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''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 had helped to create. Set in 1938 during the Stalinist Great Purge and Moscow show trials, the novel does not name either Russia or the USSR, but the characters have Russian names. Joseph Stalin is represented by "Number One", a menacing dictator. The novel expresses the author's disillusionment with the Soviet Union's version of Communism 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. ==Background== Koestler wrote ''Darkness at Noon'' as the second part of a trilogy: the first volume was ''The Gladiators'' (1939), first published in Hungarian. It was a novel about the subversion of the Spartacus revolt. The third novel was ''Arrival and Departure'' (1943), about a refugee during World War II. Koestler, who was by then living in London, wrote that novel in English. ''Darkness at Noon'' was written in German while Koestler was living in Paris. His companion, the sculptor Daphne Hardy, translated it into English during early 1940 while she was living with him there. The German text was thought to have been lost while Koestler and Hardy escaped Paris in May 1940, just before the German army occupation after its defeat of the French. On reaching Britain, Hardy began arranging to have the English manuscript published. In August 2015, a doctoral candidate of the University of Kassel reported to have identified a copy of the original German manuscript in a Zurich library.〔http://www.uni-kassel.de/uni/internationales/english-version/university/about-us/news/article/long-missing-original-manuscript-of-the-novel-darkness-at-noon-by-koestler-has-been-found.html "Long missing original manuscript of the novel "Darkness at Noon" by Koestler has been found". Press release by the University of Kassel, August 10th, 2015〕 Koestler joined the French Foreign Legion, deserted it in North Africa, and eventually made his way to Portugal.〔Arthur and Cynthia Koestler, ''Stranger on the Square'', ed. Harold Harris, London: Hutchinson, 1984, pp. 20–22〕 Waiting in Lisbon for passage to Great Britain, Koestler heard a false report that the ship taking Hardy to England had been torpedoed and all persons lost (along with his only manuscript); he attempted suicide.〔A&C Koestler (1984), pp. 20–22〕〔(Anne Applebaum, "Did the Death of Communism Take Koestler And Other Literary Figures With It?" Review of Michael Scammell, ''Koestler: The Literary and Political Odyssey of a Twentieth-Century Skeptic'' ), ''The New York Review of Books'', in ''Huffington Post'', 28 March 2010〕 (He wrote about this incident in ''Scum of the Earth'' (1941), his memoir of that period.) Koestler finally arrived in London, and the book was published there in early 1941. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Darkness at Noon」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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