Brilliance at Midnight: Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) [Volume: 12(1993), pp. 42-53]

BRILLIANCE AT MIDNIGHT
45
If Koestler had written no book other than Darkness at Noon, he would still
be one of the most celebrated writers of our politicized era. In fact, he is responsible
for thirty-two major books, which can be grouped into three categories: autobiography, fiction and drama, and science essay. The life summarized above is narrated
in detail in five volumes of autobiography: Spanish Testament (I937; reissued in
1938 as Dialogue with Death), Scum of the Earth (I941), The God that Failed (with
others; 1949), Arrow in the Blue (1952), and The Invisible Writing (I954). His
three most important works of fiction are without a doubt The Gladiators, Darkness
at Noon (1940), and Arrival and Departure (1943); of his twenty volumes of essays
and science writing, the trilogy consisting of The Sleepwalkers (I959), The Act of
Creation (1964), and The Ghost in the Machine (1967) is particularly distinguished.
Joining the three political novels, on communism and the Soviet experiment, are
three volumes on Jewish identity: the novel Thieves in the Night (1946), the history
Promise and Fulfillment (I949), and the essay The Thirteenth Tribe: The Khazar
Empire and Its Heritage (I976).15
Darkness at Noon is an early work, written in Paris between the summer of
1938 and April I940. The dates are important; when Koestler first began the work
he was no longer a member of the Communist party, and he completed it just two
months before the German occupation of Paris. He wrote the novel in German; it
was translated into English by his friend and wartime companion, the sculptor
Daphne Hardy. Its subject is the show trials held in Moscow between 1934 and
1938; the central character, Nicholas Salmanovitch Rubashov, is a composite based
on "the lives of a number of men who were victims of the so-called Moscow
Trials,"16 of Leon Trotsky (goatee, pince-nez), and of Koestler himself. Rubashov
betrays his secretary, Arlova; in Baku Koestler once betrayed a comrade and lover,
a woman he calls Nadezhda Smirnova. Other such acts loom large in the novel:
Rubashov betrays both Richard and Little Loewy, the Belgian dock worker who,
denounced as an agent provocateur, hangs himself.'7 The inner plot as it unfolds in
Rubashov's mind becomes an examination of conscience, against all odds.
Koestler is concerned with two central questions: first, Do political ends justify
the means employed in attaining them? and second, How could the Moscow show
trials have taken place at all? Why did those accused of fantastic crimes-trumpedup charges all-confess? Koestler, who attaches to his book a motto from Machiavelli's Discorsi, reveals the role that the trials played in Stalin's consolidation of
power after I934. Some have few tears to shed for such figures as Nikolay Bukharin,
Grigory Zinoviev, or Karl Radek; as Orwell wrote in his review of Darkness at
Noon: "The Moscow trials were a horrible spectacle, but if one remembered what
the history of the Old Bolsheviks had been, it was difficult to be sorry for them as
individuals. They took to the sword, and they perished by the sword." 18 As to why
the accused confessed, Koestler explains that they did so out of unquestioning loyalty
to the Party. But there is also a less apparent reason. In the scene with Rubashov's