THE NEWYORKER, SEPTEMBER 30, 2019 85
nism is very different from Orwell’s vi-
sion in “1984,” which was published nine
years later. In Orwell’s dystopia, “Ing-
soc,” English socialism, is not really an
ideology at all, just a tissue of lies and a
tool for mass hypnosis. The Party’s leader,
O’Brien, famously tells Winston Smith,
after his arrest, that the core of its ap-
peal is pure sadism, the pleasure of ex-
ercising total power over another: “If
you want a picture of the future, imag-
ine a boot stamping on a human face—
forever.” Stalinism, for Orwell, dressed
up this power worship in a lot of mean-
ingless doctrine that people learned to
repeat without thinking about it—what
the novel calls “duckspeak.”
Orwell’s book, in other words, is rel-
atively indifferent to the intellectual
content of Communism, which may ex-
plain why it is now more popular than
Koestler’s. Koestler takes dialectics se-
riously. Marx claimed to have shown
that history was a process of continual
conflict moving toward a final redemp-
tion, when the proletariat would cast
off its chains and the exploitation of
humanity would disappear. For Koest-
ler, it was the belief in the historical in-
evitability of this outcome that enabled
the Bolsheviks to act with such ruth-
lessness: acts that ordinary morality
judged to be wrong would be justified
as right and necessary once a classless
society had been established. “Whoever
proves right in the end must first be and
do wrong,” Rubashov says. But, as he
sits in his cell, he comes to realize the
immensity of this moral gamble; for if
the revolution fails, and a just society
doesn’t come into being, then the rev-
olutionaries’ crimes will remain merely
that. “It is only after the fact that we
learn who was right to begin with,”
Rubashov says. “In the meantime we
act on credit, in the hope of being ab-
solved by history.”
The deferral of responsibility for one’s
own actions to an outside agency, such
as history, is what Sartre, in his existen-
tialist writings of the time, defined as
“bad faith.” And Rubashov’s awakening,
like Koestler’s in his Spanish cell, is a
kind of existential crisis—a sudden rec-
ognition of the necessity of individual
judgment. The Communist Party, Koest-
ler writes, has “a tendency to shy away
from using the first-person singular,”
since it reckons in masses, not individ-
uals. The “I” is, for the Party, nothing
more than “the grammatical fiction,” an
illusion that had to be overcome in order
to achieve justice for the many.
But Rubashov’s experience in prison
convinces him that the “I,” for all its fra-
gility, is of infinite value, because it is
the ultimate source and basis of moral-
ity. To the Party, the fact that the “I”
partakes of infinity is what makes it use-
less for the purposes of logic: “Infinity
was a politically suspect quantity,” Koest-
ler writes. But if you remove the irra-
tional dimension from human exis-
tence—call it subjectivity, or, in religious
terms, the soul—it turns out that you
can no longer understand how people
will feel and act. As Rubashov comes
to see, for Communism there was a
“mistake in the calculation—the equa-
tion did not add up.”
If the Soviet Union was, as its de-
fenders often said, an experiment, for
Koestler it was an experiment gone
wrong, in which “the experimenters have
flayed the test person alive and left him
facing history with exposed tissue, mus-
cles, and tendons.” It is Rubashov’s
long-standing failure to understand this
truth, not his alleged crimes against the
state, that finally leads him to embrace
his guilt:
Why hadn’t the prosecutor asked: “Accused
Rubashov, what about infinity?” He would not
have known how to answer, and here, right
here, was the true source of his guilt. Could
there be any greater?
At its core, “Darkness at Noon” treats
Stalinism as a philosophical problem.
But was it? Doubtless, most of the crimes
committed in its name stemmed from
more ordinary motives, like greed, fear,
and hatred, just as the defendants of the
Moscow Trials confessed largely out
of terror and exhaustion rather than
as penitence for existential guilt. Still,
Koestler saw that, in the modern world,
it took the ruthlessness of an idea to
marshal ordinary human cruelty into an
irresistible force. It is this distrust of the
tyrannical power of reason, even when
it considers itself most righteous and
humane, that makes “Darkness at Noon”
a subversive book even today. It is still
hard for people who consider them-
selves enlightened to accept Rubashov’s
hard-won conclusion: “Perhaps think-
ing everything through to the end was
not a healthy thing to do.” October 11-13
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