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The Hillsdale College Online Courses Podcast
Totalitarian Novels: Darkness at Noon and Regret
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Welcome to the Hillsdale College online Courses podcast. I'm Jeremiah Regan.
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And I'm Juan Davalos. And we are back today with totalitarian novels. We're going to lecture number five today, Darkness at Noon. Regret.
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So Darkness at Noon by author Arthur Kersler. Say that Five Times Fast might be the least well known of these totalitarian novels, but it's Dr. Arn's favorite, and it's very compelling because of the four novels we feature in this course, it's the only one that imagines circumstances within a real regime. 1984, Brave New World, and that Hideous Strength all envision a potential future in England or elsewhere in which totalitarianism has set in. But Darkness at Noon investigates the. The Soviet regime in Russia and the way that it treats its own people.
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Yeah, and an interesting subject in this lecture is how we go actually into this cell of this main character. As he wrestles with the regret of the brutal reality of the revolution that he helped build.
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He has time to contemplate the actions he took and the lives that were lost because of those actions. And there's a very interesting plot device in which his original interrogator is an old party Bolshevik, like the protagonist himself. The protagonist's name is Rubachev. So Rubachev is questioned by a man very much like him, and there's a degree of compassion between them. But then his interrogator is himself imprisoned and tried for crimes against the regime and is replaced by Glenkin, a new zealous young Bolshevik. And that gives Rubachev some pause. He looks at the aims he had in helping support. Helping to establish and support this Soviet regime. And he looks at the type of men it's producing now. Cold, calculating, cruel, brutal, impressive in a certain way. Impressive in their devotion to the party, impressive in their intelligence, but also scary and terrifying. Not the kind of bucolic equality that Marxists always claim to try to achieve. It gives you a picture of the reality of the harshness and the injustice that always comes with Marxism.
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Yeah. So once again, we see how these totalitarian regimes completely warp the soul of the human being. And in this case, in this novel, because it is of an actual regime that existed, it just brings that image to life in a much more powerful way. Not that the other ones don't, but this one actually, it's a regime that actually happened, and we see the examples over and over. We've talked in our podcast before about Solzhenitsyn and how he brings those examples in the Gulag Archipelago. So we know that the things that are being talked about in this novel actually essentially happened, at least things very similar to this.
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So, Juan, we often talk about how hard we work on making these courses, and we sometimes ask our listeners to consider donating to support our efforts. And I wanted to recount a quick story. We had a donor who was looking to support the college, and he said his number one priority was helping more people to learn. And he had an idea for how he could give money. He asked me point blank, would this help me to produce more courses at higher quality? And while generous, his particular proposal would not have done that. But I told him he could sponsor a course if that interested him, and it sure did. He's going to sponsor two courses now to help us create a compelling educational experience, to make it very engaging, and to help tens and hundreds of thousands of people learn. If you are in a situation where you feel like you could support the production of a Hillsdale College online course, please email me jreganillsdale.edu. that's jreganillsdale.edu and we'll see what we can put together.
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Now let's turn to lecture five of totalitarian novels. Darkness at Noon regret.
