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

56 horror of modern politics, our age which is dominated by politics as the 4th century was dominated by theology".** In Darkness at Noon Koestler explores the dilemma wich caught any man, forced to make a political decisions. In the case of this book the man's political decisions are all subservient to the idea of building a better future, the "Sun State". Darkness at Noon is concerned with the ends-means dilemma, with a stage on the way towards the Promised Land, Nineteen Eighty-Four foeuses on the End. Nineteen Eighty-Four presents the "end of the road", the road paved wiht the maxim "The end justifies the means". Revolution is achieved world-wide, the Promised Land became reality. The paper does not want to get involved in the debate between critics concerning the satyric and parodic elements of Nineteen Eighty-Four, and to what extent can the book be considered a satire, Neither is the paper to be concerned with the origins of the two books. ^ What the paper seeks to do is to compare the two books along certain lines, bring out certain diff erences and similarities between the characters and the ideas, to point out certain aspects of ideological kinship between the books. There are two ways of writing the title of Orwell's book. Throughout the paper the longer version, the one made up of letters and not digits, will be used, As B.Crick aptly remarks, Nineteen Eighty-Four is a book with chracters and complex ideas, whereas 1984 is a number, referring to a certain date and likewise is perhaps more readily interpretable as a prophecy. * ® Both Orwell's and Koestler's book are major documents of contemporary politics, complex novels of ideas read by a wide public. Their special importance lies in the fact that during or after reading them we inevitably ask questions like: what kind of society should we live in? To what extent are we supposed to or can we tolerate restrictions on our liberty? We are also very likely to ask where the trends and tendencies of our time will lead to. Since these seem to be questions that each generation asks anew when it reaches political maturity, it is worth putting these books under scrutiny and taking a fresh look at them. On Time and Tenses. In Koestler'a book, Darkness at Noon the reader is immediately plunged into the frightening mirocosmos of a prison and transported into the consciousness of a political prisoner, Nikolai Salmanovich Rubashov, ex-Comissar of the People, arrested on