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Darkness at Noon | Introduction

Arthur Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1940, France) is one of the twentieth century’s most famous “political novels,” or fictional accounts of a historical reality. Written by a former member of the Communist Party, it is a unique glimpse into the volatile political situation under the government of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) in the late 1930s. Its main character, Rubashov, combines characteristics of key Soviet politicians and intellectual leaders from the Bolshevik Revolution, and the story of his imprisonment and confession explains and develops the topical political themes of totalitarianism, socialism, communism, and individualism.

Part of the reason for the novel’s wide success is the fact that Koestler, who was influenced by Sigmund Freud was able to weave his political and philosophical themes into a compelling psychological narrative. With the use of rationalistic argument and religious symbolism, Koestler is able to consider politics together with psychology and individualism. Despite the loss of the original German text, Daphne Hardy’s English translation of the novel, published in London in 1940, has become an international classic and has profoundly affected how history remembers the Moscow Show Trials.

Darkness at Noon Summary

The First Hearing
Darkness at Noon begins with its main character, Rubashov, being locked in his solitary prison cell, No. 404, where he falls asleep, dreaming of his arrest, until the 7 a.m. bugle call. When he wakes, Rubashov meditates on whether he will be shot, saying to himself, “‘The old guard is dead.… We are the last,’” and rubbing his “pince-nez” (eyeglasses that stay on the nose with a spring). After a “big man in uniform,” later revealed to be examiner Gletkin, tells him he gets no breakfast because he has a toothache, Rubashov begins a conversation with the occupant of cell No. 402 by tapping out the letters of the alphabet to him.

Rubashov then has a flashback to one of his foreign missions to southern Germany, where the satellite Communist group aided by the USSR Communist Party was falling apart. Since Richard, the leader of the group, had questioned and altered the Party’s propaganda, Rubashov told him he was no longer a member of the Party and left him to his (very bleak) fate.

Looking out the window of his cell, Rubashov notices a man with a thin upper lip staring at him from the prison grounds and finds out from No. 402 that this man was tortured yesterday. Rubashov then has a flashback to another of his foreign missions, when he met a long-standing Party member, named Little Loewy, in a Belgian seaport. He had to tell Little Loewy and the dock workers to break the strike they have loyally followed for many years and allow Russian-made weapons into Fascist Italy.

The next day, Rubashov is taken to the examining magistrate, who turns out to be Rubashov’s old friend Ivanov, whom Rubashov convinced not to commit suicide during the Civil War (the Bolshevik Revolution). Ivanov develops a logical argument about Rubashov’s involvement in the oppositional movement and states that he has evidence Rubashov planned an attempt on No. 1’s life. Rubashov is scornful of the “idiocy” of the charges, but Ivanov gives him two weeks to consider partially confessing, which will get him out of prison in five years.

The Second Hearing
This section begins with an extract from Rubashov’s diary discussing moral... » Complete Darkness at Noon Summary