Confessions of a Revolutionary

Arthur Koestler - Darkness at Noon (New Edition)

The Wall Street Journal, September 28, 2019

Arthur Koestler’s “Darkness at Noon” was one of the most influential novels of the 20th century, and the 20th century would have been a better century had it been more influential still. Yet until now, the book could only be read at one remove, in editions based on a hasty English translation of a German text presumed lost in the confusion of wartime.

In 2015, however, this changed with the rediscovery of the sole carbon copy of the missing (and slightly fuller) German-language manuscript in a Swiss archive. Mailed from Paris to Zurich in 1940 and then forgotten, the text has now been translated by Philip Boehm and given an informative introduction by Michael Scammell, the author of a fine biography of Koestler. The other addition to this trade-paperback volume is an appendix containing excerpts from the carefully-worded confession of the Old Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin at his trial in 1938, a confession which was one of the inspirations for “Darkness at Noon.” It featured an admission of “political” responsibility for vast conspiracies against the Soviet state and a curious statement on the futility of dying “unrepented.”

The country in which “Darkness at Noon” takes place is never specified, but it doesn’t have to be. Readers are left in no doubt where it is set and at whom the work was aimed, with, eventually, devastating effect. A best seller in the dangerous postwar years, “Darkness at Noon” helped turn public opinion in faltering corners of the free world against the dictator referred to in the book’s pages as “Number One.” A novel of talk and ideas rather than action, the work describes the Calvary of Nikolai Rubashov, an architect of a long-soured revolution and a hero of the civil war that saved it. In the weeks following his arrest on the orders of “Number One,” Rubashov is both persuaded and, critically, persuades himself to plead guilty to crimes he has not committed—a plea that fulfils his duty to a cause in which, despite everything, he continues to believe, a plea that also leads to his execution.

The closest that Rubashov comes to experiencing torture are the blinding light of an inquisitor’s lamp and sleep deprivation. But those who argued that “Darkness at Noon” downplayed the regime’s cruelty are missing the point. Neither Rubashov nor his interrogators make any secret of the horrors of communist rule and at least two of his fellow inmates have been savagely tortured. Koestler’s emphasis was elsewhere, on the behavior of a handful of defendants at the most notorious Stalinist show trials. These trials were, as the protagonists of “Darkness at Noon” all acknowledge, morality plays. Key defendants—once the Party’s darlings, now remorseful villains—seemed to step willingly into the roles they had been allotted, abasing themselves as they admitted to counter-revolutionary wickedness irreconcilable with any conceivable reality.

Did any of these men make their confessions, as Rubashov does, out of a desire to perform one last service for the party? Although Rubashov knows that some supposedly voluntary admissions were the result of promises of leniency or undertakings to go easy on a defendant’s family, such “incentives” were even more frequent than Koestler, writing in 1939 and ‘40, may have realized. For the most part, these mea culpas owed more to brutality than true belief.

Nevertheless, Koestler’s depiction of one communist’s crisis of faith remains essential reading. “Darkness at Noon” may or may not answer the question why so many Old Bolsheviks really went crawling to their deaths, but it does clarify why they had been (and their intellectual heirs still were) prepared to send those who were in the way to theirs. Koestler had only recently abandoned communism (“Darkness at Noon” is also a reckoning with his own past), but he never shook off the transcendental longing it once satisfied. As such, he was ideally equipped to explain that creed’s millenarian appeal, and the ferocity that its imposition would inevitably bring in its wake: “We tear the old skin off humanity,” notes the more sophisticated of Rubashov’s two interrogators, “and make a new one. That’s not for people with weak nerves. . . .”

Freed from one of Franco’s prisons early in 1937, Koestler began “Darkness at Noon” while on the French Riviera two summers later. Despite arrest and internment—after the Nazi-Soviet pact the French authorities distrusted foreigners with communist associations (Koestler was Hungarian; that he was Jewish only made things worse)—he completed the work in Paris just weeks before the Phony War came to its abrupt end. Koestler’s girlfriend, Daphne Hardy, a young British art student, translated the book into English, sometimes almost as it was being written.

Hardy was fluent in German, but she had been brought up in the Netherlands and had never attended a British school; some niceties of English grammar eluded her. She was inexperienced, working at high speed in chaotic conditions, and Koestler didn’t have the language skills to give her prose the polish it occasionally needed. Adding to her difficulties, as someone unfamiliar with the peculiarities of Soviet ideology she cannot have found it straightforward to understand, let alone translate, Rubashov’s intellectual torment.

Nevertheless, Hardy’s text—sent by her to England and first edited and published in 1940—became, until now, the definitive “Darkness at Noon.” The extraordinarily resonant title—inspired by lines from the book of Job—was Hardy’s work too. “The Vicious Circle,” Koestler’s dreary suggestion, had been rejected by his publishers.

While Hardy’s original translation and Philip Boehm’s new one retell very similar stories, the differences between them add up, and are worth noting both for their style and for the way they convey Koestler’s message. Mr. Boehm has a long track record in literary translation—and it shows. The body of Rubashov’s mistress is “languid,” rather than Hardy’s “lazy”; a debate is “tough” rather than “tenacious.” Mr. Boehm’s text captures both the relationship between Rubashov and his interrogators more precisely and with more nuance than its predecessor. Thanks, I suspect, to Mr. Boehm’s access to the manuscript and greater grasp of Koestler’s subject matter, his text also reinforces the book’s unstated, if evident Russian backdrop (thus “humanitarian scruples” become “Tolstoyan impulses” and the “jungles of the East,” the taiga) as well as the depths of Rubashov’s descent: The prisoner is subjected to “interrogations,” not “hearings.” But the advantage is not always Mr. Boehm’s. Perhaps working directly (and sleeping) with the author allowed Hardy room for a few quiet flourishes such as “back in the ring” instead of “back making policy.”

Overall, and unsurprisingly, Mr. Boehm’s translation is better and more readable. It also enjoys a superior claim to authenticity. But it will never have the historical influence of Hardy’s. Meanwhile, the brilliance of her title, with its layers of meaning, will remain, as it should, undimmed.