The MagazineMan vs. MachineThe intellectual legacy of Arthur Koestler.Feb 15, 2010, Vol. 15, No. 21
• By ELIZABETH POWERS
Koestler The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic According to Iain Hamilton, his first biographer, Arthur Koestler was a man of “disquieting intellectual passion,” which led to an “alarming readiness to deal with many of the disagreeable aspects of the age which had not yet impinged fully on the English consciousness.” Not only Englishmen were disturbed by Koestler. His searing novel Darkness at Noon (1940) exposed the moral depravity of communism at a time when many in the West were still enraptured with the Soviet experiment. Portraying an individual enmeshed in the Stalinist purges and show trials of the 1930s—deeply imbuing them, as one admirer put it, with “the smell and taste of blood”—it was among the first and most powerful shots fired in the Cold War. The French edition, entitled Le Zéro et l’Infini, had a devastating effect on the postwar fortunes of the French Communist party. To read more, you must be a Weekly Standard Subscriber We're Sorry,
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