FREEDARKNESS AT NOON EBOOK

Arthur Koestler | 224 pages | 01 Feb 2010 | Vintage Publishing | 9780099424918 | English | London, United Kingdom by , Paperback | Barnes & Noble®

Goodreads helps you keep track of books you want to read. Want to Read saving…. Want to Read Currently Reading Read. Other editions. Enlarge Darkness at Noon. Error rating book. Refresh and try again. Open Preview See a Problem? Details if other :. Thanks for telling us about the problem. Return to Book Page. Preview — Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler. Daphne Hardy Translator. Darkness at Noon from the German: Sonnenfinsternis is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in His best-known work tells the tale of Rubashov, a Bolshevik revolutionary who is cast out, Darkness at Noon and tried for treason by the Soviet government he'd helped create. Darkness at Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portray Darkness at Noon from the German: Sonnenfinsternis is a novel by the Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in Darkness at Noon stands as an unequaled fictional portrayal of the nightmare politics of our time. Its hero is an aging revolutionary, imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the Party to which he has dedicated his life. 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. Almost unbearably vivid in its depiction of one man's solitary Darkness at Noon, it asks questions about ends and means that have relevance not only for the past but for the perilous present. It Darkness at Noon —- 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. Get A Copy. Mass Market Paperbackpages. Published March by Bantam Books first published More Details Original Title. Nicolas Salmanovitch Rubashov. Other Editions Darkness at Noon Reviews. To see what your friends thought of Darkness at Noon book, please sign up. To ask other readers questions about Darkness at Noonplease sign up. I made the mistake of reading the introduction to the new translation by Mr. Why did he do that? It spoiled things for me. Perhaps I should ignore it and read on, but Maybe someone could enlighten me? Dan His arrest and eventual Darkness at Noon are not important the meat of the book comes from the interrogation and his interactions with other prisoners. I d …more His arrest and eventual consequences are not important the meat of the book comes from the interrogation and his interactions with other prisoners. I dont know what to tell you, its a book about USSR and imprisonment. Its like not watching the death of Stalin, because you know hes going to die. He used a pseudonym as I recall. Stacy I think another reason the author did not specify a particular country is that it really didn't matter. It was a picture of a socialist regime and how …more I think another reason the author did Darkness at Noon specify a particular country is that it really didn't matter. It was a picture of a socialist regime and how the socialist policies are enforced in that given country, which is proven out through history. It doesn't matter whether it was Russia, or China, or North Vietnam, or take your pick of many others-- the enforcement was always the same. The same tactics were always used, as if they were all going by some kind of manual to implement communism, which is the governmental side of socialism, which is the economic philosophy 2 sides of the same coin. See all 3 questions about Darkness at Noon…. Lists with This Book. Community Reviews. Showing Average rating 4. Rating details. More filters. Sort order. Start your review of Darkness at Noon. We diagnosed the disease Darkness at Noon its causes with microscopic exactness, but wherever we applied the healing knife a new sore appeared. Our will was hard and pure, we should have been loved by the people. But they hate us. Why are we so odious and detested? We brought you truth, and in Darkness at Noon mouth it sounded a lie. We brought you freedom, and it looks in our hands like a whip. 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 the promise of the future, but our Darkness at Noon stammered and barked Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov is arrested. Soviet Prison Doors Similar to the one that Rubashov found himself behind. But this must happen in such a way that no one become aware of it; or, if it should be noticed, excuses must be at hand, to be produced immediately. The young Darkness at Noon . Rubashov has been in trouble with the party before, but had always managed to do what was necessary to survive. The new generation of revolutionaries are not as well educated, meaner, Darkness at Noon barely recognize the names of those that were once heralded as heroes by the revolution. As Rubashov sits in prison he is left to ponder what has went wrong. For the energies of this generation are exhausted; they were spent in the Revolution; for this generation is bled white and there is nothing left of it but a moaning, numbed apathetic lump of sacrificial flesh Those are the consequences of our consequentialness. You called it vivisection morality. To me it sometimes seems as though the experimenters had torn the skin off the victim and left it standing with bared tissues, muscles