Novel
Darkness at Noon
Arthur Koestler · 1940
Synopsis
Nicolas Rubashov, a former People's Commissar and old revolutionary, is arrested at home in the middle of the night by two officials of the Commissariat for the Interior. In his cell he paces six and a half steps and makes contact with his neighbour, no. 402, by tapping a square alphabet on the wall. His examining magistrate, Ivanov, an old friend and former battalion commander, offers him partial confessions as a way to escape death. Rubashov refuses, and looks back on those he sacrificed to party discipline.
Context
The book was written in German and finished in the spring of 1940. The author's companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, made the English translation almost as he wrote, in haste and without dictionaries, and sent it to London before their flight from Paris; the original was lost in the departure. This English version long remained the only known text, and the translations derived from it, including the one the author himself made into German. In 2015, a doctoral student found in Zurich, in a publisher's archives, a copy of the German typescript; the original text appeared in 2018 and was translated into French in 2022.
Who it is for
A short novel, set almost entirely in a cell; the 2022 French translation follows the German text that was recovered.
Prizes and reception
Eighth among the hundred best English-language novels of the twentieth century according to the Modern Library, although written in German; translated into some thirty languages.
Sources for this page 12
The pages consulted to check this page.