Books: Brightest in Dungeons

DARKNESS AT NOON—Arthur Koestler —Macmillan ($2.50).

Of Author Arthur Koestler little is definitely known. (He is said to be in London.) But he has written the most exciting novel of the season. As a war correspondent in Spain, he was captured by the Fascists, sentenced to death and released when the British Government intervened; in Cairo he once edited a German-Arabic weekly; in Haifa he once hawked lemonade in the streets. In 1939 he published a historical novel, The Gladiators, about the Spartacus revolt. From Darkness at Noon, it is obvious that he also knows Russia and the deep places of the human mind.

The book begins with the clang of a cell door closing in a GPU prison. It ends with a shot in the back of the head in a murky passageway of the prison cellar. It moves with the speed, directness, precision and some of the impact of a bullet. More plausibly than any other book yet written, fiction or nonfiction, it gives the answer to one of history's great riddles: Why do Russians confess?

Old Bolshevik Nicolas Rubashov, former People's Commissar, former commander in the Red Army, a fictional composite of the late liquidated Leo Kamenev and Nikolai Bukharin, is broken down by the GPU, induced to sign a false confession and declare at a public trial that he had plotted to murder "No. 1"—Stalin. Penalty: "physical liquidation." The men who succeeded in making old Rubashov confess ("To have laid out a Rubashov meant the beginning of a great career") were GPU Inquisitors Ivanov and Gletkin. Ivanov had been Rubashov's former schoolmate, former battalion commander. He drank, he doped a little, "but the vice of pity I have up till now managed to avoid. The smallest dose of it, and you are lost. . . . The temptations of God were always more dangerous for mankind than those of Satan."

Gletkin was a Stalinist, one of those humorless men whom Rubashov called the "Neanderthalers." It took Rubashov some time to find the right words to describe Gletkin's special quality: "correct brutality." He had been a mere boy when the Revolution broke out. "That was the generation which had started to think after the flood. It had no traditions, and no memories. ... It was a generation born without umbilical cord. ..."

Ivanov was against using the "hard method" on Rubashov. "When Rubashov capitulates," Ivanov told Gletkin, "it won't be out of cowardice, but by logic. It is no use trying the hard method with him. He is made of a certain material which becomes the tougher the more you hammer on it."

Said Gletkin: "That is just talk. Human beings able to resist any amount of physical pressure do not exist. ..."

"I wouldn't like to fall into your hands'" said Ivanov, smilingly, but with a trace of uneasiness. Later he did.