Darkness at Noon (German: Sonnenfinsternis) is a novel by Hungarian-born novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he helped to create.

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Darkness at Noon

First US edition
Author	Arthur Koestler
Original title	Sonnenfinsternis
Language	German/English[nb 1]
Publisher	Macmillan
Publication date	1940
Publication place	United Kingdom
Published in English	1940, 2019
Pages	254 pp (Danube edition)
OCLC	21947763
Preceded by	The Gladiators
Followed by	Arrival and Departure

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The novel is set between 1938 and 1940, after the Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Despite being based on real events, the novel does not name either Russia or the Soviets, and tends to use generic terms to describe people and organizations; for example, the Soviet government is referred to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is referred to as "the Dictatorship". Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with Bolshevism, Stalinism, and the ideology of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II.

In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, even though Koestler wrote it in German.

Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon as the second part of a trilogy: the first volume was The Gladiators (1939), first published in Hungarian. It was a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel was Arrival and Departure (1943), about a refugee during World War II. Koestler, who was by then living in London, rewrote that novel in English after the original German version had been lost.^{[citation needed]}

Darkness at Noon was commenced in German while Koestler was living in Paris, and, as he describes in the first chapter of Scum of the Earth, completed in the summer of 1939, just outside the village of Belvédère in the Alpes-Maritimes where he was staying with his companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, who translated it into English while she was living with him. For decades the German text was thought to have been lost during the escape of Koestler and Hardy from Paris in May 1940, just before the German occupation of France. However, a copy had been sent to Swiss publisher Emil Oprecht. Rupert Hart-Davis, Koestler's editor at Jonathan Cape in London had misgivings about the English text but agreed to publish it when a request to Oprecht for his copy went unanswered.^[1] At Hart-Davis' prompting, and unable to reach Koestler, Hardy changed the title from The Vicious Circle to Darkness at Noon.^[1] The new title is a reference to Job 5:14: "They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night"— a description of the moral dilemmas faced by the book's protagonist, as well as Koestler's own escape from the Nazis.^[2] In August 2015, Oprecht's copy was identified in a Zurich library by a doctoral candidate of the University of Kassel.^[1][3] The original German manuscript was published as Sonnenfinsternis (Solar Eclipse) in May 2018 by Elsinor Verlag.^[4] A new professional English translation based on the newfound text was published in 2019.^[5]

In his introduction to the 2019 translation, Koestler biographer Michael Scammell wrote that a fresh translation was desirable because Hardy's, although "serving the novel well for over seven decades, had difficulties. According to Scammell, "[Hardy] had been forced by circumstances to work in haste, with no dictionaries or other resources available for consultation, which exposed her understandable lack of familiarity with the Soviet and Nazi machinery of totalitarianism. ... The text she worked on was not quite final either. ... It seemed that a fresh and up-to-date translation of the novel would be helpful, 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." Scammell writes that Philip Boehm "proved the ideal choice for the job".^[6][7]

In his autobiographical The Invisible Writing (1954), Koestler stated that he finished Darkness at Noon in April 1940, after many troublesome months of 1939, caused mainly by financial difficulties and the later outbreak of World War II. Koestler observed:

The first obstacle was that, half-way through the book, I again ran out of money. I needed another six months to finish it, and to secure the necessary capital I had to sacrifice two months - April and May 1939 - to the writing of yet another sex book (L'Encyclopédie de la famille), the third and last. Then, after three months of quiet work in the South of France, came the next hurdle: on 3 September the War broke out, and on 2 October I was arrested by the French police.

Koestler then describes the unfolding of what he calls 'Kafkaesque events' in his life; spending four months in the concentration camp in the Pyrenees and being released in January 1940, only to be continuously harassed by the police. "During the next three months I finished the novel in the hours snatched between interrogations and searches of my flat, in the constant fear that I would be arrested again and the manuscript of Darkness at Noon confiscated". After Hardy mailed her translation to London in May 1940, she fled to London. Meanwhile, Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted it in North Africa, and made his way to Portugal.^[8][9][7] Waiting in Lisbon for passage to Great Britain, Koestler heard a false report that the ship taking Hardy to England had been torpedoed and all persons lost (along with his only manuscript); he attempted suicide.^[10][11] He wrote about this incident in Scum of the Earth (1941), his memoir of that period. Koestler finally arrived in London, and the book was published there in early 1941.

Darkness at Noon is an allegory set in the USSR (not named) during the 1938 purges as Stalin consolidated his dictatorship by eliminating potential rivals within the Communist Party: the military and the professionals. None of this is identified explicitly in the book. Most of the novel occurs within an unnamed prison and in the recollections of the main character, Rubashov.^{[citation needed]} Koestler drew on the experience of being imprisoned by Francisco Franco's officials during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his memoir, Dialogue with Death. He was kept in solitary confinement and expected to be executed. He was permitted to walk in the courtyard in the company of other prisoners. Though he was not beaten, he believed that other prisoners were.^{[citation needed]}

The main character is Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, a man in his fifties whose character is based on "a number of men who were the victims of the so-called Moscow trials", several of whom "were personally known to the author".^[12] Rubashov is a stand-in for the Old Bolsheviks as a group,^[13] and Koestler uses him to explore their actions at the 1938 Moscow show trials.^[14][15] Secondary characters include some fellow prisoners:

