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 in May , but there was no calm for Koestler.
He thought it was because of his German citizenship, but later learned he had been classified as 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 occupy 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 December , just as German bombs were raining down on the city and there was serious talk of a possible German invasion.
Koestler was back 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 sold , copies in its first year. By the middle of the following year it had sold , copies 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 late , he 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. LitCharts Teacher Editions. Teach your students to analyze literature like LitCharts does.
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Our Teacher Edition on Darkness at Noon can help. Themes All Themes. Symbols All Symbols. Theme Wheel. Everything you need for every book you read.
The way the content is organized and presented is seamlessly smooth, innovative, and comprehensive. While No. Now, though, No. For the younger generations, No. Might there be something to the moral standards he has discarded, even if the world that produced them was exploitative? Knowing that his intended audience would admire and sympathize with Rubashov, he uses this sympathy to call their entire worldview into question.
When Ivanov is arrested in turn, he is implied to have died without confessing. Koestler gives much more weight to torture as a factor than he is often thought. Is he afraid to follow his thoughts to their logical conclusion — a fatal flaw, by their standards? As it turns out, Rubashov is spiritually as well as physically exhausted.
When he realizes this, he experiences a disillusionment with himself as well as with Communism. Rubashov is a direct descendent of an earlier German literary depiction of a revolutionary purged by his peers.
Boehm beautifully renders the back and forth of dialogue and metaphor in the interrogation scenes. A sentimental passage in which an admiring veteran of the Russian Civil War compares Rubashov to Jesus is the most irritating part of the novel. Koestler is surprisingly fascinated, for a non-Christian, with Christianity as a utopian ideology and potential counterweight to the logic of revolution. The idea is also explored in the two other novels that, though they do not share a setting or characters, form a deliberate thematic trilogy with Darkness at Noon : The Gladiators and Arrival and Departure.
The other two novels, though less well known, are not without significance. The Gladiators portrays a historically unsuccessful slave rebellion. The ending of The Gladiators is as gruesome as that of Darkness at Noon , with the victorious Roman slave-owners crucifying the rebels.
The revolution in Darkness at Noon devours itself, while that in The Gladiators is devoured. Both outcomes lead to slaughter and injustice.
Arrival and Departure explores the psychological profile of a revolutionary, portraying his psychoanalysis after a breakdown.
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