Koestler
Arthur Koestler and the ‘Political Libido’
Koester và cái gọi là "Li-bi-đô Chính trị" [Li-bi-đô phải đạo]
Ui chao, lại nhớ đến cái "chính trị phải đạo"
của một em Mít viết phê bình bằng tiếng Tẩy
Tiểu
thuyết của Koestler cho thời của chúng ta
True unbeliever: Arthur Koestler and the
‘Political
Libido’
Patrick J. Mcgrath
TLS June 6, 2008
Ông ta tàn nhẫn với vợ, tại sao nghe ông ta lầu bầu về Stalin?
Tôi bực nhất là thiên hạ chỉ biết tôi, qua Đêm giữa ban ngày.
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Patrick J. Mcgrath
TLS June 6, 2008
Ông ta tàn nhẫn với vợ, tại sao nghe ông ta lầu bầu về Stalin?
Tôi bực nhất là thiên hạ chỉ biết tôi, qua Đêm giữa ban ngày.
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When Arthur Koestler stopped writing about
politics in
the early 1950s and launched his second career as a scientific author,
he
likened it to a change of sex, yet his second sex did not enjoy the
respect he
felt it deserved. "What I most resent", he told Ian Hamilton in 1974,
"is being labeled for ever as the author of Darkness at
Noon and other political books at the expense of the
second half of my work, which to my mind is the more important." Today,
if
readers know him at all, it is indeed for Darkness
at Noon, or possibly The God That
Failed. Harold Bloom gave a nice passive-aggressive summary of the
received
view in 2001. "Koestler achieved fame during the Cold War era, which in
the first decade of the twenty-first century is now remote, if not
archaic. For
Koestler, Soviet Communism was the God that Failed, and he went off
whoring
after even stranger Gods, settling finally for the God of a weird,
personal
Evolutionism."
Whoring is the wrong word here for any number of reasons, but even Koestler's most enthusiastic admirers have to concede that his late career swerve into the crackpot world of ESP and the paranormal did his reputation no service. Then there was David Cesarani's bizarre biography (reviewed in the TLS, January 12, 1999), which promised a deeper understanding of its subject - and succeeded brilliantly. By the time he was through, he had recast Koestler in the public mind as a bully, a drunk and a rapist. Cesarani seemed to think that Koestler's private transgressions somehow invalidated the published work (he tyrannized his wife, so why listen to him banging on about Stalin?). Yet neither Koestler's private faults nor his occult obsessions should diminish, it seems to me, the value of his great literary work. The pity is not that the later work is neglected, but that appreciation of his political writing is so narrowly constricted to Darkness at Noon. His works of the 1940s alone constitute one of the strongest bibliographies of twentieth-century political writing. Vintage helped somewhat by reissuing his superb, two-volume autobiography, Arrow into the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954) for the centenary of his birth in 2005. This is a masterpiece of the genre. But his two equally powerful memoirs of imprisonment in Spain and France, Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth, doin are out of print, as are his collected essays, ous, The Yogi and the Commissar and Trail of the Dinosaur. Gone too is Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine, 1917-1948….
Whoring is the wrong word here for any number of reasons, but even Koestler's most enthusiastic admirers have to concede that his late career swerve into the crackpot world of ESP and the paranormal did his reputation no service. Then there was David Cesarani's bizarre biography (reviewed in the TLS, January 12, 1999), which promised a deeper understanding of its subject - and succeeded brilliantly. By the time he was through, he had recast Koestler in the public mind as a bully, a drunk and a rapist. Cesarani seemed to think that Koestler's private transgressions somehow invalidated the published work (he tyrannized his wife, so why listen to him banging on about Stalin?). Yet neither Koestler's private faults nor his occult obsessions should diminish, it seems to me, the value of his great literary work. The pity is not that the later work is neglected, but that appreciation of his political writing is so narrowly constricted to Darkness at Noon. His works of the 1940s alone constitute one of the strongest bibliographies of twentieth-century political writing. Vintage helped somewhat by reissuing his superb, two-volume autobiography, Arrow into the Blue (1952) and The Invisible Writing (1954) for the centenary of his birth in 2005. This is a masterpiece of the genre. But his two equally powerful memoirs of imprisonment in Spain and France, Dialogue with Death and Scum of the Earth, doin are out of print, as are his collected essays, ous, The Yogi and the Commissar and Trail of the Dinosaur. Gone too is Promise and Fulfillment: Palestine, 1917-1948….
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Note:
Cuốn này, bản dịch đầu tiên xuất hiện ở Miền Nam, là của Mẽo, qua Phòng Thông Tin Huê Kỳ, ngay sau 1954, tiếp theo đợt di cư khổng lồ, cùng vài cuốn khác nữa, thí dụ Tôi chọn tự do. Sau đó, còn mấy bản dịch nữa, chứ không phải chỉ có Tội Công Thành. Thí dụ, bản của Thạch Trung Giả, Số Không Đến Vô Tận.
Đây cũng là một trong những cuốn sách vỡ lòng của Gấu này.
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Cuốn này, bản dịch đầu tiên xuất hiện ở Miền Nam, là của Mẽo, qua Phòng Thông Tin Huê Kỳ, ngay sau 1954, tiếp theo đợt di cư khổng lồ, cùng vài cuốn khác nữa, thí dụ Tôi chọn tự do. Sau đó, còn mấy bản dịch nữa, chứ không phải chỉ có Tội Công Thành. Thí dụ, bản của Thạch Trung Giả, Số Không Đến Vô Tận.
Đây cũng là một trong những cuốn sách vỡ lòng của Gấu này.
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Người
dịch cho rằng sẽ rất
hợp lý nếu chuyển ngữ tên tác phẩm này thành Đêm giữa ban ngày nếu như
trước đó
chưa có một tác phẩm đã rất nổi tiếng cùng tên của nhà văn Vũ Thư Hiên.
PMN
PMN
VTH hẳn
đã đọc Đêm Giữa Ban
Ngày, bản dịch cuốn của Koestler, những
ngày sau chiến thắng 30 Tháng Tư, vô Miền Nam thu gom chiến lợi phẩm và
khi ông viết cuốn của ông,
chắc hẳn đã tự coi mình, cũng một thứ… tội công thành?
Ui chao
một cái tên chôm từ
của một tác phẩm có trước đó, mà lại ảnh hưởng ngược lại, như vậy sao?
Theo Gấu, không phải tự nhiên, tình cờ, mà VTH chơi [chôm] cái tít Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày!
Liệu chăng, đây cũng là một kinh nghiệm đọc Koestler sau 1975?
NQT
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Theo Gấu, không phải tự nhiên, tình cờ, mà VTH chơi [chôm] cái tít Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày!
Liệu chăng, đây cũng là một kinh nghiệm đọc Koestler sau 1975?
NQT
*
Trên
Tin Văn, đã từng lèm bèm
nhiều lần về cuốn này. Nhưng, phán về nó, là phải viện đến Steiner, khi
trả lời tờ The Paris Review:
Tôi may
được quen Arthur
Koestler, biết được cái điều: ai mà chẳng dám đánh đổi tất cả, nếu viết
được
một tác phẩm như là Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày: một trong những hành động
tối
thượng của tư tưởng. Đối với tôi, đây là một trường hợp biên cương
[giữa văn
học và ý hệ]. Nó sẽ vẫn còn được đọc, không chỉ vì Gletkin và Rubashov
là những
nhân vật giả tưởng, mà còn vì những tranh luận về chủ nghĩa Stalin, chủ
nghĩa
Marx, về sự tra tấn, và khủng bố: đâu là bản chất của sự dấn thân tới
chết, với
ý hệ? Đâu là bản chất của dối trá, nhằm bảo vệ chính nghĩa? Đúng là một
cuốn
sách giầu có. Koestler đưa vô, khá đủ độ đậm của cuộc sống, khiến nó
không
nghèo nàn như là một kịch bản về ý hệ.
Tuyệt!
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Hồi nhớ
thường lầm lạc, và
thường hay "chọc quê" con người. Để chống lại, con người ôm lấy kỷ
niệm giả, thay vì sự kiện thực. Người đọc đành phải coi những biến cố
trong
tiểu thuyết chỉ là những giả dụ. Bản thân người viết, qua mục "Tạp
Ghi" (trên tờ Văn Học, Cali)
đã hơn một lần bị trí nhớ đánh lừa. Câu của Sartre, trong bài viết về
Koestler,
"tác phẩm lớn như cây đại thụ", thực sự không phải vậy. Khi viết về
Sartoris của Faulkner, ông cho rằng tác phẩm lớn, tới một lúc nào đó,
giống như
sỏi đá, cây cỏ. Người đọc chấp nhận, và quên luôn nó đã từng có một tác
giả.
Cũng trong bài "Trầm luân vì niềm tin" kể trên, người viết đã cố tình
"hiểu sai" ý nghĩa của cuốn truyện, vì như một độc giả có thiên kiến,
hoặc như bao con người của 10 ngày cải tạo, anh ta không tin sự chuyển
hoá cuối
cùng, Rubashov "lần hồi" trở lại làm người.
Giả và thực trong văn chương [tạp ghi]
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Giả và thực trong văn chương [tạp ghi]
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Bằng roi
vọt chúng ta quất
lên đám đông đang rên rỉ, bắt họ hướng về hạnh phúc chỉ có tính tương
lai và
chỉ là lý thuyết..."