and nerves Rubashov does not have a safety net of friends, most have perished, some were betrayed by Darkness at Noon silence when he was in a position to save them. They are less than impressed to find out who he is; in fact, the only use he has to is to share his last sexual encounter GO ON. He has more thinking to do. More explaining to Darkness at Noon to himself. He has two interrogators. One is trying to save him and one is trying to kill him. In his diary Rubashov is still justifying his past decisions. He still believes in the movement, but is disenchanted with the people. In periods of mental immaturity, only demagogues invoke the higher judgment of the people. Lots of people die and more will continue to die and when you ask the peasants if their Darkness at Noon are better than they were four years ago or forty years ago or two hundred and forty years ago the answer is the same The revolutionaries Darkness at Noon out to be as brutal as the Czarist government they overthrew and since we know that Stalin is only warming up by the publication date of this book we know it will get much, much worse. Stalin had nearly a million of his own citizens executed, beginning in the s. Millions more fell victim to forced labor, deportation, famine, massacres, and detention Darkness at Noon interrogation by Stalin's henchmen. His mind has been degraded from lack of sleep and he has decided the easiest way to go is to admit guilt on certain points. Now he was to find that powerlessness had as many grads as power; that defeat could become as vertiginous as victory, and that its depths Darkness at Noon bottomless. I do though identify with him enough to feel uncomfortable. They overthrow a government, but are generally so paranoid that they resort to the same or worse tactics as the original government to keep control. We were lucky in our revolution in the United States because it was more about expelling a foreign power from our shores than it was about overthrowing a government. Our Revolutionary Heroes, after the war, were willing to share a certain amount of power with the people. Freedom was more important to them than power. Although the revolution was more about greed how dare thee tax me than about being oppressed. This country, by the wisdom of our forefathers,was built on a foundation of freedom and sometimes we have to remind ourselves of those principles. Russia is a country that continues to wrestle with their identity. Revisiting Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon | National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH)

Four years ago, an Austrian friend alerted me to a startling article that had just appeared in a German newspaper. It had gone missing soon after it was completed some seventy-five years earlier and had been Darkness at Noon forever lost. Koestler had preceded Orwell, Huxley, and other authors of dystopian novels by several years, but Darkness at Noon had the misfortune to come out just as the was joining the Western allies in their war against fascism, making it an inopportune time for an anti-Soviet work to appear. Orwell, indifferent to such conventions, immediately praised it for its literary and political qualities and later borrowed from it in It was translated into over thirty languages, became a global Darkness at Noon, and maintained that position until the Soviet Darkness at Noon collapsed in Since then the novel has inevitably lost its immediacy and topicality, and some of its political force, too, though I would argue that there is Darkness at Noon misunderstanding here. Meanwhile, it has lost none of its literary merit and is still regarded as a modern classic. In my biography, I noted that Darkness at Noon had another peculiarity that was extremely rare in modern literature: It existed only in translation. He wrote in a great hurry and his girlfriend, Daphne Hardy, translated the book into her native English Darkness at Noon as he wrote it in German. The finished English text was dispatched to London just days before they fled Darkness at Noon to escape the invading army, and, in their haste, Darkness at Noon lost the top copy Darkness at Noon the original typescript and completely forgot about the carbon copy sent to Zurich. In this context, the German newspaper article struck me as exciting, even sensational. I had imagined him opening a filing cabinet and pulling out a frayed folder with its flimsy carbon copy inside, but this was too twentieth century. When I wrote to Wessel to ask for details, he explained he had been sitting at his computer at the University of Kassel when he first came across the unknown title, and it was another week before he could hold a photocopy in his hand and read it. On reading it through, Wessel also realized that the text differed in many respects from the standard German edition back-translated from English. By the time I wrote to him, he had contacted Thomas Pago at Elsinor Verlag, the German publisher of the earlier back-translation, and suggested a completely new edition. Pago agreed to publish, with a foreword by me and an afterword by Wessel, and the new work made the German best- seller list for books issued by small publishers that