Word: koestlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...recent months LIFE-like Swiat (World) magazine has run excerpts from Nineteen Eighty-Four, George Orwell's prophetic novel about the sterile lives of "unpersons" in a totalitarian society. Another magazine carried a lengthy review of ex-Communist Arthur Koestler's Darkness at Noon, hailed his savage exposition of Communist terrorism as "a very thorough analysis of Stalinist methods." Other papers have run glowing stories on the "truly democratic" U.S. and Western prosperity. The Culture Ministry's official organ recently published an article on the U.S. economy by a Communist official who noted sardonically that he "prefers...
Budapest-born Arthur Koestler was the first to dramatize the theory that a strong shot of ideological doubletalk, administered with a minimum of sleep, was enough to persuade an old Communist to confess to, and even agree to be shot for, errors he had not committed. Though a brilliant anti-Communist novel, Koestler's Darkness at Noon left the lingering impression that the Communist inquisitors won by superior cunning...
...facts seemed to be a good deal simpler and more sinister than what Koestler imagined. The 1949 show trial of Hungary's Communist Foreign Minister Laszlo Rajk read as if it had been taken from Koestler's pages. Apparently for reasons of party unity, Rajk, like Koestler's Rubashov, confessed in court to treasonable deviation. But no relentless interrogator was needed to persuade Rajk to confess. The job was done by Rajk's friend Janos Kadar, now the puppet Premier of Hungary...
...sheetless bed," Koestler writes The Invisible Writing--"enveloped by gloom and stench, counting the familiar stains on the wall which crushed bed-bugs leave behind, I heard the sound of a gramophone in the next room." It was Hughes, playing Sophie Tucker on his phonograph, not bothering to notice the dirt. While Koestler was disgusted by the filth and unsanitary living habits, and only briefly amused by a local purge trial, Hughes was enjoying lavish Turk hospitality and occasionally reading the voluminous notes Koestler took each day. What Koestler found most everywhere failed to meet his expectations, and Hughes, having...
...When Koestler described those days in 1953, he apologized, "I found it impossible to revive the naive enthusiasm of the period." This was not Hughes' way. His enthusiasm stayed fresh because it was for people and things, not ideas, which date faster. While he protested violently against the Scottsboro decision and later against Franco's bombing of Madrid, his protest was not a Party member's but always that of an individual. As he was convinced by the discovery of a swank little restaurant in Tashkent: "The system under which the succesful live--left or right, capitalist or communist...