Koestler: Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày.
Trầm luân vì niềm tin
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Koestler: Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày.
Trầm luân vì niềm tin
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Trong chuyến
đi dài chạy trốn quê hương, trong mớ sách vở vội vã mang theo, tôi thấy
hai cuốn, một của Nabokov, và một của Koestler. Tôi đã đọc Darkness at
Noon" qua bản dịch "Đêm hay Ngày" do Phòng Thông Tin Hoa Kỳ xuất bản
cùng một thời với những cuốn như "Tôi chọn Tự do"... Chúng vô tình đánh
dấu cuộc di cư vĩ đại với gần một triệu người, trong có một chú nhỏ
không làm sao quên nổi chiếc chuồng giam giữ thời ấu thơ của mình: Miền
Bắc, Hà-nội.
Lần thứ nhì bỏ chạy quê hương,
cùng nỗi nhớ Sài-gòn là sự thật đắng cay mà tuổi già càng làm thêm cay
đắng: Một giấc mộng, dù lớn lao dù lý tưởng cỡ nào, cũng không làm sống
lại, chỉ một sợi nắng Sài-gòn: Trong những đêm chập chờn mất ngủ, hồn
thiêng của thành phố thức giấc ở trong tôi, tôi tưởng hồn ma của chính
mình đang lang thang trên những nẻo đường xưa cũ, sống lại cái phần đời
đã chết theo cùng với Sài Gòn, bởi cái phần đời đó mới đáng kể. Tôi đọc
lại Nabokov và lần ra sợi dây máu mủ, ruột thịt giữa tác giả-nhà văn
lưu vong-con vật đáng thương-nàng nymphette tinh quái. Đọc Koestler để
hiểu rằng, tuổi trẻ của tôi và của bao lớp trẻ sau này, đều bị trù yểm,
bởi một ngày mai có riêng một con quỷ của chính nó:
Miền Bắc, Hà-nội.
Miền Bắc, Hà-nội.
Koestler,
enfin, retrové, cuốn "Le Zéro et l'Infini", tôi lục lọi cách chuyến đi
không xa, trong mớ sách "ký gởi" - một hình thức mới của sách vỉa hè-
tại một tiệm phía bên kia cầu Thị Nghè. Cái thiểu số hỗn độn may mắn
sống sót sau những ngày tháng Tư, trở thành những nạn nhân đầu tiên
thay con người Sài-gòn dãi dầu mưa nắng Trong số những người đang lục
lọi quanh tôi, có kẻ chỉ tò mò lật vài trang đầu, tìm tên chủ nhân, có
thể kèm theo đó là một lời đề tặng của chính tác giả cuốn sách. Cả hai
đều đã đi xa, vợ con ở nhà mang mớ sách kỷ niệm đổi lấy một vài mớ rau,
một hai lon gạo.
Gặp lại những nhân vật
của Koestler, những nhân vật văn chương còn mang nặng những nét đặc thù
của nguyên mẫu ngoài đời, những Roubachof suốt đời tắm bằng máu của kẻ
khác, kể cả của người yêu, bạn bè, đến khi chết lại mong trở thành
những Thánh Tử Đạo, đọc lại nhhững câu văn mang sự thực khủng khiếp còn
hơn cả những lời nguyền rủa: "Bằng roi vọt chúng ta quất lên đám đông
đang rên rỉ, bắt họ hướng về hạnh phúc chỉ có tính tương lai và hoàn
toàn lý thuyết...", tôi bỗng nhận ra một điều thật giản dị: Nếu những
tác phẩm lớn đều cưu mang trong nó bóng dáng của những tác phẩm lớn
khác - một cách nào đó Hemingway chú giải Joyce, Camus mô phỏng Kafka,
rõ ràng Garcia Marquez viết lại Faulkner... - Cũng vậy, những bạo chúa
chỉ là những bản sao của những bạo chúa khác. Staline bắt chước Néron,
cả hai đều có tham vọng văn chương, một muốn làm thi sĩ, một muốn ngự
sử văn đàn, kẻ ban phát giải thưởng văn học. Mao diễn lại tuồng đốt
sách, chôn học trò. Molotov chỉ mong người đời coi là một Robespierre
của Cách Mạng Nga. Người ra lệnh bắn vào sinh viên biểu tình tại Thiên
An Môn là một học trò đắc ý của Chu Ân Lai, ông này lại là một học trò
đắc ý nhất của Cách Mạng Pháp. Polpot đã từng du học ở Paris. Tất cả
đều tâm đắc một điều: Không có một cuộc cách mạng nào mà không có quá
độ. Một cuộc cách mạng không đổ máu thì rất đáng ngờ.Lần Cuối Sài Gòn
Cuốn sách nổi tiếng thế giới đầu tiên, liền sau Đệ Nhị Thế Chiến, đúng là cuốn tiểu thuyết ngắn Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày, dịch ra tiếng Tây dưới cái tít Số Không và Vô Tận
Milosz: Koestler
Nhưng lời phán bảnh nhất, là của tay viết tiểu sử K. Ông này coi đây là đòn Cách Sơn Đả Ngưu, bởi vì khi ngồi xuống viết nó, là K. đã nhìn ra hiệp chót của trận đấu, và đã nhìn thấy bức tường Bá Linh, những lâu đài thành quách sụp đổ, và cái đầu của bức tượng Stalin lăn lóc trên đường phố Budapest rồi!
The Last Salvation
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Và cái tít Vòng Tròn Ma Thuật này, liệu có dính dáng tới sự chúc dữ của cái vòng tròn, đề tài ruột của cuốn Những Kẻ Mộng Du của Koestler?
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Tại sao họ tin tưởng vào Stalin?
Không phải tự nhiên, mà
Rubashov, nhân vật của Koestler trong Đêm giữa Ngọ,
Darkness at Noon, bằng lòng thú tội trước bàn thờ, chấp nhận đủ
thứ tội ác mà Đảng và Nhà nước phịa ra cho ông, bằng lòng thú tội trước
tòa án nhân dân, chấp nhận tử vì đạo, Đạo Cộng Sản, cái chuyện, một ông
nhà văn bi giờ, [HKP, xem talawas], đọc nhật ký của đám Nhân Văn Giai
Phẩm, cảm thấy bị tình phụ, ấy là vì, cho đến bi giờ, nhân loại cũng
chưa "vươn tới tầm, chưa đủ chín", chưa đồng thuận, chưa chịu giao lưu
hòa giải, để mà hiểu thấu đáo, thảm họa lớn lao, là thảm họa VC trên
toàn thế giới, tức Cơn Kinh Hoàng, Cuộc Khủng Bố của Stalin, như Aileen
Kelly chỉ ra, trong bài viết nêu trên, cho dù càng ngày càng có thêm hồ
sơ, chứng liệu.
[... that despite the prodigious increase in documentation on the mentalities and motives of those who implemented or colluded with Stalin's Terror, we are still far from a consensus on the lessons to be drawn from that great historical catastrophe.].
Cái câu nói, cái nước ta, cái xứ sở ta, nó vốn như vậy, của me-xừ HNH, có một ý nghĩa sâu thẳm hơn nhiều.
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"Vấn nạn" ba ngưòi khác, trong có ông nhà văn Tô Hoài-Bối, dâm quá thể, làm Gấu nhớ tới Koestler.
Ông này mê nhất cái trò đó, vợ bạn cũng chẳng tha. Mần thịt xong là chàng đi.
Cuốn hách xì xằng nhất của K. Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày, là từ sự kiện thực, giống như Ba Người Khác, từ CCRĐ. Tuy nhiên, cái gọi là "điển hình" (1) ở nhà văn Tô Hoài, thật khác xa của Koestler.
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Nhưng quả là thiên tài, khi, từ bao nhiêu năm trước, với con mắt cú vọ của một ký giả khi nhìn vào sự kiện đời thường, tức diễn tiến những vụ án tại Moscow, mà đã ngửi ra được tiếng chuông gọi hồn của chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản, thì quả là cao thủ!
Và chính cái ngọn lửa thiên tài đó, làm cho Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày [1940] cứ sống hoài, và cùng với nó, là tên của Arthur Koestler. Sáu chục năm sau, [bài điểm cuốn "Koestler, The homeless Mind" của Cesarani, là trên tờ TLS số đề ngày 15 tháng Giêng, 1999. Người điểm: Michael Shelden, tác giả những cuốn Orwell: Tiểu sử được phép 1991, và Graham Greene: The man within, 1994], cuốn sách vẫn tiếp tục hớp hồn độc giả, và vẫn được nhắc nhở tới, trong rất nhiều trường hợp hoàn cảnh.
Ba Người Khác
Tản Mạn về Ba Người Khác
[... that despite the prodigious increase in documentation on the mentalities and motives of those who implemented or colluded with Stalin's Terror, we are still far from a consensus on the lessons to be drawn from that great historical catastrophe.].
Cái câu nói, cái nước ta, cái xứ sở ta, nó vốn như vậy, của me-xừ HNH, có một ý nghĩa sâu thẳm hơn nhiều.
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"Vấn nạn" ba ngưòi khác, trong có ông nhà văn Tô Hoài-Bối, dâm quá thể, làm Gấu nhớ tới Koestler.
