Characters

• Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov: The protagonist, an Old Bolshevik in his 50s who is arrested and imprisoned. He struggles with his loyalty to the Party and his own moral conscience.
• No. 402: A former Tsarist army officer imprisoned in the cell next to Rubashov. He communicates with Rubashov through tapping on the wall.
• Ivanov: Rubashov's first interrogator and an old friend from the civil war. He tries to convince Rubashov to confess using logical arguments.
• Gletkin: A younger interrogator who takes over from Ivanov. He uses harsh physical methods to break down Rubashov.
• Number One: The dictator, representing Joseph Stalin. He is only mentioned but never appears directly.
• Richard: A young German communist betrayed by Rubashov in a flashback. His arrest haunts Rubashov's conscience.
• Little Loewy: A Belgian dock worker and communist leader whom Rubashov betrays in another flashback.
Orlova: Rubashov's former secretary and lover, mentioned in his recollections.
• Michael Bogrov: A former revolutionary naval commander executed during Rubashov's imprisonment.

Quick facts

• Arthur Koestler wrote Darkness at Noon in German while living in Paris, and it was translated into English by his partner Daphne Hardy.
• While set in an unnamed country, the novel is clearly based on Stalinist Russia during the Great Purge of the late 1930s.
• The main character, Rubashov, is a composite of several real-life Old Bolsheviks who were victims of Stalin's show trials.
• Koestler drew on his own experience of being imprisoned during the Spanish Civil War when writing the prison scenes.
• The novel's title comes from the Book of Job in the Bible: “They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope in the noonday as in the night."
• In 1998, Darkness at Noon was ranked #8 on the Modern Library's list of the 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century.
• The book was very influential on George Orwell and helped inspire his novels *Animal *Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four.
• Darkness at Noon has been adapted for stage, most notably in Sidney Kingsley's 1951 Broadway production, as well as radio and television.
• Attempts to make a film version were allegedly blocked by Communist screenwriters in Hollywood in the 1940s.
• Thought to be lost for decades, the original German manuscript of the novel was rediscovered in a Zurich library in 2015.
• A new English translation based on the rediscovered German manuscript was published in 2019.

About the author

Arthur Koestler (1905-1983) was a prolific Hungarian-British author and journalist. Born in Budapest, he was educated in Austria and became fluent in Hungarian, German, French, and English from a young age. In the 1930s, Koestler joined the Communist Party and traveled to the Soviet Union but became disillusioned with Stalinism and resigned from the party in 1938. During the Spanish Civil War, he was captured and sentenced to death by Franco's forces, an experience that informed his most famous novel, Darkness at Noon.

After moving to Britain in 1940, Koestler achieved international fame with Darkness at Noon, a powerful critique of totalitarianism. Over the next four decades, he wrote extensively on politics, science, philosophy and the paranormal. His major works include the autobiographies Arrow in the Blue and The Invisible Writing, as well as The Sleepwalkers, The Act of Creation, and The Ghost in the Machine. Koestler was known for his intellectual versatility, tackling subjects from evolutionary biology to ESP.

Though his reputation has been debated, Koestler remains an influential 20th-century intellectual. His anti-totalitarian writings had a major impact in Europe during the Cold War. He embraced and abandoned many political and philosophical movements over his lifetime, from Zionism to Communism to mysticism. While some critics saw him as a dilettante, others praised Koestler's willingness to challenge orthodoxies and explore big ideas across disciplines. In his later years, he became an advocate for voluntary euthanasia. Koestler and his wife committed suicide together, when he was suffering from leukemia and Parkinson's disease. His estate funded a chair in parapsychology at the University of Edinburgh, reflecting his longtime interest in unexplained phenomena.