year, surpassing all our expectations. For these reasons and in keeping with the adage that new generations of readers deserve new translationsI concluded that a new translation would be welcome. Boehm is the talented translator of works by Ingeborg Bachmann, , Darkness at Noon several other writers in German and Polish, and a creative writer in his own right. He has also lived in Poland and experienced life behind the Iron Curtain, which gives him an advantage in interpreting the vocabulary and structure of the Soviet bureaucracy and its criminal justice system. I was confident he would strip the varnish Darkness at Noon this old picture and restore it to its original clarity, Darkness at Noon that is just what he did. Just over a year later, Darkness at Noon deed was done and a Darkness at Noon months later, almost identical American and British editions appeared on either sides of the Atlantic, with an introduction by me. I felt strongly that the project was worthwhile both for literary and political reasons, but two questions hovered in the back of my mind. Could the popularity of this famous novel, written eighty years beforehand, be rekindled by a new translation? And to what degree were its insights into dictatorial regimes of both left and right and their suppression of individual dissidents still relevant to modern readers? Of these, the think piece by Adam Kirsch in the New Yorker was the longest and most substantial. In writing it, Koestler had confronted head on the idea that noble ends could justify evil means and then demolished it, which, together with his distrust of the tyrannical power of reasonmade his novel subversive even now. Rubashov was shown as caught in a mental trap, knowing his position was dangerous but unable to admit he was wrong, and this was of little use Darkness at Noon readers confronted by modern leaders. As for the translation, Updike praised it and definitely preferred it to the old one, as did Aatish Taseer in Air Mail, who judged it not as stilted as the old one, but it was Andrew Stuttaford, in the Wall Street Journalwho dwelt on it in some detail. Though there were not as many reviews as I had hoped for, it was an old book in a new translation rather than a brand-new book Darkness at Noon, and I felt the responses were more than enough to justify my efforts. The icing on the cake was a Darkness at Noon roundtable discussion of the novel at Roosevelt House in Darkness at Noon York, held soon after the reviews appeared. Adam Kirsch questioned Philip Boehm and myself about our goals and procedures and the significance of Darkness at Noonand this was followed by a lively Q and A in which members of the audience showed how well they knew Koestler and Darkness at Noon. Others embraced the idea, but a sort of armistice was arrived at when a member of the audience in the back row stood up to speak. She had read Darkness at Noon while living in postwar France, she said, where the French translation broke all sales records and prevented the French Communist party from being elected to join the government in an impending general election. The novel was a cautionary tale and its message applied to all countries and regimes, whether of Darkness at Noon left or the right. That message was simple: Beware of self-delusion. Skip to main content. Search this Section. Digital Feature. Published on December 23, Arthur Koestler, author of Darkness at Noonmany Darkness at Noon later. Twitter Facebook. About the author. Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

After a public trial, he is sentenced to death and summarily executed in the prison basement. There are several allusions to , but the names of Darkness at Noon characters are mostly Russian and the political system he describes is obviously the Soviet one. His inspiration for writing his book was the show trials of Soviet Communist Party leaders in the late s, when the world was startled by the news that more than half the Soviet leadership had been charged with Darkness at Noon. Koestler had been a loyal member of the party himself until then and on his first and only visit Darkness at Noon the Soviet Union inhad met some of the government ministers who were being imprisoned and put on trial. By the time Bukharin was imprisoned, Koestler had had a taste of political prison himself. He remained there for three months, seeing other prisoners led out for execution and constantly Darkness at Noon he might be next. He was released after some influential British friends intervened on his behalf and immediately wrote Darkness at Noon with Death about his experiences. Soon afterward, the third big Soviet got under way. Bukharin and twenty of his Soviet government colleagues were accused of a host of fantastic crimes, among them plotting to assassinate Lenin and Stalin, carve up the Soviet empire, and restore capitalism. Few people Darkness at Noon the Soviet Union believed these accusations, but after first denying the charges, Bukharin and his comrades inexplicably pleaded guilty. Koestler was electrified by these confessions. How could Darkness at Noon a large portion of the Soviet establishment have spent months plotting against the government and Stalin without being