Word: koestlers
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Journalist Koestler made his pilgrimage to Russia just in time for the great 1932 famine, and traveled all the way to fabled Bokhara, where the muezzin had been replaced by the morning loudspeaker ("Get up, get up, empty your bowels, do your exercises . . ."). When he fell in love with a breathtakingly beautiful employee of the Baku Water Supply Board (whom he later denounced to the police as a suspected spy), Koestler found in her pathetic ignorance of the outside world his first seeds of disgust with Soviet Russia. But he still had a long way to travel before...
...labyrinth, memory was a better guide than hope. Koestler proved faithful to the links of a Jewish family-to those who loved him without Freudian gimmicks-his father, a lovable crank who went broke backing quack inventions; his mother, so invincibly bourgeois that she knew her son could never have been a jailbird...
...Will Listen? It is easy enough to say, with Elmer Davis, that eminent piece of journalistic litmus paper, that ex-Communists are bores. But Koestler is no bore. He transformed history into literature of such reality that it, in turn, became history. His masterpiece, Darkness at Noon, was based on the Moscow trials and told how 01d Bolshevik "Rubashov" confessed falsely to a plot against the party, because confession was "the last service" he could render the party. While Koestler was writing that novel, Walter Krivitsky, ex-head of Soviet Military Intelligence for Western Europe, was writing a factual account...
...Communist Koestler writes of his seven lean years in the party with a kind of choked-up reluctance; in a sense, he has already made bigger and better confessions in his fiction. The Invisible Writing is nevertheless a fascinating document in which Koestler reaffirms membership in the company of those who, like Silone. Malraux, Chambers and others, have "seen the future" and are very much afraid that it may work. Koestler confesses to a recurring dream in which he shouts warning of terrible danger to a crowd, but no one will listen. With his faculty for making his nightmares come...
...Koestler has found out that in Britain the Reichstag fire trial has been safely over for 350 years (when the right man was convicted, name of Guy Fawkes). The pilgrim has been given to understand that inferiority complexes should be of more moderate size than cathedrals of -more on the lines of a semidetached villa which may have terra-cotta griffons on the roof but no real monsters within. It is a "cosy" doghouse, Koestler admits, and in gratitude affirms that this mild race lives "closer to the text of the invisible writing than any other." No one in Koestler...