POLITICAL CONTENT IN DARKNESS AT NOON BY ARTHUR KOESTLER
POLITICAL CONTENT IN DARKNESS AT NOON BY ARTHUR KOESTLER

Summary/Abstract: Koestler’s novel entitled Darkness at Noon has an obvious political content. It appeared in 1940(written in German, but first published in English translation) and it marked its author’s disillusion with Russian socialism since to the thirties generation, who had often seen Russia as an ideal socialist state set in opposition with the expanding threat of fascist Germany, the Non-Agression Pact signed between Russia and Germany in 1939 came as a great shock. Moreover, in Darkness at Noon, Koestler sets out to explain the Moscow trials of the thirties in which Stalin had shocked the world again by purging members of his own party. Koestler records in his dedication: “The characters in this book are fictitious. The historical circumstances which determined their actions are real” and thus his intentions are at least partly documentary. The life of his hero, N. S. Rubashov is a synthesis of the lives of a number of men who were victims of these trials and the book is dedicated to them”.

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