Darkness at Noon

Summary

Darkness at Noon is a novel about the arrest, interrogation and execution of Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, a veteran revolutionary and former People's Commissar in an unnamed country ruled by a single party and its leader, known only as No. 1. The setting is never named, but the novel is plainly modeled on the Soviet Union during Stalin's purges and the Moscow show trials of 1936 to 1938. Rubashov is arrested at night and taken to solitary confinement. In the cell next to his is a former Tsarist officer, with whom he communicates by tapping on the wall in a code of knocks. As he waits, Rubashov remembers the people he sacrificed for the Party in his years of service abroad: Richard, a young German communist he expelled for deviating from the line; Little Loewy, a dockworkers' organizer in Belgium who hanged himself after Rubashov enforced a Party decision to supply oil to a hostile power; and Arlova, his secretary and lover, whom he failed to defend when she was accused and who was executed. The novel is divided into three hearings and a final section. In the first, Rubashov is questioned by Ivanov, an old comrade from the civil war, who appeals to the logic they once shared: if the end justifies the means, the individual counts for nothing against the Party's historical mission. Rubashov begins to doubt that logic and to recognize in himself what he calls the grammatical fiction, the first person singular that the Party had taught him to dismiss. Ivanov is himself arrested and shot for being too lenient, and the interrogation passes to Gletkin, a younger official formed entirely by the new regime, who uses sleeplessness, glaring lights and relentless questioning. A fellow prisoner known as Hare-lip, the son of an old friend, is made to testify against Rubashov. Exhausted, and persuaded that a public confession is his last service to the Party, Rubashov signs a confession to crimes he did not commit and repeats it at a public trial. In the final section, The Grammatical Fiction, he reflects on what has been lost, and he is shot in the cellar of the prison. Koestler wrote the book in German in Paris in 1938 to 1940, and his companion Daphne Hardy translated it into English for publication in London in 1940. It had a large influence on Western views of Soviet communism. The German manuscript, thought lost, was found in 2015, and a new translation from it by Philip Boehm appeared in 2019.

Top Lessons

• Ends and means

  Ivanov and Rubashov once accepted that any means were justified by the end of a classless society. The novel tests that principle against its human costs.

• Why confess?

  Rubashov confesses to crimes he did not commit. The novel offers one explanation of the Moscow show trials and invites students to weigh others.

• The individual conscience

  The 'grammatical fiction' is the first person singular, which the Party treats as unimportant. Rubashov rediscovers it in prison.

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