Notes
- . Peter Slavek was modeled on Endre Havas, a young Hungarian poet whom Koestler knew during the war in London. Arrested during a purge in Hungary, he went insane under prison torture. Koestler quotes a Hungarian press attache who was also arrested and wrote a book on the experience: “Havas, with his conspicuous appearance and the typical awkwardness of an intellectual, was a tempting target. They dragged him about and played football with his body. He was left lying in his excrement for days” (“Postscript to the Danube Edition,” in Arrival and Departure, Danube Edition [London: Hutchinson & Co., 19661, p. 191). He was posthumously rehabilitated as one of the victims of the “Stalin personality cult.”
- . “We Need a Fraternity of Pessimists,” New York Times Magazine (November 7, 1943), p. 12; “The Fraternity of Pessimists,” in The Yogi and the Commissar (New York: Macmillan Co., 1946), p. 100. This essay is one of a number, some of no particular distinction, used to pad “The Yogi and the Commissar (11)” to book length. The latter essay itself concludes a one‐hundred page, self‐contained pamphlet on the failure of the Soviet experiment. Koestler documents his case devastatingly from Soviet statistics and in many cases makes statistical guesses which have received a startling confirmation in Solzhenitsyn's The Gulag Archipelago. The three chapters before “The Yogi and the Commissar (11)” are “Anatomy of a Myth,”“Soviet Myth and Reality,” and “The End of an Illusion.” The second concludes with the lines, reminiscent of Crassus in The Gladiators: “The Russian Revolution has ediled in its aim to create a new type of human society in a new moral climate. The ultimate reason for its failure was the arid nineteenth‐century materialism of its doctrine. It had to fall back on the old opiates because it did not recognise man's need for spiritual nourishment” (p. 192).
- . If the resolution of reality into discrete levels is the climactic stage of any mode of explanation, then Islam rather than Christianity would seem to be “terminal religion,” a position which Koestler suggests elsewhere and with which, in fact, I am inclined to agree.
- . Koestler wrote this essay, of course, before the discovery of DNA. He seems almost to have hedged his bet against precisely such a discovery, writing:” continuity, only jumps, and a staircase never becomes a slope, even if the steps are made infinitely small. For we can always choose a correspondingly small particle which will remain at rest on the staircase but roll down the slope” (“The Yogi and the Commissar (II),” p. 237). Molecular biologists like Jacques Monod take the position that the staircase is a slope. A Koestler‐edited (with J. R. Smythies) volume, Beyond Reductionism: New Perspectives in the Lve Sciences (New York: Macmillan Co., 1969) was the only work by a contemporary on which Monod chose to comment in his own philosophical essay Chunce and Necessity (trans. Austryn Wainhouse [New York: Alfred A. Knopf, Inc., 1971]), and he did so with considerable asperity.
- . As a polemicist against Communism, Koestler achieved his greatest success with the French translation of Darkness at Noon. Appearing during a postwar referendum on the future form of the French constitution, it sold four hundred thousand copies, breaking all prewar publication records, and was plainly an important factor in the defeat of that form of constitution which would have permitted the French Communist party to come to power. Koestler calls this one of “two incidents in my life to which, in the frequent hours of depression and self‐negation, I turn for comfort” (The Invisible Writifig, p. 404). The French title of the work, which was originally written in German but only survives in translations, was, interestingly, Le ziro et I'infini, a much more direct allusion to the “hours at the window” and related reflections.
- . A minor irony is that the motto of the Dominican order, contemplata trarlpre, is rather exactly the translation of what Koestler calls the “Yogi‐ethics,” namely, “to transfer the values derived from passive contemplation into practical action” (“The Yogi and the Commissar (II),” p. 243).