Ông này mê nhất cái trò đó, vợ bạn cũng chẳng tha. Mần thịt xong là chàng đi.
Cuốn hách xì xằng nhất của K. Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày, là từ sự kiện thực, giống như Ba Người Khác, từ CCRĐ. Tuy nhiên, cái gọi là "điển hình" (1) ở nhà văn Tô Hoài, thật khác xa của Koestler.
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Nhưng quả là thiên tài, khi, từ bao nhiêu năm trước, với con mắt cú vọ của một ký giả khi nhìn vào sự kiện đời thường, tức diễn tiến những vụ án tại Moscow, mà đã ngửi ra được tiếng chuông gọi hồn của chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản, thì quả là cao thủ!
Và chính cái ngọn lửa thiên tài đó, làm cho Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày [1940] cứ sống hoài, và cùng với nó, là tên của Arthur Koestler. Sáu chục năm sau, [bài điểm cuốn "Koestler, The homeless Mind" của Cesarani, là trên tờ TLS số đề ngày 15 tháng Giêng, 1999. Người điểm: Michael Shelden, tác giả những cuốn Orwell: Tiểu sử được phép 1991, và Graham Greene: The man within, 1994], cuốn sách vẫn tiếp tục hớp hồn độc giả, và vẫn được nhắc nhở tới, trong rất nhiều trường hợp hoàn cảnh.
Ba Người Khác
Tản Mạn về Ba Người Khác
Người dịch cho rằng sẽ rất hợp lý nếu chuyển ngữ tên tác phẩm này thành Đêm giữa ban ngày nếu như trước đó chưa có một tác phẩm đã rất nổi tiếng cùng tên của nhà văn Vũ Thư Hiên.
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Ui chao, hàng dởm, đồ nhái, mà lại bảnh hơn đồ zin, hàng xịn sao? NQT
Giới thiệu Nhật thực qua bản dịch từ
tiếng Anh của dịch giả
Phạm Minh Ngọc với nhan đề Vòng tròn ma thuật kì này, chúng tôi mong
muốn gửi
đến độc giả Việt Nam hi vọng về một tương lai trong đó chúng ta vĩnh
viễn không
bao giờ phải trải qua những kinh nghiệm như được miêu tả trong tác phẩm
cay
đắng này nữa.
talawas chủ nhật
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Theo Gấu, dân Mít chúng ta đã trải qua những kinh nghiệm như được miêu tả trong Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày này rồi, nếu không, Vũ Thư Hiên đã không chôm lấy cái tên cuốn sách của Koestler [bản dịch tiếng Việt trước 1975), làm của mình.
Ông ta tin rằng ông là những thứ bị những tai họa như nhân vật chính trong đó.
Nói rộng ra, tất cả những anh VC bị thất sủng, đều nghĩ như ông VTH này.
Ngay cả những ông như Đào Hiếu, như Phạm Xuân Ẩn... tức là những tên VC nằm vùng, biết rất rõ, cái xã hội Miền Nam đã bị các ông làm thịt đó, tốt đẹp hơn xã hội Miền Bắc, vậy mà đến bây giờ, họ vẫn bảo vệ chân lý, vẫn tiếp tục dối trá, bằng những hồi ký dởm.
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Tôi may được quen Arthur Koestler, biết được cái điều: ai mà chẳng dám đánh đổi tất cả, nếu viết được một tác phẩm như là Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày: một trong những hành động tối thượng của tư tưởng. Đối với tôi, đây là một trường hợp biên cương [giữa văn học và ý hệ]. Nó sẽ vẫn còn được đọc, không chỉ vì Gletkin và Rubashov là những nhân vật giả tưởng, mà còn vì những tranh luận về chủ nghĩa Stalin, chủ nghĩa Marx, về sự tra tấn, và khủng bố: đâu là bản chất của sự dấn thân tới chết, với ý hệ? Đâu là bản chất của dối trá, nhằm bảo vệ chính nghĩa? Đúng là một cuốn sách giầu có. Koestler đưa vô, khá đủ độ đậm của cuộc sống, khiến nó không nghèo nàn như là một kịch bản về ý hệ.
talawas chủ nhật
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Theo Gấu, dân Mít chúng ta đã trải qua những kinh nghiệm như được miêu tả trong Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày này rồi, nếu không, Vũ Thư Hiên đã không chôm lấy cái tên cuốn sách của Koestler [bản dịch tiếng Việt trước 1975), làm của mình.
Ông ta tin rằng ông là những thứ bị những tai họa như nhân vật chính trong đó.
Nói rộng ra, tất cả những anh VC bị thất sủng, đều nghĩ như ông VTH này.
Ngay cả những ông như Đào Hiếu, như Phạm Xuân Ẩn... tức là những tên VC nằm vùng, biết rất rõ, cái xã hội Miền Nam đã bị các ông làm thịt đó, tốt đẹp hơn xã hội Miền Bắc, vậy mà đến bây giờ, họ vẫn bảo vệ chân lý, vẫn tiếp tục dối trá, bằng những hồi ký dởm.
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Tôi may được quen Arthur Koestler, biết được cái điều: ai mà chẳng dám đánh đổi tất cả, nếu viết được một tác phẩm như là Bóng Đêm Giữa Ban Ngày: một trong những hành động tối thượng của tư tưởng. Đối với tôi, đây là một trường hợp biên cương [giữa văn học và ý hệ]. Nó sẽ vẫn còn được đọc, không chỉ vì Gletkin và Rubashov là những nhân vật giả tưởng, mà còn vì những tranh luận về chủ nghĩa Stalin, chủ nghĩa Marx, về sự tra tấn, và khủng bố: đâu là bản chất của sự dấn thân tới chết, với ý hệ? Đâu là bản chất của dối trá, nhằm bảo vệ chính nghĩa? Đúng là một cuốn sách giầu có. Koestler đưa vô, khá đủ độ đậm của cuộc sống, khiến nó không nghèo nàn như là một kịch bản về ý hệ.
Đâu là
bản chất của dối trá, nhằm bảo vệ chính nghĩa?
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Nói rõ hơn, tất cả cuộc chiến Việt Nam, với những điều dối trá, là để bảo vệ chân lý: Nước Việt Nam là một. Nhưng chỉ đến khi Miền Nam bị làm thịt, thì lúc đó mới ngã ngửa ra là, chân lý thì vẫn chân lý, nhưng chính nó cũng bị lừa!
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Nói rõ hơn, tất cả cuộc chiến Việt Nam, với những điều dối trá, là để bảo vệ chân lý: Nước Việt Nam là một. Nhưng chỉ đến khi Miền Nam bị làm thịt, thì lúc đó mới ngã ngửa ra là, chân lý thì vẫn chân lý, nhưng chính nó cũng bị lừa!
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Như đã trình bầy, Gấu này đọc Đêm hay Ngày rất sớm, bản tiếng Việt, của Mẽo xb. Sau đọc bản tiếng Tây, đọc song song với bản tiếng Việt, để học tiếng Tây. Đọc song song với bà cụ nhà thơ TTT, cùng với một vài cuốn khác nữa, thí dụ, Bác sĩ Zhivago, bản của Mặt Trận Bảo Vệ Văn Hóa Tự Do, và rất nhiều bản dịch những tác giả Mẽo, của nhà xb Ziên Hồng.
Buổi tối hai bà cháu ngồi bàn chuyện văn hóa, bà nói tao mê cái con Lara quá, cái thằng chồng VC Liên Xô của nó tao cũng mê!
Rồi Gấu biết tới cuốn Những Người Mộng Du, qua một bài điểm sách trên tờ nrf, mua tại một tiệm sách bán sách cũ trên đường Trần Quí Cáp, gần nhà Huỳnh Phan Anh, những ngày la cà khu Chợ Đũi. Đến khi làm cho Mẽo, là bèn tậu về, và khoe với ông anh nhà thơ, khi ngồi Pagode.
Hóa ra ông cũng mê Koestler. Còn chỉ thêm cho vài cuốn nữa, thí dụ bộ ba cuốn trứ danh, trong có Tiếng Kêu Sảng Khoái Ơ Ra Kià của Archimède, bản tiếng Tây, dịch cuốn The Act of Creation.
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1954. Những
ngày đầu kinh ngạc bỡ ngỡ, cố làm quen Sài-gòn. Chú nhỏ mồ côi cha, một
mình lủi thủi xuống tầu, bỏ lại thành phố vừa mới kịp yêu mến. Tiếng
còi mười giờ chạy dài trên con phố Tràng Tiền, đuổi theo chú bé đến tận
con tầu khổng lồ. Ngơ ngác nhìn biển lạ lần đầu. Cơn say sóng dật dờ.
Ngay cả trong giấc mơ, chú vẫn còn trông thấy thấp thoáng đâu đó, những
trái sấu vàng vương vãi trên con đường từ hồ Halais tới nhà trường gần
bên Bờ Hồ. Vẫn đứa trẻ lớn lên tại Sài-gòn nhưng lúc nào cũng ngây thơ,
cứng đầu, khăng khăng mặc cả cùng quá khứ, nỗi mất mát chỉ có thể đền
bù bằng một tình yêu lớn lao đầu đời: "Anh yêu em bởi vì anh yêu
Hà-nội". Ôi những cái "bởi vì" ngông cuồng đáng yêu của một thời thơ
dại.