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From 1936 to 1938, Stalin killed in public trials almost everyone who began the communist revolution with him in 1917 in St. Petersburg. The circumstances are very strange. First of all, a German intelligence officer wanting to get Russia out of the war. And the Germans almost won the First World War because they achieved that and got to transfer all their troops over to the Western front. And in 1918, but for the arrival of the Americans, they might have won the war. They got close to Paris. They picked up all these exiles, Communists, Lenin and his buddies, and put them on a train and took them to Petersburg and inserted them into the Soviet Union. Churchill says that they were injected like a poison bacilla in a sealed train into Russia. They set up in a house that the czar had built for a mistress, a ballerina. I've been in that house. It's a museum to these events now. And they made lists of people to kill and they sent people out to kill them. They were very ruthless. And so they started the world communist revolution. Or is it to be a world revolution? Much of the action of this novel is about that question. We're going to talk about the third of the novels we're reading. Of the four, it's called Darkness at Noon. I favored this novel myself. I'm not sure I think it's the best, but if I am pressed to name the Best of the four. I more often used this one than others. These show trials are odd because these guys were old colleagues and they had done this amazing thing together. And now it's 20 years later, and Stalin, who's on the periphery of this picture, has become the boss. That's his title. He was not that at that time. And he turns on his colleagues and he publicly tries them, and they confess to crimes that upon investigation, it's proved they weren't even in the place where they said they committed the crimes. And when they do that, they know that after they've done that, they're going to be fed pretty nicely for 24 hours, and then they're going to be walked down a hallway in a prison, dark, with a guard behind them, and it's somewhere along the way, without ceremony, they're going to be shot in the back of the head. There's no particular place where this is going to happen. There's no witness. And so the question is, why did these guys, who had every reason to resent Stalin, make these confessions, knowing their fate? Well, that's an interesting question, isn't it? That's amazing. And it teaches us something about totalitarianism. Now, there are more than one explanation for why they did that. And if you think about it, it's an intellectual question that's hard to solve because it inquires into the motives of a dead person who doesn't leave a record. And so some of them were surely tortured and their families threatened, and that would be sufficient to explain what they did. Some of them. But the author of Darkness at Noon, Arthur Koestler, who was a communist, who was appalled by the things he saw and became an anti communist, wrote this novel to give an explanation. And the novel is an answer to that question. And it's profound and it teaches you something about people, about character, about life, and about totalitarianism in particular. This communist variant. Communism is the most murderous doctrine ever invented. Hitler maybe killed 8, 10 million people outside actual combat. Stalin probably north of 20 million men, MAU probably north of 50 million. Stalin was very elegant in the way he committed genocide, especially in Ukraine. What he did was they were resisting him. They didn't want their farms collectivized. And so what he did was he just sent troops down there and took all the harvest away up to Moscow and other places so people could eat it. And they were left with nothing. And they starved. He starved millions of people, wouldn't let them travel, took away their food, didn't have to put them on trains and take them to extermination camps, which is what Hitler did. This method killed more people and was covered up. Certain American journalists from the New York Times refused to believe it. Disgraced himself. Others did too. Well, these are the people, you know. Stalin comes out of that bunch and he killed most of the others. The novel has a structure. It's a simple structure. It's very well written, to my eye. The protagonist is a man named Rubachev, and he's one of the Old Bolsheviks. That's what they call him, the Old Bolsheviks. One of the original great prestige. He describes them as militant philosophers, which strikes me as very like this idea of hypnopedia in Brave New World. Hypnopedia is a contradiction of the human soul as we know it. Including our own militant philosopher is a violation of the term, because philosophers look and observe especially they look up and they try to see things as they are. They don't make war on things. That's a perversion of philosophy, which is somewhere near the heart of the meaning of all these totalitarian novels. Rubachev has grown old, and the form of the novel is that there are two interrogations of him. It opens with him being arrested, taken to prison. All the action takes place in the prison. There are two interrogations, and then there's a postlude called the grammatical fiction. The grammatical fiction is the pronoun I. There is no I. That's the grammatical fiction. I've made the point earlier that. And we'll read CS Lewis making the point that these utopian theories require the destruction of humanity, each individual one eventually, including, by the way, the last one standing. If we do reach an ultimate tyrant, he too will be destroyed. We'll go through that argument later. Rubachev is interrogated first by a man named Ivanov, who's himself an old Bolshevik, and he wants to save Rubachev. Rubachev is very tough and very stubborn. At one point he stamps out a cigarette in his back of his hand to test himself. Can he stand up to pain? Because he thinks he's going to be tortured. He isn't, by the way. And so Ivanov is a good guy, as these things go. And he does talk Rubachev into confessing, facing a prison sentence, not destruction. And he can go on and have a life. He's sort of converted by that. And he has a couple of days where he's planning to write, with the end of his life, a more scientific account of the historicist dialectic. They got some things wrong, he's saying, and we can correct them now and get this dang revolution right. Ivanov is overcome and himself arrested and killed. That happens. Sort of just reported and his place taken by Gletkin, a young Bolshevik he's often called a Neanderthal. Rich Rubachev is appalled by him and overcome by him too. When he's appalled by him, he reflects, this is what we've made. These Neanderthals, they're not philosophers, they're just militant. I'm saying that Rubachev was not really a philosopher either, but Glevkin makes no pretense.
