Koestler’s Darkness at Noon framed the debate over sacrificing truth for the party

Evidence

The imaginary scenario discussed by Sartre and Spender resembles the plot of Darkness at Noon, a novel by Arthur Koestler, an ex-Communist turned anti-Communist. The novel, published in English in 1940 and in French in 1946 as Le zéro et l’infini, was based on the case of Nikolai Bukharin, tried and executed during the Soviet purges in 1938. Koestler portrayed his fictionalised version as a man so loyal to the party that he signed a false confession and went voluntarily to his death for the good of the state. This was way too credulous as an interpretation of Bukharin’s real-life case, since his confession was produced under duress. But Koestler gave the intellectuals a story to quarrel over: just how far might a person go to defend Communism? He raised similar questions in his essay ‘The Yogi and the Commissar’, which contrasted the ‘commissar’ type, prepared to do anything for a remote ideal goal, with the ‘yogi’ type, who sticks to present realities. — Sarah Bakewell, At the Existentialist Café, 777

Categorization

• XREF: The yogi/commissar distinction resonates with the ends-vs-means structures in the reader’s knowledge of sacrifice and ideology debates; also connects to the engaged-commitment theme shaping this book.
• DEFINE: Briefly defines the yogi/commissar polarity, which recurs throughout treatments of 20th-century ideological commitment.
• SEED: A possible essay angle: how the ‘would you let one innocent prisoner die for the cause’ thought experiment has persisted through Darkness at Noon, Spender’s challenge, and contemporary trolley-problem politics.
• BMF: No — thematic parallel to ideology-vs-individual stories only, no oblique cross-domain match with the listed fiction library.