Cả tới khi
mối tình tan vỡ vẫn xót xa gượng cười, bởi thành phố tuổi thơ có bao
giờ phản bội?
Và
trộn vào giấc mơ tuổi thơ, là cơn mộng đời rực rỡ. Sẽ trở thành nhà
văn. Sẽ viết một truyện dài nối liền được hai thành phố.
Cơn mộng đời
dẫn tôi tìm lại Koestler, qua bản dịch tiếng Pháp, những ngày học Chu
Văn An, khi nhà trường còn nằm phía sau trường Pétrus Ký, miếng đất sau
trở thành Trung Tâm Học Liệu. Đọc và gần như thuộc lòng một số câu văn,
để trau giồi ngoại ngữ, thâu thập tri thức, tập tành suy tưởng. Rồi dần
dà theo tuổi học, tuổi đời, tôi lần tới những câu của Camus, con người
nổi loạn, những khẩu hiệu làm rung động loài người (Bí mật của Vô sản
là cái chết của Tư bản, thí dụ vậy), những trang nhật ký của
Roquentin...
Lần Cuối Sài Gòn
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Due to Koestler's complex life, the novel was originally
written in German
and translated into English. However, the original German text has been
lost, and German versions are back translations from English. Darkness
at Noon is actually the second part of a trilogy, the first volume
being The
Gladiators about
the subversion of the Spartacus
revolt, and the third Arrival and
Departure about
a refugee in World
War II. The Gladiators was originally written in Hungarian
and Arrival and Departure in English. Of these two, only The
Gladiators has had much success.Lần Cuối Sài Gòn
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Characters
Several inspirations have been suggested for Rubashov. According to George Orwell, "Rubashov might be called Trotsky, Bukharin, Rakovsky or some other relatively civilised figure among the Old Bolsheviks".[1]Koestler arguably drew on his own experience of being imprisoned by Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War. Like Rubashov, he was in solitary confinement, expected to be executed, paced his cell constantly, was permitted to walk in the courtyard in the company of other prisoners, was not beaten himself but knew that others were beaten.
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The French language title is Le Zéro et l'Infini, meaning "Zero and Infinity". Like "Darkness at Noon", it reflects Koestler's lifelong obsession with the meeting of opposites, and dialectics. The book sold over 400,000 copies in France.
American screenwriter and Communist Party USA member Dalton Trumbo openly bragged in the party periodical The Worker that he had prevented Darkness at Noon, among other anti-Stalinist books, from being produced into a Hollywood film.[2]
In 1954, at the end of a long inquiry and a show trial, Communist Romania sentenced to death former high-ranking member of the Romanian Communist Party and one-time government official Lucreţiu Pătrăşcanu, on various charges.[3][4] According to his collaborator Belu Zilber — himself a victim of the trial —, Pătrăşcanu had read Darkness at Noon during the time when he visited Paris as an envoy to the 1946 Peace Conference, and had brought the book back to his native country
Wikipedia
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Như thế, nguyên bản tiếng Đức quả đã bị mất, và theo như Phạm Minh Ngọc, mới tìm lại được.
Nhưng ông không giải thích, nguồn gốc của cái tít.
Gấu phòng đoán, từ những gì đã đọc Koestler, đúng ra, từ kinh nghiệm đọc Những Kẻ Mộng Du, cái vòng tròn ma thuật, chính là... Chủ Nghĩa Cộng Sản
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Giới thiệu Nhật thực qua bản dịch từ tiếng Anh của dịch giả Phạm Minh Ngọc với nhan đề Vòng tròn ma thuật kì này, chúng tôi mong muốn gửi đến độc giả Việt Nam hi vọng về một tương lai trong đó chúng ta vĩnh viễn không bao giờ phải trải qua những kinh nghiệm như được miêu tả trong tác phẩm cay đắng này nữa.
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Vấn đề theo Gấu, không phải là, "hy vọng về một tương lai trong đó chúng ta vĩnh viễn không bao giờ phải trải qua", mà là, "chúng ta đã thực sự đau thương trải qua rồi", thì, làm sao "sống" ["deal" - như đám Mít hải ngoại thường nói], với chúng?
Trên
NYRB số đề ngày 23 tháng Mười, có bài điểm cuốn sách mới nhất của
ông, The Hooligan's Return, một hồi ký. Angela Jianu dịch từ
tiếng Romania [nhà xb Farrar, Strauss and Giroux, 385 trang, $30.00].
Theo tác giả bài điểm sách, Charles Simic, Manea
là người có dư thành công lực để trả lời những câu hỏi về một hoàng kim
thời đại của hận thù. The Hooligan's Return là một memoir của một thời
ma quỉ như thế.
Một trong những luận điểm quan trọng của cuốn hồi ký của ông là: Một tự vấn thật nghiêm khắc về quá khứ - cách tốt nhất để bảo vệ nhân loại chống lại bất cứ một chủ nghĩa toàn trị - đã bị vờ đi, giản dị chỉ có vậy. Bởi vì chẳng có giống dân nào lại muốn khoe khoang, trong lịch sử mang gươm đi mở đất, dân tộc "ta, mình..." đã làm cỏ bao nhiêu giống dân khác?
Một lý thuyết lịch sử, theo đó, nhân loại sẽ "tha thứ" cho bất cứ một tội ác, bởi vì, thí dụ, "tội ác" 1975 đã đẻ ra một dân tộc Việt Kiều Hải Ngoại... một lý thuyết lịch sử như thế, đúng là một khởi đầu hứa hẹn, nhưng chưa đủ, theo Manea...
Tác phẩm của Manea là từ ba nguồn kinh nghiệm, như ông nói với nhà sử học người Ý, Marco Cugno:
"Khi bạn khám phá ra, mình là người Do Thái, ở trong trại tù, vào lúc 5 tuổi, như vậy là mọi lựa chọn kể như tiêu: cái thảm kịch tập thể, xa xưa bám dính lấy bạn. Như vậy là, ngay từ lúc nhỏ xíu, kinh nghiệm Lò Thiêu là một dẫn nhập tàn nhẫn đưa tôi vào đời. Sau đó, tới chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản. Chủ nghĩa toàn trị có nghĩa là loại trừ và đảo ngược truyền thống. Tới tuổi già, lưu vong đem trả cho tôi thân phận một kẻ trôi sông lạc chợ, và theo tôi, để vượt được nó, phải bám chặt vào ngôn ngữ và văn hóa của mảnh đất tôi sinh ra."
Nhật Ký Tin Văn
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Và liệu cái vòng tròn ma thuật là vòng tròn này:
“Rắn cắn làm hư cái
đầu. Bên trong cái
vòng
tròn huyền hoặc, cái đầu
luẩn quẩn trong một thế giới ảo. Cái đầu tin vào những lời dối trá, và không thể phân
biệt thực với ảo.”Một trong những luận điểm quan trọng của cuốn hồi ký của ông là: Một tự vấn thật nghiêm khắc về quá khứ - cách tốt nhất để bảo vệ nhân loại chống lại bất cứ một chủ nghĩa toàn trị - đã bị vờ đi, giản dị chỉ có vậy. Bởi vì chẳng có giống dân nào lại muốn khoe khoang, trong lịch sử mang gươm đi mở đất, dân tộc "ta, mình..." đã làm cỏ bao nhiêu giống dân khác?
Một lý thuyết lịch sử, theo đó, nhân loại sẽ "tha thứ" cho bất cứ một tội ác, bởi vì, thí dụ, "tội ác" 1975 đã đẻ ra một dân tộc Việt Kiều Hải Ngoại... một lý thuyết lịch sử như thế, đúng là một khởi đầu hứa hẹn, nhưng chưa đủ, theo Manea...
Tác phẩm của Manea là từ ba nguồn kinh nghiệm, như ông nói với nhà sử học người Ý, Marco Cugno:
"Khi bạn khám phá ra, mình là người Do Thái, ở trong trại tù, vào lúc 5 tuổi, như vậy là mọi lựa chọn kể như tiêu: cái thảm kịch tập thể, xa xưa bám dính lấy bạn. Như vậy là, ngay từ lúc nhỏ xíu, kinh nghiệm Lò Thiêu là một dẫn nhập tàn nhẫn đưa tôi vào đời. Sau đó, tới chủ nghĩa Cộng Sản. Chủ nghĩa toàn trị có nghĩa là loại trừ và đảo ngược truyền thống. Tới tuổi già, lưu vong đem trả cho tôi thân phận một kẻ trôi sông lạc chợ, và theo tôi, để vượt được nó, phải bám chặt vào ngôn ngữ và văn hóa của mảnh đất tôi sinh ra."
Nhật Ký Tin Văn
*
Và liệu cái vòng tròn ma thuật là vòng tròn này:
(A snake bite disables the mind. Inside a magic circle, the mind moves in a fictitious world, believes in lies, and cannot distinguish reality from illusion).
Ông cho rằng, những mắc míu của tầng lớp trí thức với chủ nghĩa cộng sản, gia nhập rồi rời bỏ – trong chán chường và vỡ mộng: “thời điểm vỡ mộng có lẽ là quan trọng nhất” (“the moment of disullusion is perhaps the most important”).
