![]() Throughout the novel, Koestler is at pains to stress the similarity of totalitarianism to religion and to make the related comparison between dissent and heresy. Orwell’s more widely read Nineteen Eighty Four, which has many points of similarity with Darkness at Noon, makes the same terrifying point that the fanatics don’t just want you to obey them: They want you to agree with them. ![]() This is a crux that has relevance well beyond the time and place in which it was set. ![]() Indeed, the teamwork of the two questioners, Ivanov and Gletkin, is so logically and artistically represented that it actually had the effect of converting some people to communism! Rubashov has one fatal weakness, which is that of the open-minded intellectual: “the familiar and fatal constraint to put himself in the position of his opponent, and to see the scene through the other’s eyes.” His dogmatist jailers suffer from no such disadvantage. If you once accept a certain logic of history, how can you exempt yourself from it? Apart from Dostoyevsky’s Grand Inquisitor, there is no finer example in fiction of a pitiless interrogator facing a victim with the intention of saving his soul. But we do not know that this paradox was not alive in Bukharin’s own mind, even at the end. ![]() Stalin’s men employed less subtle means of inducement and persuasion. We now know that this is not how the confession of Nikolai Bukharin, for example, was in fact obtained. ![]()
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