BRLSI Big Read: Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler

BRLSI’s Democracy Under Threat series invites you to pause and take stock by surveying the wealth of history and political thinking which underpins our long-held democratic systems and institutions. It explores the laying down of democratic principles from Ancient Athens to the present day, and takes in current scenarios in international geopolitics, while considering Britain as its own small island with its own set of political traditions.

And what of the great political novels? The BRLSI Big Read this month is on Darkness at Noon by Arthur Koestler.

Left-wing intellectuals such as Arthur Koestler and George Orwell wrote widely of their bitter disillusionment at the perversion of the ideals and ambitions of Communism and the 1917 Russian revolution as it morphed – perhaps inevitably – into a murderously amoral police state under Stalin.

Koestler personalises all this via the death-cell memories, ruminations and remorse of the “Old Bolshevik” Rubashov, the last of the heroic makers of the revolution and the Soviet state to have survived the purges of the 1930s in which Stalin destroyed all opposition to his rule and cowed a vast country.

Darkness at Noon is one account of how, not for the first time in history, a revolution aspiring to provide bread and justice for all has eaten its children. This is how reviewers saw it after its publication in 1940: “A remarkable book, a grimly fascinating interpretation of the logic of the Russian Revolution, indeed of all revolutionary dictatorships …” and “Koestler approaches the problem of ends and means, of love and truth and social organisation, through the thoughts of Rubashov as he awaits death in a GPU prison.”

Led by Chris Curtain, journalist

Things to consider while you’re reading:
1 – In what context was this statement made O Liberty, what crimes are committed in thy name!?
2 – Did this book change your perception of the Soviet Union?
3 – The novel’s central moral question is that the end justifies the means. Do you accept this rule to be an ethical one?
4 – Is it possible for revolutionaries without a conscience to deliver freedom and happiness?
5 – What is the meaning of the Dostoyevsky quote Man, man, one cannot live quite without pity.

Big Read is free for BRLSI members – please register via the RSVP button below.

Non-members are very welcome to join the discussion for £4 – please buy your ticket below. If you’d like to become a BRLSI member and take advantage of half-price (or free!) tickets, discounted courses and other local offers, please join via our membership page here!

A discount of 20% is on offer to all those purchasing five tickets or more from the series, excluding the conference on the 4th of July.