Milosz: Cầm Tưởng
*
Giới thiệu Nhật
thực
qua bản dịch từ tiếng Anh của dịch giả Phạm Minh Ngọc với nhan đề Vòng
tròn ma thuật
kì này, chúng tôi mong muốn gửi đến độc giả Việt Nam hi vọng về một
tương lai trong đó chúng ta vĩnh viễn không bao giờ phải trải qua những
kinh nghiệm như được miêu tả trong tác phẩm cay đắng này nữa.
talawas
Ui chao, có lạc quan tếu chăng?
Gấu này sợ rằng những kinh nghiệm được mô tả, vẫn đang được diễn ra, tại xứ Mít của chúng ta!
talawas
Ui chao, có lạc quan tếu chăng?
Gấu này sợ rằng những kinh nghiệm được mô tả, vẫn đang được diễn ra, tại xứ Mít của chúng ta!
Và
đây là thông điệp của
nhà nước gửi tới những anh chị Mít 20 tuổi vào năm 2008
Hãy trẻ, và câm
miệng lại!
Chú hình: Trích báo Người Quan Sát Mới, của Tây, số 10-16 Tháng Tư, 2008, đặc biệt về "Hai mươi tuổi vào năm 2008". Cái bóng đằng sau là de Gaulle, nhưng với Mít, bất cứ một anh Công An mà chẳng được!
Bịt miệng như vậy là không đúng! Ngài thủ tướng [?] VC chẳng đã phán như vậy sao?
*
Còn đây là thông điệp cho đám Mít già:
Liệu có một cái gọi là đạo đức Cộng Sản?
Chú hình: Trích báo Người Quan Sát Mới, của Tây, số 10-16 Tháng Tư, 2008, đặc biệt về "Hai mươi tuổi vào năm 2008". Cái bóng đằng sau là de Gaulle, nhưng với Mít, bất cứ một anh Công An mà chẳng được!
Bịt miệng như vậy là không đúng! Ngài thủ tướng [?] VC chẳng đã phán như vậy sao?
*
Còn đây là thông điệp cho đám Mít già:
Liệu có một cái gọi là đạo đức Cộng Sản?
Second, associating the
family with morality and the 'Stalinist regime' with its absence may
give us a
comfortable feeling that we are on the right side of history, but
historians
have a responsibility to try to explain what those alien beings from
the past thought they were doing. This is
not a matter
of 'tout comprendre, c'est tout pardonner,' but of granting Stalinists
- yes,
even Stalinists - the capacity to believe they were acting morally.
Claudia
Koonz entitled her book The Nazi Conscience: why is the notion of a
Communist
morality impermissible? Figes puts the words in
inverted commas and asserts the impossibility
of being 'a Stalinist in public life' without letting 'the morals of
the system
infect personal relationships'.
Đây không phải là vấn đề biết
hết thì [có thể] tha thứ hết, nhưng mà là vấn đề, liệu có thể, VC Liên
Xô hành động một cách đạo đức? Claudia Koonz đặt tên cuốn sách
của mình là Ý thức Nazi: Tại
làm sao ý niệm về một thứ đạo đức VC lại không thể
nào được phép?
…. [Ấy là bởi vì] làm một anh VC giữa công chúng, giữa thanh thiên bạch nhật, mà có một cái cục lương tâm sạch như của me-xừ Đào Hiếu, hay me-xừ Vũ Thư Hiên là chuyện không thể. Là chuyện bố náo bố nếu!
[Đoạn tiếng Anh, trên, trích Điểm Sách London, số 10 Tháng Tư, 2008, trong bài điểm cuốn Những kẻ nói thầm: Đời sống riêng tư trong nước Nga của Stalin, của Orlando Figes, nhà xb Allen Lnae, 740 trang, 25 Anh Kim. Tin Văn sẽ giới thiệu bài viết, trong những ngày tới]
*
…. [Ấy là bởi vì] làm một anh VC giữa công chúng, giữa thanh thiên bạch nhật, mà có một cái cục lương tâm sạch như của me-xừ Đào Hiếu, hay me-xừ Vũ Thư Hiên là chuyện không thể. Là chuyện bố náo bố nếu!
[Đoạn tiếng Anh, trên, trích Điểm Sách London, số 10 Tháng Tư, 2008, trong bài điểm cuốn Những kẻ nói thầm: Đời sống riêng tư trong nước Nga của Stalin, của Orlando Figes, nhà xb Allen Lnae, 740 trang, 25 Anh Kim. Tin Văn sẽ giới thiệu bài viết, trong những ngày tới]
*
*
https://www.newyorker.com/…/the-desperate-plight-behind-dar…
The Desperate Plight Behind “Darkness at Noon”
Arthur Koestler’s novel of the Moscow Trials laid bare the gulf between Communist ideals and the reality they produced.
By Adam Kirsch
September 23, 2019
Unlike other critics of Communism, Koestler took Marxist theory seriously.
Photograph from Erich Hartmann / Magnum
On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was shot and killed in the hallway outside his office. The assassin, an unemployed man who had been expelled from the Party and bore a grudge against its leadership, was apprehended on the spot, but the case still raised questions. How did the killer get his pistol? Who had called off the bodyguards who usually surrounded Kirov at all times?
Today, most historians agree that it was Joseph Stalin himself who ordered the murder, in order to eliminate a potential rival. But the official investigation came to quite different conclusions. During the next four years, it metastasized into a conspiracy-hunt that claimed to expose shocking villainy at the highest levels of Russia’s government, military, and industry. In a series of trials that were publicized around the world, some of the oldest and most trusted Bolshevik leaders—men who, with Lenin, had led the Russian Revolution—were accused of being traitors. Supposedly, acting on orders from Stalin’s exiled rival Leon Trotsky, they had plotted to murder Stalin, to hand Soviet territory over to Nazi Germany, and to restore capitalism in Russia. Their alleged methods included not just assassinations but also industrial sabotage, or “wrecking”—even putting ground glass in the nation’s butter supply.
At the conclusion of the trial of two veteran Party leaders, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, the state prosecutor general, Andrey Vyshinsky, denounced the defendants with florid Stalinist rhetoric: “These mad dogs of capitalism tried to tear limb from limb the best of the best of our Soviet land. . . . I demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them!” There was never any doubt about the verdict or the sentence. And the Party leaders who were condemned, in what came to be known as the Moscow Trials, were only the most prominent of the victims. Stalin’s Great Purge, of 1936-38, ultimately took the lives of a million Soviet citizens, and sent millions more to the Gulag.
By the late nineteen-thirties, Western intellectuals who sympathized with Communism had already proved themselves capable of accepting a great deal of killing in the name of the cause. Such “fellow-travellers” usually justified Stalinism’s crimes as the necessary price of building a socialist future, and of defending it against a hostile capitalist world. Walter Duranty, the Times’ correspondent in Moscow, excused the three million famine deaths that were caused by the push to collectivize Soviet agriculture, writing that, “to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
The Moscow Trials, however, presented a different sort of challenge to the Communist faith. It was one thing to unleash the power of the state against kulaks, the wealthy peasants who were key villains in Soviet mythology. But how could it be that Old Bolsheviks, who had, until the day before yesterday, been the rulers of the Soviet Union, were secret counter-revolutionaries? On the other hand, if the charges were false, why did the defendants confess? Zinoviev, who had been a member of the first Politburo, in 1917, and the head of the Comintern, said, “My defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at Fascism.” Kamenev concluded his statement by addressing his children: “No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just. Don’t look back. Go forward together with the Soviet people, follow Stalin.”
Did such men simply give in to prolonged interrogation—the so-called “conveyor,” whereby prisoners were questioned for days on end by a team of agents working in shifts—or to outright torture? Were they trying to protect their wives and children, who were effectively Stalin’s hostages? Or did they feel that, in some obscure way, they deserved punishment for crimes they hadn’t committed? Here was a problem for a psychologist—or, better, for a novelist, one who understood Communism from the inside and knew what it was like to be a political prisoner.
That novelist was Arthur Koestler, and the book that the Moscow Trials inspired him to write was “Darkness at Noon,” which became one of the most important political novels of the twentieth century. Telling the story of a veteran Bolshevik who is awaiting trial for treason, the book originally appeared in December, 1940, just two years after the events that it drew on, and became a worldwide phenomenon. In America, it was a best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was soon adapted into a hit Broadway play. When it appeared in France, in the spring of 1945, it sold half a million copies. Some observers credited “Darkness at Noon” with tipping the balance against the Communists in the French elections of 1946.
Now Scribner has published a new translation of the book, by Philip Boehm, based on the original German manuscript, which was discovered in a Swiss archive in 2015 after being lost for seventy-five years. The story of how it disappeared in the first place gives a vivid sense of the dislocated world from which the novel emerged. Koestler began writing “Darkness at Noon”—under its original title, “The Vicious Circle”—early in 1939, in France, where he had lived as a stateless refugee ever since Hitler came to power in Germany, six years before. When the Second World War broke out, that September, the French government took the opportunity to sweep up such immigrants—especially those who, like Koestler, had Communist Party connections—and put them in internment camps.
Video From The New Yorker
Throwing Shade Through Crosswords
From October, 1939, to January, 1940, Koestler had to abandon work on the novel while he was a prisoner at a camp in southwestern France. When he was released, after string-pulling by some highly placed literary and political friends, he returned to Paris and quickly finished the book. As Koestler worked, his English girlfriend, Daphne Hardy, sat in the same room producing an English translation, and, at the beginning of May, both manuscripts were mailed out—the English version to a publisher in London, and the German version to a publisher in neutral Switzerland.
Ten days later, the Germans invaded France and swiftly conquered the country. Koestler, who was a Jew, a Communist, and a refugee, knew that if he fell into Nazi hands he would certainly be killed, and he and Hardy embarked on a headlong dash for the unoccupied southern zone of the country, separating along the way. Hardy, a British citizen, made it back to London fairly easily, but Koestler underwent a months-long odyssey, during which he joined and then quit the French Foreign Legion, twice attempted suicide (once with morphine, once with cyanide—miraculously, neither worked), and finally smuggled himself, via Morocco and Portugal, to England, where he was promptly arrested once again.
While he was in transit, Hardy had been corresponding with the London publisher, which, despite some reservations, had accepted the novel for publication. When the publisher objected to Koestler’s original title, it was Hardy who, unable to contact Koestler, decided on calling it “Darkness at Noon.” The phrase was an allusion to Job 5:14: “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night”—a description of both the moral conundrums facing the novel’s protagonist and the desperate plight of Koestler himself. The German manuscript, meanwhile, was presumed to have been lost in the chaos of war, and so the English translation of the novel became, in effect, the original, from which all subsequent translations were made, including one back into German. The new edition is the first to return to Koestler’s German text, and aims to replace Hardy’s version, which was the hasty work of an inexperienced translator—though, clearly, it was good enough to have secured the novel’s global reputation.
This new “Darkness at Noon” arrives in a very different world from that which greeted the original, and one important difference has to do with Koestler’s reputation. In 1940, he was thirty-five and little known in the English-speaking world. He had been a successful journalist in Berlin and a Communist Party activist in Paris, but “Darkness at Noon” was his first published novel. It transformed him from a penniless refugee into a wealthy and famous man, and was also the best book he would ever write. It was followed, in the forties, by an important book of essays, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” and several thought-provoking but less consequential novels of politics and ideas, including “Arrival and Departure,” which reckoned with Freudianism, and “Thieves in the Night,” about Jewish settlers in Palestine.
But after that Koestler’s reputation took a fairly steep dive, as he turned from fiction to pop-scientific works that earned the scorn of actual scientists, especially when he began to embrace E.S.P. and other paranormal phenomena. By the time Koestler died, in 1983—in a double suicide with his wife, Cynthia, after he was given a diagnosis of terminal leukemia—he already seemed to belong to history. And the dive turned into an irrecoverable plummet after the publication, in the past two decades, of biographies by Michael Scammell and David Cesarani, which exposed him as an egotistical monster with a lifelong pattern of abusing women emotionally and physically. At least one woman accused Koestler of rape, but many others described behavior that today would certainly be classified as sexual abuse. Simone de Beauvoir said that he kept aggressively “pushing and pushing” her to sleep with him until she gave in: “I really detested him, that arrogant fool.”
If Koestler’s biography raises one barrier to his reception, a changed political climate raises another. Soviet Communism in its heyday served many people around the world as a secular religion. Today, although Marxist ideas and the label “socialist” have been resurgent on the left, the enormous influence once exerted by Communism now seems a distant phenomenon. To its adherents, Communism was not just a party identification but a complete theory of life and history, which dictated both personal and political morality. And it was the conflict between that morality and ordinary moral instincts—which condemned things like lying and killing, which the Party often demanded—that provided the dramatic focus of “Darkness at Noon.” The novel reminds us of a time when literature was felt to be urgently 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 approaches today.
“Darkness 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, because every political creed must eventually face the question of whether noble ends can justify evil means. As Koestler saw, this problem reached its pure form in Communism because its avowed aim was the noblest of all: the permanent abolition of social injustice throughout 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 Communist 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 Salmanovich Rubashov, is one such righteous butcher, now facing his turn on the chopping block. The figure Rubashov especially evokes is Nikolai Bukharin, a veteran theorist of revolution 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.
MORE FROM THIS ISSUE
September 30, 2019
Yet there was ambiguity in that “consider myself responsible,” for Bukharin insisted that he was unaware of any of the specific plots of sabotage and assassination 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 absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness,” Bukharin said in the courtroom. “There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented.” Repentance, even false repentance, could give propaganda value to what would otherwise be a meaningless death.
“What company do you see yourself starting when you leave this one in five years?”Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
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 particular deeds to which they were confessing,” Koestler writes.
Much 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), confirmed 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 his guilt, and his loss of belief in the infallible justice of Communism. Early in the book, a flashback shows Rubashov on a mission in Nazi Germany in 1933, just after Hitler seized power and banned the Communist Party. In a thrillerlike scene, Rubashov covertly meets with a German Communist named Richard, who pours out his grief to this representative of the socialist fatherland: his comrades have been murdered, he is living in hiding, and he is losing faith in the cause. Rather than sympathize with him or promise help, Rubashov tells Richard that he is being expelled from the Party because he dared to distribute pamphlets that, as he coldly says, “contained wordings that the party considers politically inadmissible.” By the end of the scene, it’s clear that Richard has been marked for death.
“The party cannot be wrong,” Rubashov says. “You and I can make mistakes—but not the party.” Anyone who disagrees with the Party’s dictates is on the wrong side of history, and so deserves to be eliminated. The Moscow Trials, Koestler suggests, were just the latest example of a tendency toward self-cannibalism that had been there from the start.
It is no accident—to use a phrase favored by Communist writers of the time—that Koestler found the Party’s treatment of foreign comrades to be the most conspicuous example of its injustice, since he had spent most of the thirties as one of those comrades. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary in 1905, Koestler had already lived several professional and ideological lives by the time he joined the Party, in 1931. As a teen-ager, he had been a committed Zionist who moved to Palestine to work on an agricultural settlement. Quickly realizing that this austere existence was not for him, Koestler transformed himself into a journalist, working as a stringer for German newspapers. After two years, he returned to Europe, and by the end of the twenties he had a precociously successful career in Berlin, working as an editor and writer for one of Germany’s biggest liberal dailies.
In the essay that he contributed to “The God That Failed” (1949), a collection of six memoirs by ex-Communist writers, Koestler recalled how conditions in Weimar Germany turned him into a Communist. “Germany lived in a state of latent civil war, and if one wasn’t prepared to be swept along as a passive victim by the approaching hurricane it became imperative to take sides,” he wrote. If the future was a struggle between Nazism and Communism, then Communism was the only possible choice. But Koestler emphasized that he did not become a Communist “by a process of elimination.” Rather, he compared the experience to a religious conversion. “The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” he wrote. “There is now an answer to every question.”
For the next seven years, Communism was at the center of Koestler’s life and work. “I served the Communist Party for seven years—the same length of time as Jacob tended Laban’s sheep to win Rachel his daughter,” he wrote, in “The God That Failed.” (In the Biblical story, Jacob finds out, at the end of that time, that he’s been tricked and given the wrong bride.) In 1932, after losing his highly paid job—because, he claimed, his employers learned that he had joined the Party—Koestler made a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, where he spent eighteen months travelling around in order to write a propagandistic book praising the Soviet experiment. By the time he left Russia, in 1933, Hitler was in power and he couldn’t return to Germany. Instead, he went to France, where he worked for a series of Party-funded publications and agencies until 1938.
Throughout this period, Koestler later wrote, he was well aware of the gulf between Communist ideals and the reality they produced. He had seen the victims of famine in Ukraine, and he had gone along with the Party’s ruthless imposition of the official line. But he still felt that the only way to improve the Party was from within. Indeed, he was willing to risk his life for it: in 1937, Koestler went to report on the Spanish Civil War for the News Chronicle, a British daily, knowing that if he was captured by Franco’s Nationalists his life would be in danger. In February, he was caught in the city of Málaga, as it fell to Franco’s forces, and taken prisoner. For the next three months, he lived in a cell not unlike Rubashov’s, as his fellow-prisoners were executed and he waited for his turn. But, because he had been on assignment for an English newspaper, the British government and press took an interest. The public attention meant that Koestler was spared; in the end, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange.
This experience, which Koestler wrote about in his memoir “Dialogue with Death,” could have strengthened his Communist convictions—after all, he had been imprisoned as a rojo, a Red. Instead, his imprisonment awakened a new sense of the preciousness of freedom. “Strangely enough,” he wrote, “I feel that I have never been so free as I was then.” This was an existentialist kind of freedom, cold and clear, the last possession of someone with nothing left to lose.
Once he was released, Koestler found it impossible to retreat back into the intellectual orthodoxy of Party life. Events in Russia—including the news that three of his closest friends had been arrested in Stalin’s purge—only confirmed his disillusionment. In 1938, the year he resigned from the Party, Koestler gave a speech to an audience of refugee intellectuals in Paris, in which he affirmed that “a harmful truth is better than a useful lie,” and that “no movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility.” His listeners, he remembered, were split in their reactions: “The non-Communist half of the audience applauded, the Communist half sat in heavy silence, most of them with folded arms.”
“Darkness at Noon,” which Koestler began writing the following year, in the South of France, was his attempt to work through the intellectual and emotional reasons for breaking with the Party. Rubashov is a better Communist than Koestler ever was, and the purity of Rubashov’s faith allows the novel to lay bare its contradictions. How did Communism, with its dream of a perfectly just society, result in Stalinism, with its paranoia, persecution, incompetence, and cruelty? “Our principles were all correct, but our results were all wrong,” Rubashov muses. “We brought you the truth, and in our mouths it sounded like a lie.”
Koestler’s reckoning with Communism is very different from Orwell’s vision in “1984,” which was published nine years later. In Orwell’s dystopia, “Ingsoc,” 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 appeal is pure sadism, the pleasure of exercising total power over another: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Stalinism, for Orwell, dressed up this power worship in a lot of meaningless doctrine that people learned to repeat without thinking about it—what the novel calls “duckspeak.”
Orwell’s book, in other words, is relatively indifferent to the intellectual content of Communism, which may explain why it is now more popular than Koestler’s. Koestler takes dialectics seriously. Marx claimed to have shown that history was a process of continual conflict moving toward a final redemption, when the proletariat would cast off its chains and the exploitation of humanity would disappear. For Koestler, it was the belief in the historical inevitability of this outcome that enabled the Bolsheviks to act with such ruthlessness: 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 revolutionaries’ 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 absolved by history.”
The deferral of responsibility for one’s own actions to an outside agency, such as history, is what Sartre, in his existentialist 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 recognition of the necessity of individual judgment. The Communist Party, Koestler writes, has “a tendency to shy away from using the first-person singular,” since it reckons in masses, not individuals. 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 fragility, is of infinite value, because it is the ultimate source and basis of morality. To the Party, the fact that the “I” partakes of infinity is what makes it useless for the purposes of logic: “Infinity was a politically suspect quantity,” Koestler writes. But if you remove the irrational dimension from human existence—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 equation did not add up.”
If the Soviet Union was, as its defenders 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, muscles, 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 themselves enlightened to accept Rubashov’s hard-won conclusion: “Perhaps thinking everything through to the end was not a healthy thing to do.” ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the September 30, 2019, issue, with the headline “Assassin’s Creed.”
• Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and the author of, most recently, “The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.”
The Desperate Plight Behind “Darkness at Noon”
Arthur Koestler’s novel of the Moscow Trials laid bare the gulf between Communist ideals and the reality they produced.
By Adam Kirsch
September 23, 2019
Unlike other critics of Communism, Koestler took Marxist theory seriously.
Photograph from Erich Hartmann / Magnum
On December 1, 1934, Sergei Kirov, the head of the Communist Party in Leningrad, was shot and killed in the hallway outside his office. The assassin, an unemployed man who had been expelled from the Party and bore a grudge against its leadership, was apprehended on the spot, but the case still raised questions. How did the killer get his pistol? Who had called off the bodyguards who usually surrounded Kirov at all times?
Today, most historians agree that it was Joseph Stalin himself who ordered the murder, in order to eliminate a potential rival. But the official investigation came to quite different conclusions. During the next four years, it metastasized into a conspiracy-hunt that claimed to expose shocking villainy at the highest levels of Russia’s government, military, and industry. In a series of trials that were publicized around the world, some of the oldest and most trusted Bolshevik leaders—men who, with Lenin, had led the Russian Revolution—were accused of being traitors. Supposedly, acting on orders from Stalin’s exiled rival Leon Trotsky, they had plotted to murder Stalin, to hand Soviet territory over to Nazi Germany, and to restore capitalism in Russia. Their alleged methods included not just assassinations but also industrial sabotage, or “wrecking”—even putting ground glass in the nation’s butter supply.
At the conclusion of the trial of two veteran Party leaders, Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, the state prosecutor general, Andrey Vyshinsky, denounced the defendants with florid Stalinist rhetoric: “These mad dogs of capitalism tried to tear limb from limb the best of the best of our Soviet land. . . . I demand that these dogs gone mad should be shot—every one of them!” There was never any doubt about the verdict or the sentence. And the Party leaders who were condemned, in what came to be known as the Moscow Trials, were only the most prominent of the victims. Stalin’s Great Purge, of 1936-38, ultimately took the lives of a million Soviet citizens, and sent millions more to the Gulag.
By the late nineteen-thirties, Western intellectuals who sympathized with Communism had already proved themselves capable of accepting a great deal of killing in the name of the cause. Such “fellow-travellers” usually justified Stalinism’s crimes as the necessary price of building a socialist future, and of defending it against a hostile capitalist world. Walter Duranty, the Times’ correspondent in Moscow, excused the three million famine deaths that were caused by the push to collectivize Soviet agriculture, writing that, “to put it brutally—you can’t make an omelet without breaking eggs.”
The Moscow Trials, however, presented a different sort of challenge to the Communist faith. It was one thing to unleash the power of the state against kulaks, the wealthy peasants who were key villains in Soviet mythology. But how could it be that Old Bolsheviks, who had, until the day before yesterday, been the rulers of the Soviet Union, were secret counter-revolutionaries? On the other hand, if the charges were false, why did the defendants confess? Zinoviev, who had been a member of the first Politburo, in 1917, and the head of the Comintern, said, “My defective Bolshevism became transformed into anti-Bolshevism, and through Trotskyism I arrived at Fascism.” Kamenev concluded his statement by addressing his children: “No matter what my sentence will be, I in advance consider it just. Don’t look back. Go forward together with the Soviet people, follow Stalin.”
Did such men simply give in to prolonged interrogation—the so-called “conveyor,” whereby prisoners were questioned for days on end by a team of agents working in shifts—or to outright torture? Were they trying to protect their wives and children, who were effectively Stalin’s hostages? Or did they feel that, in some obscure way, they deserved punishment for crimes they hadn’t committed? Here was a problem for a psychologist—or, better, for a novelist, one who understood Communism from the inside and knew what it was like to be a political prisoner.
That novelist was Arthur Koestler, and the book that the Moscow Trials inspired him to write was “Darkness at Noon,” which became one of the most important political novels of the twentieth century. Telling the story of a veteran Bolshevik who is awaiting trial for treason, the book originally appeared in December, 1940, just two years after the events that it drew on, and became a worldwide phenomenon. In America, it was a best-seller and a Book-of-the-Month Club selection, and was soon adapted into a hit Broadway play. When it appeared in France, in the spring of 1945, it sold half a million copies. Some observers credited “Darkness at Noon” with tipping the balance against the Communists in the French elections of 1946.
Now Scribner has published a new translation of the book, by Philip Boehm, based on the original German manuscript, which was discovered in a Swiss archive in 2015 after being lost for seventy-five years. The story of how it disappeared in the first place gives a vivid sense of the dislocated world from which the novel emerged. Koestler began writing “Darkness at Noon”—under its original title, “The Vicious Circle”—early in 1939, in France, where he had lived as a stateless refugee ever since Hitler came to power in Germany, six years before. When the Second World War broke out, that September, the French government took the opportunity to sweep up such immigrants—especially those who, like Koestler, had Communist Party connections—and put them in internment camps.
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From October, 1939, to January, 1940, Koestler had to abandon work on the novel while he was a prisoner at a camp in southwestern France. When he was released, after string-pulling by some highly placed literary and political friends, he returned to Paris and quickly finished the book. As Koestler worked, his English girlfriend, Daphne Hardy, sat in the same room producing an English translation, and, at the beginning of May, both manuscripts were mailed out—the English version to a publisher in London, and the German version to a publisher in neutral Switzerland.
Ten days later, the Germans invaded France and swiftly conquered the country. Koestler, who was a Jew, a Communist, and a refugee, knew that if he fell into Nazi hands he would certainly be killed, and he and Hardy embarked on a headlong dash for the unoccupied southern zone of the country, separating along the way. Hardy, a British citizen, made it back to London fairly easily, but Koestler underwent a months-long odyssey, during which he joined and then quit the French Foreign Legion, twice attempted suicide (once with morphine, once with cyanide—miraculously, neither worked), and finally smuggled himself, via Morocco and Portugal, to England, where he was promptly arrested once again.
While he was in transit, Hardy had been corresponding with the London publisher, which, despite some reservations, had accepted the novel for publication. When the publisher objected to Koestler’s original title, it was Hardy who, unable to contact Koestler, decided on calling it “Darkness at Noon.” The phrase was an allusion to Job 5:14: “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night”—a description of both the moral conundrums facing the novel’s protagonist and the desperate plight of Koestler himself. The German manuscript, meanwhile, was presumed to have been lost in the chaos of war, and so the English translation of the novel became, in effect, the original, from which all subsequent translations were made, including one back into German. The new edition is the first to return to Koestler’s German text, and aims to replace Hardy’s version, which was the hasty work of an inexperienced translator—though, clearly, it was good enough to have secured the novel’s global reputation.
This new “Darkness at Noon” arrives in a very different world from that which greeted the original, and one important difference has to do with Koestler’s reputation. In 1940, he was thirty-five and little known in the English-speaking world. He had been a successful journalist in Berlin and a Communist Party activist in Paris, but “Darkness at Noon” was his first published novel. It transformed him from a penniless refugee into a wealthy and famous man, and was also the best book he would ever write. It was followed, in the forties, by an important book of essays, “The Yogi and the Commissar,” and several thought-provoking but less consequential novels of politics and ideas, including “Arrival and Departure,” which reckoned with Freudianism, and “Thieves in the Night,” about Jewish settlers in Palestine.
