Darkness at Noon
Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is...
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Originally published in 1941, Arthur Koestler's modern masterpiece, Darkness At Noon, is a powerful and haunting portrait of a Communist revolutionary caught in the vicious fray of the Moscow show trials of the late 1930s. During Stalin's purges, Nicholas Rubashov, an aging revolutionary, is imprisoned and psychologically tortured by the party he has devoted his life to. Under mounting pressure to confess to crimes he did not commit, Rubashov relives a career that embodies the ironies and betrayals of a revolutionary dictatorship that believes it is an instrument of liberation. A seminal work of twentieth-century literature, Darkness At Noon is a penetrating exploration of the moral danger inherent in a system that is willing to enforce its beliefs by any means necessary.
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Format: paperback
ISBN:
9781416540267 (1416540261)
ASIN: 1416540261
Publish date: October 17th 2006
Publisher: Scribner
Pages no: 272
Edition language: English
Category:
Classics,
Novels,
Science Fiction,
Academic,
School,
Literature,
Cultural,
Historical Fiction,
20th Century,
Politics,
Philosophy,
Russia,
Dystopia
Series:
Nice book about the madness of the purges and the radical logic of the revolutionaries.
A fiercely intelligent examination of the thought behind ruthless totalitarian communism through the account of a former Party Commissioner who is arrested and interrogated by a member of the younger generation, a native of the revolution.It seems to me that Koestler has set out to render a great se...
bookshelves: published-1940, slavic, classic, fraudio, holocaust-genocide, lifestyles-deathstyles, philosophy, psychology, recreational-homicide, teh-brillianz, translation Read in November, 2009 Unabridged and read by Frank Muller. Highly Kafkaesque in tone insomuch as it's bleak, dark humoure...
A recent re-reading of Darkness At Noon didn't live up to my memory of it from many years ago. The prison descriptions were excellent, in a claustrophobic way, and the inner workings of Rubashov's mind in an effort to keep his sanity were riveting indeed. But the long political discourses about "t...
Darkness at Noon is one of a class of novels, mostly prison and interrogation things, in which all is just so hopelessly restrictive and cramped - so lacking in even the smallest victories.So, it's not fun. And it's not particularly new.Koestler, though, was an early-adopter communist who had suffer...