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of prison literature,” Orwell wrote of Darkness at Noon in a 1941 review for the New Statesman, “it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow ‘confessions’ by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods.”īut the original manuscript, written while Koestler was in the south of France in the summer of 1939 and finished in Paris in 1940, has been lost for decades. 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.Koestler was an active member of the Communist party until he resigned, disillusioned, at the time of Stalin’s purges in 1938.

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 stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. 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. You can read this before Darkness at Noon PDF EPUB full Download at the bottom.ĭarkness at Noon (from the German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. Here is a quick description and cover image of book Darkness at Noon written by Arthur Koestler which was published in 1940–. Brief Summary of Book: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler