Darkness at Noon by {author}: summary and why it matters
Arthur Koestler's 1940 novel of an Old Bolshevik who is imprisoned and made to confess, an inside view of the Moscow show trials.
The book
| Author | Arthur Koestler |
|---|---|
| First published | 1940 |
| First publisher | Jonathan Cape |
| Kind of book | Novel |
What it argues
Rubashov is a founder of the revolution who has risen high in the party and is now arrested as a traitor. In his cell he reviews his career and the doctrine that guided it: the end justifies the means, and the individual is nothing before the collective. He had sent others to their deaths on that principle and now sees it turned on him.
The interrogators, one of an older generation and another a young brute, press him to confess to crimes he did not commit in order to serve the party, and Rubashov, after a long inner debate, yields. The novel shows how a believer can be persuaded that his own destruction is logical.
Koestler, a former Communist, wrote it after leaving the party, and it was drawn from the Moscow trials of the 1930s, in which old revolutionaries were induced to confess.
Why it matters
The novel helped many readers understand how true believers could confess to absurd charges, and it shaped the anticommunism of the postwar years. Whittaker Chambers and others considered it a document of their generation's disillusion.
About the author
Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was a Hungarian-born writer who joined the German Communist Party in 1931, spent time in the Soviet Union and was imprisoned in Franco's Spain. He left the party after the Moscow trials. He wrote the novel in German, and the manuscript was translated into English by Daphne Hardy, who was then his companion, and published in Britain in 1940.
Who should read it
Readers of twentieth-century literature and politics.
Sources
Profile last reviewed November 8, 2026