Darkness at Noon
This chilling, fictionalized account of one man’s victimization in the Moscow show trials of the 1930s is Scriber’s re-release of Koestler’s classic 1941 novel depicting the horrors of living under a totalitarian regime. While it’s historical fiction now, it was thoroughly contemporary when he wrote it in Paris in 1940; Daphne Hardy translated it from German to English as he wrote, and was able to smuggle the manuscript out of France mere days before Paris fell to the Germans in WWII.
The novel introduces us to Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, a loyal, revered, and leading member of the Communist Party since the 1917 Revolution, just as he is jailed by his own compatriots as a traitor. The novel is historically accurate in its description of how the Party began to devour its own, as Stalin (here referred to as “No. 1”), who was never as popular or competent as Lenin (“the old man”), sought to shore up and protect his power base. The primary tenets of the Party – that the Party is never wrong, the individual is meaningless, the end justifies any means, and that wrong ideas are crimes punishable by death – all support the systematic purges of the old guard. Rubashov is hardly innocent of following the logic of this warped philosophy to its bloody ends himself, but now finds himself its next victim. As he tells his tormentors: “I plead guilty to having placed the idea of man above the idea of mankind.”
It’s a strong story told with compelling, horrifying realism. This is a timely release from Scribner, and I recommend it as an apt reminder of what life was like for millions under rapacious, repressive Soviet Communist rule, where mercy was considered poison.