discovered? How had powerful leaders such as Bukharin been transformed into impotent defendants and manipulated to confess to crimes they had clearly not committed? And why had the victims played their parts so willingly and gone so obediently to their deaths? It was taken for granted, for example, that torture must have been used to extract these confessions from the Soviet leaders. Koestler by no means ruled out the use of torture in Soviet jails and there are many instances of torture in Darkness at Noon. Rubashov himself is denied sleep Darkness at Noon has a blinding light shone in his eyes during his interrogations, but Koestler never shows Rubashov undergoing direct physical torture. He plays it down, not, as some critics have alleged, to soften the crimes of the communist authorities, but because he was more interested in something else. Darkness at Noon had taught Darkness at Noon that the idealistic form of communism that had inspired these men in their youth and had also attracted him to enlist in the party had Darkness at Noon but disappeared, giving Darkness at Noon to a harshly oppressive regime in which all power was concentrated in the Darkness at Noon of one man—Joseph Darkness at Noon. The result was widespread corruption and the establishment of a dictatorship that Darkness at Noon crushed the people, especially the peasants and workers in whose name the revolution had been carried out. The show trials were both a symptom of this corruption and proof Darkness at Noon the rot that was undermining the whole system, and the most loyal party members among the accused had confessed because the ideological ground beneath their feet had been cut away and they had nothing more to believe Darkness at Noon. It was their resulting psychological collapse that Koestler wished to explore, rather than the mechanisms of the trials themselves. Cocooned in their privileged party positions, they had been slow to grasp the radical corruption undermining the country from within, and when they finally acknowledged this truth, were unable to hide their disillusionment. To this theory Koestler attached another, equally controversial suggestion that Rubashov might have undergone a kind of spiritual conversion in prison as well. During his long hours alone Rubashov uses a prison tapping code to make contact with a White Russian prisoner in the cell adjoining his. The code itself was also grounded in reality. Koestler had learned of it from a childhood friend, , who had just been expelled to the West after serving sixteen months in a Soviet jail for allegedly plotting to assassinate Stalin. As time passes, however, Rubashov begins to doubt himself. Ivanov mentions the novel during his first interrogation of Rubashov and their arguments often resemble Porfiry Petrovich questioning Raskolnikov. These Christian motifs point to themes of martyrdom and absolution, and Koestler suggests that by the time he is ready to confess, Rubashov is prompted by a deeper sense of guilt than simply disloyalty to the party. His crimes are violations of traditional morality and when he finally confesses to Gletkin, it is for reasons Gletkin cannot possibly understand. Koestler refrains from portraying Rubashov as a full-fledged Christian, however, and at his execution leaves him an agnostic. It was long expected but nevertheless took him by surprise. A second, shattering blow hit him on the ear. Then all was still. The sea rushed on. A wave gently lifted him up. It came from afar and traveled serenely onward, a shrug of infinity. Koestler wrote his novel with astonishing speed, starting it in the South of France in the summer of and finishing it in Paris in April The last eight months coincided with the time of the Phoney War, a period of calm before the German invasion of France Darkness at Noon Maybut there was no calm for Koestler. He thought it was because of his German citizenship, but later learned he had been classified Darkness at Noon a Soviet agent, this at a time when he had left the Communist Party and was writing his anti-Soviet novel. The camp regime was lax enough for him to be able to continue writing and after four months, for lack of evidence, he was allowed to return to Paris. He was condemned to house arrest and ordered to report regularly to the nearest police station, but even so, he was subjected to unannounced police raids and the occasional confiscation of his papers. Once or twice the unfinished text of Darkness at Noon sat on his desk and a carbon copy rested on top of his bookcase, but the French police overlooked them. Hardy had no prior experience in translation and was nervous about her abilities, but agreed to give it a try. He would sit at his table in the bigger room with the bookcases, I would sit on the edge of the divan at the round table. Days later, when German troops moved to Darkness at Noon Paris, Hardy and Koestler fled south to escape arrest. Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion to hide his identity while Hardy, a British citizen, made her way to London. Nothing was heard from Switzerland and she believed that to all intents and purposes, her translation was the only copy of the book to survive. Darkness at Noon was published by Cape in London in Decemberjust Darkness at Noon German bombs were raining down on the city and there was serious talk of a possible German invasion. Koestler was Darkness at Noon in jail again—in England now, having arrived illegally from Lisbon—and again as a suspected agent, this time of the Germans. It was hardly an auspicious moment to launch a political novel about show trials in the prewar Soviet Union. Sales of the book were slow to begin with and only a few critics, most of them on the left, understood its importance. The English public, distracted by the war, was slow to be convinced. In the United States, not yet at war, sales were better, helped by a glowing review in Time by Whittaker Chambers, the former Soviet spy, who knew what Koestler was talking about. Its selection by the Book of the Month Club also boosted sales, but they were still modest compared with what happened after the war, when sales of the English-language edition exploded. A French translation came out and soldcopies in its first year. By the middle of the following year it had soldcopies and went on to sell two million in two years, then a record in French publishing. This phenomenal success was due in large part to the turbulent political scene in Europe during and after World War II. In France, they were the largest party in the Constituent Assembly and were expected to win the first postwar general election with ease. In this context, the anti-Soviet message of Darkness at Noon erupted with shattering force. There were rumors of a communist delegation visiting the French publisher to demand he cease publication, and of party members being dispatched to bookstores to buy up all available copies. When Koestler returned to Paris in latehe was greeted as a hero, embraced by Sartre, de Beauvoir, Camus, and Malraux as a literary equal. In the United States, which Koestler visited for the first time two years later, he was regarded as the most potent anti-communist writer of his time. Within a few years Darkness at Noon had been translated into more than 30 languages and become a worldwide bestseller. For decades it was widely read in American high schools and assigned in undergraduate political science courses, and the accepted English version has always remained in print, despite a falloff in readers since the collapse of Soviet communism. This raises the question of why make a new translation almost 80 years after the novel was written and why publish it now? One reason is circumstantial. Her English version had introduced Darkness at Noon to the English-speaking public all over the world and had become the urtext from which all other translations were made, a rare occurrence in modern literature. Despite her youth and lack of experience, her version has been properly acknowledged as idiomatic and fluent, serving the novel well for over seven decades, Darkness at Noon it also reveals signs of the difficulties she had encountered. She had been forced by circumstances to work in haste, with no dictionaries or other resources available for consultation, which exposed her understandable lack of Darkness at Noon with the Soviet and Nazi machinery of totalitarianism. It seemed that a fresh and up-to-date translation of the novel would be Darkness at Noon, preferably by a seasoned translator with the knowledge and experience to clarify the jargon of Marxism-Leninism and present it in terminology that is both accurate and makes sense to an English- speaking reader. Philip Boehm, a noted translator of over thirty books and plays from German and Polish, who lived for several years behind the Iron Curtain, has proved the ideal choice for the job. The prose is tighter, the dialogue clearer, the tone more ironic, and the intricacies of Marxist-Leninist dialectics more digestible. The effect for the reader is of chancing upon a familiar Darkness at Noon that has had layers of varnish and dust removed to reveal images and colors in a much brighter light. Darkness at Noon years ago, the editors of the Modern Library in New York ranked Darkness at Noon at number eight on its list of the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century. The historical dimension is important, of course. Though Koestler refused to name the country where his story takes place, it most closely resembles the Soviet Union and Number Darkness at Noon is clearly based on Stalin. The novel was highly topical from the moment it first appeared, and it remained so for a long time, thanks in part to its adoption as a weapon in the Cold War. Today, we have only to look at authoritarian regimes in China, North Korea, and scattered across the globe to be reminded that its basic message is still relevant, and that current dictatorships operate in essentially the same way they always have—by terrorizing their subjects and depriving them of their most important freedoms. Available from Scribner. Created by Grove Atlantic and Electric Literature. Via Scribner. He has translated books by Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, and Nabokov into English and writes regularly about Russian and East European literature. Next Article When D. More Story.

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