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On the new episode of the Larry Arn Show, Hillsdale College President Larry P. Arn sits down with pastor, professor and author Kevin DeYoung for a one on one conversation. When Jesus is ascending, about to ascend in Acts Chapter one, and the disciples ask him, is now now are you going to set up your kingdom? It's amazing. They are still confused. They still are thinking, might this be an earthly kingdom? In John's gospel, they want to try to make him king by force. Some of his followers, they just can't get out of their head that when he talks about the kingdom, the only way they can conceive of power and true influence and might in the world is there's a king on a throne, in a palace, in a castle, in a temple somewhere. Listen to this exclusive interview with Kevin DeYoung right now, only available on the Larry Arn Show. Find it on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at Podcast Hillsdale Edu. Also at Apple podcasts Spotify and YouTube and subscribe to receive new episodes delivered right to your device. That's Podcast Hillsdale, Eduardo.
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Great books, great people, great ideas. Learning about these things is critical to being a well educated human being and we can help with the Hillsdale Dialogues. Each week, Hillsdale College President Larry Arne joins radio veteran Hugh Hewitt to discuss topics of enduring relevance. And from time to time they also talk about current events, but always with an eye toward more fundamental truths. And they want you to tune in to a conversation like no other. The Hillsdale Dialogues are posted every Monday on the Hillsdale College Podcast Network at podcast hillsdale.edu. that's podcast hillsdale Edu or listen via Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube or wherever you find your audio.
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Along the way through these interrogations, there are memories and recountings of things that Rubachev have done and they are crucial. And there are three that are the most crucial. There are three people that Rubeshoff killed. They have in common that they're all worthy people and Rubachev is somewhat haunted by the episodes. The first is a man named Richard. Young man, idealistic, communist. They talk in a museum. Rubachev is looking, as the museum darkens, at a Pieta, the mother of Jesus, with her arms outstretched in supplication. That's an important image in the novel and it has an effect on Rubachev. He remembers it and thinks about it quite a lot. And he abandons Richard, imposing on him party discipline. You have not circulated the party materials, Rubachev says. A speech that goes like you and I can make a mistake, but the party cannot make a mistake. It is history talking. He knows that Richard will be killed, but he likes Richard. Richard is high minded, idealistic. Richard has a woman. She, Richard fears, is to be lost. She too is a communist. Rubachev knows that she is meanwhile having an affair with another man and doesn't tell Richard. The the party is cynical, ruthless. Rubachev is ruthless. The second one is Little Loe. He's a union organizer in a Baltic port. He too is a very attractive young man. Rubachev is by now an old man. Goes to see him and he has to tell him that they have organized that a fleet coming in from Nazi Germany they don't name, it won't be unloaded. We will impede the fascists. And Rubachev is there to tell him that it is to be unloaded. Because at that moment Stalin is in cahoots with Hitler. These are names are not used. But that is in fact what's going on in the world. Stalin, Viktor Hansen points out in his great second world wars, is the only major leader in the two world wars who was at one time or another an ally of every other major combatant. Stalin was tricky, and so he has to disappoint little Loey. And Little Loey hangs himself. That haunts Rubachev. It shouldn't. Militant philosophers are not supposed to care about such things, but it does. One of the meanings of the book is that's why Rubachev has to be killed. He's becoming. There's a touch of human in him. The third is Arlova, who's a mistress of Rubachev. She's a secretary. She loves him, she worships him. She'll do anything he wants, in part because Rubachev is so important. She is denounced and Rubachev could defend her. He has memories of their lovemaking that haunt him. He's not impressed with her. He doesn't think she's a power. He doesn't look up to her. I Guess that's a way to put it. But he's affectionate to her and she to him, and he lets her die. Those three things are very important in the novel. And when Gletkin takes over, first of all, the investigation is much more vigorous. He keeps him up late, he wakes him after 30 minutes sleep, he shines bright lights in his eyes. Gletkin is formidable. He does all the interrogation himself. He keeps the same hours as he imposes on Rubacheville. And he always looks immaculate. And he wants Rubachev to confess to things that Rubeshev did not do. Except it turns out he did some form of them in some conversation. He said, better if the boss were killed. Things like that didn't take any steps, but he said it. At one point, a witness appears against Rubachev. He's identified, identified as Hare lip. And he turns out to be the son of an old colleague of Rubachev. And he's been tortured. And he says some outlandish things that have some element of truth in