Darkness at noon - BokDraken

267 sidor

Publicerades 24 juli 2006 av Scribner.

ISBN:: 978-0-02-565200-2
OCLC-nummer:: 74491552

Darkness at Noon (German: Sonnenfinsternis) 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 …

Darkness at Noon (German: Sonnenfinsternis) 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.

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Björn recenserade Darkness at Noon av Arthur Koestler

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Essentially Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable set during Stalin's purges and stretched to 250 pages, Darkness And Noon is obviously dated but not not outdated in the way it circles the question of Greater Good, the worth of one life vs the worth of a thousand, the question of just what an idea is worth, etc. The irony: A revolution based on an idea of progress inevitably (?) becomes a (literally rather than politically) conservative regime dedicated to continuing refining the idea and fighting against any notion of changing it. (Makes me wonder about the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy vs any of its challengers - how do you sell an idea that's just about what you do now as a contender to an idea that promises either utopia or apocalypse in the future? Is the problem of liberalism that it lacks the endgame that Lenin, Hitler, Jesus or …

Essentially Dostoevsky's Grand Inquisitor parable set during Stalin's purges and stretched to 250 pages, Darkness And Noon is obviously dated but not not outdated in the way it circles the question of Greater Good, the worth of one life vs the worth of a thousand, the question of just what an idea is worth, etc. The irony: A revolution based on an idea of progress inevitably (?) becomes a (literally rather than politically) conservative regime dedicated to continuing refining the idea and fighting against any notion of changing it. (Makes me wonder about the strengths and weaknesses of liberal democracy vs any of its challengers - how do you sell an idea that's just about what you do now as a contender to an idea that promises either utopia or apocalypse in the future? Is the problem of liberalism that it lacks the endgame that Lenin, Hitler, Jesus or Mohammed can offer? Were the political ideologies of the short 20th century just secularized escatology?)

At the same time, as a novel, it tends to get very longwinded. What makes an interesting philosophical argument can also make for a fairly dry novel, as Koestler's small cast of characters walk around in their cells contemplating political theory. Any boredom is saved by the last paragraph, though, which is glorious.

Ämnen

Soviet Union -- History -- Revolution, 1917-1921 -- Fiction