When I was a college student in the 1960s, this was one of those books that seemed to have a certain prominence and yet to be little read. As it is not a long and difficult book, this may have meant that it had been prominent, but was fading. I never read it, and I think the sense of its being passé, perhaps even disreputable, had something to with that fact. Moreover—and this I can definitely explain—it was an anti-communist book, and anti-communism was not something that anyone in the youthful political left wanted anything to do with. It was about a man imprisoned by the Soviet government, and we didn't want to hear about that. It wasn’t so much that we denied such things as that we thought them unworthy of attention: it wasn’t “Oh, all that has been disproved or exaggerated,” but “Oh, all that is old and irrelevant.” Not that one thought or said this consciously; rather, one automatically changed the subject, even within one’s own mind.

I’m not sure what provoked me to read it now. It may be only that I picked up a copy at a library sale, or even from a library give-away table. The latter is more likely, because it was a paperback that had sold for thirty-five cents in 1956, and it fell apart in my hands as I was reading it.

I was expecting a sort of expose of totalitarian methods, something like the treatment Winston Smith gets toward the end of 1984 (in which Orwell is said to have been influenced by Koestler). And it is that, but not in the way I expected. It’s not a picture of an innocent and defiant man being crushed by brutal mistreatment, but rather of a man acquiescing to the implications of an ideology which he shares.

Without using the names of real people, and without even admitting that he is talking about Russia, Koestler gives us a protagonist, Rubashov, who was one of the heroes of the communist revolution, and has continued to serve it for twenty years or so, but has now become a victim of the purges of the 1930s. The book opens with his arrest. He knows what this means, and he does not want to die. But he has come to have doubts about the revolution, and so in a sense is actually guilty, even though he has taken no action against it, and doesn’t intend to. He is never beaten, and the closest thing to torture he experiences is being allowed very little sleep during a long series of interrogations. He does not, in other words, get the soul-destroying Winston Smith treatment.

By non-communist standards, Rubashov is far from innocent. Accepting the party’s philosophy that the end always justifies the means, he has brought about the deaths of other people who simply happened to be in the way of the party’s aims at the moment, or to have associated with people who were in the way. They had to go because the party is the instrument of history, which operates according to definite and known principles, and to oppose or in any way hinder the party, even accidentally, is to make oneself an obstacle to the attainment of the perfect society—an obstacle which must be removed, which it would be immoral not to remove. And in the end he finds it difficult to claim that the same logic should not apply to himself.

It’s a good novel in the most basic sense: an interesting story, well told. It’s also a very philosophical novel, a novel of ideas. And two of those ideas are what I found most interesting about it. First, I don’t think I had ever quite grasped just how rigorous communist theory is, or was. I don’t think you can find many people now who accept the full theory, with its claim to be a science. It’s easy to find people, not even very far on the left, who will assert that communism was basically a good idea, but hasn’t been executed well, or that people just aren’t good enough for it. At best I think you can say complimentary things only about the fundamental impulse—why can’t we all just share everything? Why can’t we all get along? Imagine no possessions. The structures erected on that impulse were gravely defective, to say the least, and often monstrous. Rubashov is an intellectual; he takes ideas very seriously and lives by them. This book helps to explain the fact that communism was once considered an intellectual rival to the Catholic Church, not just a political and spiritual opponent.

Second is what Rubashov calls “the grammatical fiction”: the first person singular, that is, the self. One of the effects of Rubashov’s loss of faith in the revolution is that he begins to question what is apparently the communist doctrine—the doctrine of these communists, at least—that the individual not only does not matter but does not even truly exist, or at least ought not to. It wasn’t clear to me whether this was a metaphysical principle or a matter of mental discipline.

With his faith in the party going or gone, and death most likely not far away, the grammatical fiction begins to trouble Rubashov. He calls it the “silent partner,” and it often manifests itself as a conscience which he does not want to possess. In one interrogation, thinking of a time when he betrayed a man, the words “Now I shall pay” present themselves to his mind, and this shocks and puzzles him.

Rubashov tried to study this newly discovered entity very thoroughly during his wanderings through the cell...he had christened it the ‘grammatical fiction’. He probably had only a few weeks left to live, and he felt a compelling urge to clear up this matter, to ‘think it to a logical conclusion’. But the realm of the ‘grammatical fiction’ seemed to begin just where the ‘thinking to a conclusion’ ended. It was obviously an essential part of its being, to remain out of the reach of logical thought, and then to take one unawares, as from an ambush, and attack one with day-dreams and toothache.

Communism in its rigorous ideological form does not seem to have many adherents now (though in its misty sentimental form it has many). This question of the grammatical fiction, however, is presenting itself by another channel: the neuro-psychology which is said to be in the process of proving scientifically that the existence of the self is an illusion. How an entity can falsely believe in its own existence is a conundrum I cannot solve. But a “scientific,” i.e. the materialist, denial of the soul, with all its implications, is coming at us in a new package, with who knows what consequences.