them. And he does prove that Rubachev was disloyal, had doubts, turned against the boss. It's important that there's a tissue of truth in this. Gletkin has to get him to confess to some things that are different than what he did. That seems to be important, by the way, that it's not just you did suggest, and the Hare lip overheard you, that maybe the boss should be killed. But you have to say you conspired with people to make that happen. And he didn't do that, partly, I think, because he didn't feel strong enough. And remember, these people are all killers, right? What do they expect? And one of the devices in the interrogation is that Gletkin gets him to admit that he killed those three people and abandoned our Lova. And if you are prepared to do things like that for people, should you not make a final sacrifice for the unity of. Of the party? And this seems to me like a distortion and resurrection of a theme that's important in Aristotle that I've suggested before, and that is one way to summarize something about Aristotle, is you are what you do. You become these things that you do, and you can't get away from them. And so it's his past that haunts him. In the case of Rubeshoff, it's one of the causes of his confessing to things that he did not do, at least did not give action to them or take any step in that direction. Real practical step. He stands probably for a man named Bukharin who was the last of the show trial convicts and the most important of them, Bukharin, actually took an extra day in his confession to refute the claims that the others who had confessed had not actually done it. One important thing in this that comes up is that Rubachev actually becomes acquainted with death in the prison. He was unacquainted with it before, although he had caused the death of many people. They had a phrase for it, physical liquidation. And the effect of physical liquidation was not in their minds that you were dead, you were struck off the party rolls. There's a certain hero. He was the admiral in command of the battleship Potemkin, of which they made a famous war movie. And he's led down the hall, having been tortured to his execution. And Rubachev hears him whimper. And that has a big effect on him. He starts thinking about death in a different way, as a human thing, and it's just an abstraction to him before he murders. And he doesn't understand what that means. Humanity is dawning on him. If you understand pain yourself, you might be merciful to others, sympathize with them when they're hurt. He has some of that now. The admiral is important too, because Gladkin explains. What were these show trials all about? They were basically extensions of a struggle that began between Stalin and Trotsky. Stalin was, relative to these other guys, a silent figure. He was cowardly too. By the way, there's a great description of his mental processes in Solzhenitsyn's novel the First Circle. It's early in the book you should read. It shows that he's afraid to go into a big room. He had 100,000 people stationed around Moscow to defend him against killing. And he's not known for his speeches. Whereas Trotsky was brilliant, talked all the time, a doctrinaire. He believed that there had to be a continuous revolution all over the world. And the fact that they had a beachhead in Russia was not sufficient. Whereas Stalin invented socialism in one country. And that's one of the proximate causes of Stalin killing all those people. Also, they were dangerous to him because they were powerful men like him. So just kill them all. I'll close by describing the grammatical fiction. Rubachev, he gets a kind of reverie that comes over him several times, including when he's walking down the basement corridor to be shot. He calls it the oceanic sense, the ocean sense. He's thinking of something really big and maybe something eternal. And that is occurring to him as he becomes more human. It's his last thought as he dies. This explanation is very powerful because, you know, if you wonder how can people do this to people? What makes them act like this? And it's no good thinking of them as robots. That would be sort of like the mistake that Stalin and Hitler make. Rubachev presents us with a man that was of that mind and rethinks it. And I think. But you'll have to make your own judgment about the book. Doesn't rethink it all the way, I think enough of the way to get himself killed. I think this book is profound. If you read the paper and you see people doing things that look wrong to you and particularly despotic, which I do sometimes. If you want to understand why, they're people too. Right. You don't want to be in a position where you take whole classes of people and regard them as evil, especially if they're fellow citizens. But these things happen all over the world. Now to deal with it, first of all, to avoid it for yourself, one would not want to fall into that. Churchill said about an alliance with the Nazis, better to die than do that. Better for the whole nation to die than to do that. Although of course he would not have been the agent to kill the nation. He wanted them to fight to the death. And that's the only time in his life he ever said that. He's very reluctant to say things like that, but then also to understand what's happening. Where do these impulses come from? In this novel, there's an examination of that inside the mind of one of the makers of the Bolshevik Revolution.
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