page_title: Darkness at Noon
section_title: Reception
hierarchical_section_title: Darkness at Noon / Reception
context_page_description: Darkness at Noon is a novel by Hungarian-born British novelist Arthur Koestler, first published in 1940. His best known work, it is the tale of Rubashov, an Old Bolshevik who is arrested, imprisoned, and tried for treason against the government that he helped to create.
  The novel is set in 1939 during the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials. Despite being based on real events, the novel does not name either Russia or the Soviets, and tends to use generic terms to describe people and organizations: for example the Soviet government is referred to as "the Party" and Nazi Germany is referred to as "the Dictatorship". Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with the Bolshevik ideology of the Soviet Union at the outset of World War II.
  In 1998, the Modern Library ranked Darkness at Noon number eight on its list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, even though Koestler wrote it in German.
context_section_description: Darkness at Noon was very successful, selling half a million copies in France alone. Kingsley Martin described the novel as "one of the few books written in this epoch which will survive it". The New York Times described Darkness at Noon as " a splendid novel, an effective explanation of the riddle of the Moscow treason trials. . . written with such dramatic power, with such warmth of feeling and with such persuasive simplicity that it is absorbing as melodrama".
  George Steiner said it was one of the few books that may have "changed history", while George Orwell, who reviewed the book for the New Statesman in 1941, said:
  Brilliant as this book is as a novel, and a piece of brilliant literature, it is probably most valuable as an interpretation of the Moscow "confessions" by someone with an inner knowledge of totalitarian methods. What was frightening about these trials was not the fact that they happened—for obviously such things are necessary in a totalitarian society—but the eagerness of Western intellectuals to justify them.
caption: Handbill for a stage adaption of Darkness at Noon by Sidney Kingsley, 1953
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