• No. 402 is a Czarist army officer and veteran inmate,^[16] with an archaic sense of personal honor, as Rubashov would consider it, .
• "Rip Van Winkle", an old revolutionary demoralised and apparently driven to madness by 20 years of solitary confinement and further imprisonment.^[17]
• "Harelip", who "sends his greetings" to Rubashov, but insists on keeping his name secret.^[18]

Two other secondary characters never make a direct appearance but are mentioned frequently:

• Number One, representing Joseph Stalin, dictator of the USSR. He is depicted in a widely disseminated photograph, a "well-known color print that hung over every bed or sideboard in the country and stared at people with its frozen eyes".^[19]
• Old Bolsheviks. They are represented by an image in his "mind's eye, a big photograph in a wooden frame: the delegates to the first congress of the Party", in which they sat "at a long wooden table, some with their elbows propped on it, others with their hands on their knees, bearded and earnest".^[20]

Rubashov has two interrogators:

• Ivanov, a comrade from the civil war and old friend.
• Gletkin, a young man characterised by starching his uniform so that it "cracks and groans" whenever he moves.^[21]

Character described in flashbacks and in the third interrogation:

• Orlova, Rubashov's secretary and lover.

Darkness at Noon was very successful, selling half a million copies in France alone.^[31] Kingsley Martin described the novel as "one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it".^[32] The New York Times described Darkness at Noon as "a splendid novel, an effective explanation of the riddle of the Moscow treason trials...written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling and with such persuasive simplicity that it is absorbing as melodrama".^[32]

George Steiner said it was one of the few books that may have "changed history", while George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the New Statesman in 1941, stated:

Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.^[33]

The novel was adapted as a stage play by Sidney Kingsley circa 1950, which was made into a 1955 television production on the American television series Producer’s Showcase.

Writers interested in the political struggles of the time followed Koestler and other Europeans closely.^{[citation needed]} Orwell wrote, "Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin, Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks".^[34] In 1944, Orwell thought that the best political writing in English was being done by Europeans and other non-native British. His essay on Koestler discussed Darkness at Noon.^[35] Orwell's Homage to Catalonia, which was bout the Spanish Civil War, sold poorly; he decided after reviewing Darkness at Noon that fiction was the best way to describe totalitarianism, and wrote Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.^[31] When reviewing Nineteen Eighty-Four, Arthur Mizener said that Orwell drew on his feelings about Koestler's handling of Rubashov's confession when he wrote his extended section of the conversion of Winston Smith.^[36]

In 1954, at the end of a long government inquiry and a show trial, Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, the former high-ranking Romanian Communist Party member and government official, was sentenced to death in Romania.^[37][38] According to his collaborator Belu Zilber, Pătrăşcanu read Darkness at Noon in Paris while envoy to the 1946 Peace Conference, and took the book back to Romania.^[37][38] Both American and European communists considered Darkness at Noon to be anti-Stalinist and anti-USSR. In the 1940s, numerous scriptwriters in Hollywood were still communists, generally having been attracted to the party during the 1930s. According to Kenneth Lloyd Billingsley in an article published in 2000, communists considered Koestler's novel important enough to prevent its being adapted for movies; the writer Dalton Trumbo "bragged" about his success in that to the newspaper The Worker.^[39]

U.S. Navy admiral James Stockdale used the novel's title as a code to his wife and the U.S. government to fool his North Vietnamese captors' censors when he wrote as a POW during the Vietnam War. He signaled the torture of American POW's by communist North Vietnam: "One thinks of Vietnam as a tropical country, but in January the rains came, and there was cold and darkness, even at noon." His wife contacted U.S. Naval Intelligence and Stockdale confirmed in code in other letters that they were being tortured.^[40] At the height of the media attention during the Clinton–Lewinsky scandal, U.S. President Bill Clinton reportedly referred to Koestler's novel, telling an aide "I feel like a character in the novel Darkness at Noon" and "I am surrounded by an oppressive force that is creating a lie about me and I can't get the truth out."^[41]

The novel is of special interest to historians of British propaganda, due to the heavy financial support that the novel secretly received from the Information Research Department (IRD), a covert branch of the UK Foreign Office dedicated to disinformation, pro-colonial, and anti-communist propaganda.^[42][43] The IRD bought thousands of copies to inflate sales statistics, and also used British embassies to translate and distribute the novel to be used as Cold War propaganda.^[44][45][46]

Rubashov resigns himself to the reality that people are not capable of self-governance nor even of steering a democratic government to their own benefit. He asserts this is true for a period of time following technological advancements—a period in which people as a group have yet to learn to adapt to and harness, or at least respond to the technological advancements in a way that actually benefits them. Until this period of adaptation runs its course, Rubashov comes to accept that a totalitarian government is perhaps not unjustified as people would only steer society to their own detriment anyway. Having reached this conclusion, Rubashov resigns himself to execution without defending himself against charges of treason.

Every jump of technical progress leaves the relative intellectual development of the masses a step behind, and thus causes a fall in the political-maturity thermometer. It takes sometimes tens of years, sometimes generations, for a people's level of understanding gradually to adapt itself to the changed state of affairs, until it has recovered the same capacity for self-government as it had already possessed at a lower stage of civilization. (Hardy translation)

And so every leap of technical progress brings with it a relative intellectual regression of the masses, a decline in their political maturity. At times it may take decades or even generations before the collective consciousness gradually catches up to the changed order and regains the capacity to govern itself that it had formerly possessed at a lower stage of civilization. (Boehm translation)

― Arthur Koestler, Darkness at Noon