Az Eszterházy Károly Tanárképző Főiskola Tudományos Közleményei. 1991. British and American Philologycal Studies (Acta Academiae Paedagogicae Agriensis : Nova series ; Tom. 20)
József Hruby: Two "Last Men in Europe": A. Koestler's Darkness at Noon and G. Ornwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four
55 HRUBY JÓZSEF TWO "LAST MEN IN EUROPE": A. KOESTLER'S DARKNESS AT NOON AND G. ORWELL'S NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR Motto: It is 1971, and Mirak says that the struggle of man against power is the struggle of memori against forgetting. Milan Kundéra: The Book of Laughter and Forgetting (1) In the 20 th century science and technology developed at breathtaking speed, faster than ever before in the history of mankind, At the same time ideologies came into being that strove to create the faceless "mass man". These two trends, unaccompanied by the parallel development of humanist values, resulted in the emergence of strong concentrations of power, curtailing the freedom of' the individual, thus making him easy subject to surveillance and manipulation. In our century it has been the "Theatre of the Absurd" and the political novel depicting instances of individual heroism in the age of mass ideology"^ that have been able to give the best account of the human predicament. The 1930's and 1940's proved to be frightfully fruitful in terms o! giving birth to represenatives of the political novel, Two books, both of them products of the 30's and 40's cover all the major issues and themes that ordinary people, politicians or political novelists, for that matter" were and have been concerned with: the mechanism of' totalitarianism, Arthur Koestler's enduring masterpiece, Darkness at Noon (1940) poses the problem in a concrete, easily identifiable context. The context is the Soviet Union of the 1930's; It is a great evocation of Stalinist milieu", 3 with "psychological interest.^ George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949) discusses the same theme in a more generalised context, The book "speaks for our time" 5 and "illustrates the nature of societies that do exist",^ "is not so much a prophecy". 7 Violence, power, and the problem of truth are the main themes of the book. However dissimilar they are in terms of approach, they have it in common that both are the concentrated expressions of the