But after that Koestler’s reputation took a fairly steep dive, as he turned from fiction to pop-scientific works that earned the scorn of actual scientists, especially when he began to embrace E.S.P. and other paranormal phenomena. By the time Koestler died, in 1983—in a double suicide with his wife, Cynthia, after he was given a diagnosis of terminal leukemia—he already seemed to belong to history. And the dive turned into an irrecoverable plummet after the publication, in the past two decades, of biographies by Michael Scammell and David Cesarani, which exposed him as an egotistical monster with a lifelong pattern of abusing women emotionally and physically. At least one woman accused Koestler of rape, but many others described behavior that today would certainly be classified as sexual abuse. Simone de Beauvoir said that he kept aggressively “pushing and pushing” her to sleep with him until she gave in: “I really detested him, that arrogant fool.”
If Koestler’s biography raises one barrier to his reception, a changed political climate raises another. Soviet Communism in its heyday served many people around the world as a secular religion. Today, although Marxist ideas and the label “socialist” have been resurgent on the left, the enormous influence once exerted by Communism now seems a distant phenomenon. To its adherents, Communism was not just a party identification but a complete theory of life and history, which dictated both personal and political morality. And it was the conflict between that morality and ordinary moral instincts—which condemned things like lying and killing, which the Party often demanded—that provided the dramatic focus of “Darkness at Noon.” The novel reminds us of a time when literature was felt to be urgently 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 approaches today.
“Darkness 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, because every political creed must eventually face the question of whether noble ends can justify evil means. As Koestler saw, this problem reached its pure form in Communism because its avowed aim was the noblest of all: the permanent abolition of social injustice throughout 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 Communist 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 Salmanovich Rubashov, is one such righteous butcher, now facing his turn on the chopping block. The figure Rubashov especially evokes is Nikolai Bukharin, a veteran theorist of revolution 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.
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Yet there was ambiguity in that “consider myself responsible,” for Bukharin insisted that he was unaware of any of the specific plots of sabotage and assassination 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 absolutely black vacuity suddenly rises before you with startling vividness,” Bukharin said in the courtroom. “There was nothing to die for, if one wanted to die unrepented.” Repentance, even false repentance, could give propaganda value to what would otherwise be a meaningless death.
“What company do you see yourself starting when you leave this one in five years?”Cartoon by Jeremy Nguyen
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 particular deeds to which they were confessing,” Koestler writes.
Much 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), confirmed 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 his guilt, and his loss of belief in the infallible justice of Communism. Early in the book, a flashback shows Rubashov on a mission in Nazi Germany in 1933, just after Hitler seized power and banned the Communist Party. In a thrillerlike scene, Rubashov covertly meets with a German Communist named Richard, who pours out his grief to this representative of the socialist fatherland: his comrades have been murdered, he is living in hiding, and he is losing faith in the cause. Rather than sympathize with him or promise help, Rubashov tells Richard that he is being expelled from the Party because he dared to distribute pamphlets that, as he coldly says, “contained wordings that the party considers politically inadmissible.” By the end of the scene, it’s clear that Richard has been marked for death.
“The party cannot be wrong,” Rubashov says. “You and I can make mistakes—but not the party.” Anyone who disagrees with the Party’s dictates is on the wrong side of history, and so deserves to be eliminated. The Moscow Trials, Koestler suggests, were just the latest example of a tendency toward self-cannibalism that had been there from the start.
It is no accident—to use a phrase favored by Communist writers of the time—that Koestler found the Party’s treatment of foreign comrades to be the most conspicuous example of its injustice, since he had spent most of the thirties as one of those comrades. Born into a Jewish family in Hungary in 1905, Koestler had already lived several professional and ideological lives by the time he joined the Party, in 1931. As a teen-ager, he had been a committed Zionist who moved to Palestine to work on an agricultural settlement. Quickly realizing that this austere existence was not for him, Koestler transformed himself into a journalist, working as a stringer for German newspapers. After two years, he returned to Europe, and by the end of the twenties he had a precociously successful career in Berlin, working as an editor and writer for one of Germany’s biggest liberal dailies.
In the essay that he contributed to “The God That Failed” (1949), a collection of six memoirs by ex-Communist writers, Koestler recalled how conditions in Weimar Germany turned him into a Communist. “Germany lived in a state of latent civil war, and if one wasn’t prepared to be swept along as a passive victim by the approaching hurricane it became imperative to take sides,” he wrote. If the future was a struggle between Nazism and Communism, then Communism was the only possible choice. But Koestler emphasized that he did not become a Communist “by a process of elimination.” Rather, he compared the experience to a religious conversion. “The whole universe falls into pattern like the stray pieces of a jigsaw puzzle,” he wrote. “There is now an answer to every question.”
For the next seven years, Communism was at the center of Koestler’s life and work. “I served the Communist Party for seven years—the same length of time as Jacob tended Laban’s sheep to win Rachel his daughter,” he wrote, in “The God That Failed.” (In the Biblical story, Jacob finds out, at the end of that time, that he’s been tricked and given the wrong bride.) In 1932, after losing his highly paid job—because, he claimed, his employers learned that he had joined the Party—Koestler made a pilgrimage to the Soviet Union, where he spent eighteen months travelling around in order to write a propagandistic book praising the Soviet experiment. By the time he left Russia, in 1933, Hitler was in power and he couldn’t return to Germany. Instead, he went to France, where he worked for a series of Party-funded publications and agencies until 1938.
Throughout this period, Koestler later wrote, he was well aware of the gulf between Communist ideals and the reality they produced. He had seen the victims of famine in Ukraine, and he had gone along with the Party’s ruthless imposition of the official line. But he still felt that the only way to improve the Party was from within. Indeed, he was willing to risk his life for it: in 1937, Koestler went to report on the Spanish Civil War for the News Chronicle, a British daily, knowing that if he was captured by Franco’s Nationalists his life would be in danger. In February, he was caught in the city of Málaga, as it fell to Franco’s forces, and taken prisoner. For the next three months, he lived in a cell not unlike Rubashov’s, as his fellow-prisoners were executed and he waited for his turn. But, because he had been on assignment for an English newspaper, the British government and press took an interest. The public attention meant that Koestler was spared; in the end, he was released as part of a prisoner exchange.
This experience, which Koestler wrote about in his memoir “Dialogue with Death,” could have strengthened his Communist convictions—after all, he had been imprisoned as a rojo, a Red. Instead, his imprisonment awakened a new sense of the preciousness of freedom. “Strangely enough,” he wrote, “I feel that I have never been so free as I was then.” This was an existentialist kind of freedom, cold and clear, the last possession of someone with nothing left to lose.
Once he was released, Koestler found it impossible to retreat back into the intellectual orthodoxy of Party life. Events in Russia—including the news that three of his closest friends had been arrested in Stalin’s purge—only confirmed his disillusionment. In 1938, the year he resigned from the Party, Koestler gave a speech to an audience of refugee intellectuals in Paris, in which he affirmed that “a harmful truth is better than a useful lie,” and that “no movement, party or person can claim the privilege of infallibility.” His listeners, he remembered, were split in their reactions: “The non-Communist half of the audience applauded, the Communist half sat in heavy silence, most of them with folded arms.”
“Darkness at Noon,” which Koestler began writing the following year, in the South of France, was his attempt to work through the intellectual and emotional reasons for breaking with the Party. Rubashov is a better Communist than Koestler ever was, and the purity of Rubashov’s faith allows the novel to lay bare its contradictions. How did Communism, with its dream of a perfectly just society, result in Stalinism, with its paranoia, persecution, incompetence, and cruelty? “Our principles were all correct, but our results were all wrong,” Rubashov muses. “We brought you the truth, and in our mouths it sounded like a lie.”
Koestler’s reckoning with Communism is very different from Orwell’s vision in “1984,” which was published nine years later. In Orwell’s dystopia, “Ingsoc,” 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 appeal is pure sadism, the pleasure of exercising total power over another: “If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever.” Stalinism, for Orwell, dressed up this power worship in a lot of meaningless doctrine that people learned to repeat without thinking about it—what the novel calls “duckspeak.”
Orwell’s book, in other words, is relatively indifferent to the intellectual content of Communism, which may explain why it is now more popular than Koestler’s. Koestler takes dialectics seriously. Marx claimed to have shown that history was a process of continual conflict moving toward a final redemption, when the proletariat would cast off its chains and the exploitation of humanity would disappear. For Koestler, it was the belief in the historical inevitability of this outcome that enabled the Bolsheviks to act with such ruthlessness: 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 revolutionaries’ 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 absolved by history.”
The deferral of responsibility for one’s own actions to an outside agency, such as history, is what Sartre, in his existentialist 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 recognition of the necessity of individual judgment. The Communist Party, Koestler writes, has “a tendency to shy away from using the first-person singular,” since it reckons in masses, not individuals. 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 fragility, is of infinite value, because it is the ultimate source and basis of morality. To the Party, the fact that the “I” partakes of infinity is what makes it useless for the purposes of logic: “Infinity was a politically suspect quantity,” Koestler writes. But if you remove the irrational dimension from human existence—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 equation did not add up.”
If the Soviet Union was, as its defenders 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, muscles, 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 themselves enlightened to accept Rubashov’s hard-won conclusion: “Perhaps thinking everything through to the end was not a healthy thing to do.” ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the September 30, 2019, issue, with the headline “Assassin’s Creed.”
• Adam Kirsch is a poet, critic, and the author of, most recently, “The Global Novel: Writing the World in the 21st Century.”
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