Arthur Koestler

The following article is from The Great Soviet Encyclopedia (1979). It might be outdated or ideologically biased.

Koestler, Arthur

 

Born Sept. 5, 1905, in Budapest. English writer and philosopher. Son of an industrialist.

Koestler graduated from the University of Vienna (1926) with a major in psychology. He is the author of several publicistic satirical novels, including Darkness at Noon (1940), Arrival and Departure (1943), and Thieves in the Night (1946), which have been used as anticommunist propaganda. During the 1940’s and 1950’s, Koestler was a supporter of the “cold war.” In the late 1950’s he abandoned politics and has since then published a series of essays and studies on philosophy, biology, and the theory of biological systems, including The Sleepwalkers (1959), The Act of Creation (1965), and The Ghost in the Machine (1967); these works, using the theories of modern bourgeois philosophical anthropology, develop the idea of man as a “mistake of evolution.”

WORKS

Drinkers of Infinity. London, 1968.
The Roots of Coincidence. London, 1972.

REFERENCES

Glagoleva, E. “Psevdonauchnye rassuzhdeniia o prirode tvorchestva.” Kommunist, 1972, no. 12.
Potter, D. “The Ominous Beat of Koestler’s Ragged Black Wings.” The Times Saturday Review, Oct. 21, 1967.
Europäische Begegnung, October 1970, p. 37.

E. N. GLAGOLEVA and A. V. POTEMKIN

The Great Soviet Encyclopedia, 3rd Edition (1970-1979). © 2010 The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.