THENEWYORKER,SEPTEMBER30, 2019 83
tification but a complete theory of life
and history, which dictated both per-
sonal and political morality. And it was
the conflict between that morality and
ordinary moral instincts—which con-
demned things like lying and killing,
which the Party often demanded—that
provided the dramatic focus of “Dark-
ness at Noon.” The novel reminds us of
a time when literature was felt to be ur-
gently political—when the critic Lionel
Trilling could speak of “the dark and
bloody crossroads where literature and
politics meet.” This gave Koestler, like
his contemporaries Jean-Paul Sartre,
George Orwell, and Albert Camus, a
kind of authority that no novelist ap-
proaches today.
“
D
arkness at Noon” is certainly
dated, in the sense that an effort
of imagination is needed to enter into
its time and place. But its central theme
will probably always seem timely, be-
cause every political creed must even-
tually face the question of whether noble
ends can justify evil means. As Koest-
ler saw, this problem reached its pure
form in Communism because its avowed
aim was the noblest of all: the perma-
nent abolition of social injustice through-
out the world. If this could be achieved,
what price would be too high? Maybe
a million or ten million people would
die today, but if billions would be happy
tomorrow wasn’t that worth it? A Com-
munist revolutionary, Koestler writes,
“is forever damned to do what he loathes
the most: become a butcher in order to
stamp out butchery, sacrifice lambs so
lambs will no longer be sacrificed.”
Koestler’s protagonist, Nikolai Sal-
manovich Rubashov, is one such righ-
teous butcher, now facing his turn on
the chopping block. The figure Ru-
bashov especially evokes is Nikolai
Bukharin, a veteran theorist of revolu-
tion who was the most famous of the
defendants in the Moscow Trials. Like
all the other defendants, Bukharin
ended up pleading guilty, and the new
edition of “Darkness at Noon” usefully
reproduces a speech that he gave at his
trial. “I consider myself responsible for
a grave and monstrous crime against
the socialist fatherland and the whole
international proletariat,” he said.
Yet there was ambiguity in that “con-
sider myself responsible,” for Bukharin
insisted that he was unaware of any of
the specific plots of sabotage and as-
sassination with which he had been
charged. His crime, he seemed to be
saying, was not actual but mental, even
metaphysical. Perhaps he was pleading
guilty only because he knew that it was
the last service he could render to the
Party, which he had served for so long.
“For when you ask yourself, ‘If you must
die, what are you dying for?,’ an abso-
lutely black vacuity suddenly rises be-
fore you with startling vividness,” Buk-
harin said in the courtroom. “There was
nothing to die for, if one wanted to die
unrepented.” Repentance, even false re-
pentance, could give propaganda value
to what would otherwise be a mean-
ingless death.
In “Darkness at Noon,” Koestler
inserts a version of these words into
a speech that Rubashov gives at his
trial. But although Rubashov dies as a
loyal Party member, by the end of the
book he has lost his certainty that the
things he did in the Party’s service were
justified. Indeed, Koestler suggests
that the Moscow defendants may have
pleaded guilty as a form of clandestine
atonement for crimes they really did
commit at the Party’s command. “They
were all guilty, just not of those partic-
ular deeds to which they were confess-
ing,” Koestler writes.
M
uch of the power of the book comes
from its journalistic immediacy and
the authenticity of its details. Rubashov’s
jailers, for instance, work on his nerves
by leading a prisoner who was his friend
past his cell on the way to execution;
Robert Conquest, in his groundbreaking
history “The Great Terror” (1968), con-
firmed that this was a standard technique
in Soviet prisons. Koestler explains the
code that political prisoners developed
in order to carry out conversations by
tapping on the walls of their cells. And
he knew that the most common way of
executing prisoners was to shoot them
in the back of the head when they weren’t
expecting it—which is how Rubashov
dies in the final pages of the novel.
But the real plot of “Darkness at
Noon” is almost entirely internal. It lies
in Rubashov’s evolving realization of
“What company do you see yourself starting when
you leave this one in five years?”
• •
