Arthur Koestler

Darkness at Noon

a summing up

Janus

O zero e o infinito

Ecrit de 1938 à 1940, paru en France dès 1945, Le Zéro et l'Infini est un des grands " classiques " du XXe siècle, ainsi qu'un best-seller mondial. Inspiré des grands procès de Moscou, le roman imagine l'itinéraire d'un responsable communiste, Roubachof, jeté en prison et jugé après avoir été lui-même un " épurateur ". A travers ce thème, l'écrivain nous convie à un véritable procès des dictatures et du système totalitaire pour lesquels l'homme n'est rien, un zéro en regard de la collectivité, alors que l'humanisme voit en lui, au contraire, un infini. Le Zéro et l'Infini est de ces œuvres dont le temps n'abolit pas la portée.

Le zéro et l'infini

Spanish Testament is a 1937 book by Arthur Koestler, describing his experiences during the Spanish Civil War. Part II of the book was subsequently published on its own, with minor modifications, under the title Dialogue with Death (see below). Koestler made three trips to Spain during the civil war; the third time he was captured, sentenced to death and imprisoned by the Nationalist forces of General Franco. Koestler was at that time working on behalf of the Comintern and as an agent of the Loyalist Government's official news agency, using for cover accreditation to the British daily News Chronicle. --

Spanish Testament

Scum of the Earth

On September 23, 1926, and Austrian experimental biologist named Dr. Paul Kammerer blew his brains out on a footpath in the Austrian mountains. His suicide was the climax of a great evolutionary controversy which his experiments had aroused. The battle was between the followers of Lamarck, who maintained that acquired characteristics could be inherited, and the neo-Darwinists, who upheld the theory of chance mutations preserved by natural selection. Dr. Kammerer's experiments with various amphibians, including salamanders and the midwife toad (Alytes obstetricans), lent much weight to the Lamarckian argument and drew upon him the full fury of the orthodox neo-Darwinists. Arthur Koestler had known about Dr. Kammerer's work when he himself was a student in Vienna, and he has always been interested in this tragic story. He gives a fascinating description of the venomous atmosphere in which the battle was fought and of the lengths to which apparently respectable scholars would go to discredit their opponents. Heading the attack on Kammerer was a British scientist, William Bateson, who hinted that the Viennese's experiments were fakes, but who failed to examine the evidence, including the so-called nuptial pads of Kammerer's last remaining specimen of the midwife toad. It was a young American scientist who delivered the coup de grace; on a visit to Vienna, he discovered that the discoloration of the nuptial pads was due not to natural causes but to the injection Indian ink. When his findings were published, Kammerer shot himself. Mr. Koestler, whose recent writings, in books such as The Act of Creation and The Ghost in the Machine, have been in part concerned with evolutionary theory, decided to investigate this old mystery. When he started on his researches, he expected to relate the tragedy of a man who had betrayed his calling, for Kammerer's suicide was accepted as a confession of guilt and his work was discredited from that day to this. Instead, as Mr. Koestler read the contemporary papers, corresponded with Kammerer's daughter, Bateson's son, and the surviving scientists who attended Kammerer's lecture in Cambridge, he found himself writing a vindication of a man who in all probability was himself betrayed. The story that emerges is, on one level, fascinating piece of scientific detection; on another, it is a moving and human narrative about a much abused, brilliant and lovable figure. Though no Lamarckian himself, Mr. Koestler ends the book with an appeal to biologists to repeat Kammerer's experiments with an open mind in order to verify or refute them. If Kammerer's claims were posthumously confirmed our outlook on evolution would be significantly changed. A superb intellectual thriller whose implications still reverberate today, The Case of the Midwife Toad is an entirely new kind of book for Mr. Koestler, and perhaps only he could have written it, for it required expert knowledge and familiarity with the academic world of science, combined with the creativity and imaginative insight of an outstanding novelist.

The Case of the Midwife Toad

Verlorene Illusionen

Slumpens rötter

Sam Sloan

The Thirteenth Tribe is a ground breaking work of great importance, if only because it has shaped the way that people think about The Jews. It is based on the theory that European Jews, Ashkenazi Jews from Europe, are not descendants of Abraham but rather are the remnants of a tribe, the Khazars, that converted to Judaism in the Eighth Century. We know little about the Khazars, but we do know for certain that they existed and that they were Jewish. The Jews, Russians, Georgians and Armenians all wrote about the Khazars, but the Khazars left no literature, no books. This was perhaps because the Khazars existed during the Dark Ages, a period from which few books survive today. Koestler's thesis is that while the Khazars as a unified tribe may have disappeared, their descendants survived, only that they were no longer known as the Khazars. Instead, these people are now Eastern European Jews and they continue to live in the same places where the Khazars lived such as in Kiev and Odessa. The view of Arthur Koestler who himself was Jewish is that none of the mass movements of the Jewish people happened at all. Rather, the Jews stayed in exactly the same place where they have been all along because the Eastern European Jews are the Khazars. They are the same people. Just their name has been changed. Which is more logical: The Traditional Jewish view or Arthur Koestler's theory?

The Thirteenth Tribe the Khazar Empire and Its Heritage

Tells the story of a group of academic scientists struggling to understand the human tendency towards self-destruction, while the group members gradually become more suspicious and aggressive towards each other. The prologue and epilogue are two short stories which are connected to the main text of the novel by theme rather than plot. The prologue, "The Misunderstanding", is an interior monologue of Jesus Christ as he makes his way to the site of the Crucifixion. The epilogue, "The Chimeras", is a conversation between a psychiatrist and a man who believes that the world is being taken over by monsters. In this novel Koestler introduces the term cocacolonization to refer to the expansion of a typical modern diet, consisting of such fare as hamburgers, French fries, fat-rich snacks, soft drinks high in sugar. Nowadays the term is widely used by physicians when they want to explain, at least in part, the global expansion of obesity, diabetes and cardiovascular risk factors.

A Tragi-comedy

The Call-girls

Roman

Gottes Thron steht leer

Kepler

Cecil Hewitt Rolph

An Exposure of Capital Punishment in England

Hanged by the Neck

La tour d'Ezra

A Biography of Johannes Kepler

The Watershed

Thieves in the night : Chronicle and experiment

Phyllis BLEWITT

Trevor Eaton BLEWITT

Dialogue with death; translated by Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt, with a new preface by the author

Dialogue With Death. Translated by Trevor and Phyllis Blewitt

Arthur Koestler

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