Koestler Arthur 1905 - 1983 (78)
The principal mark of genius is not perfection but originality, the opening of new frontiers.
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. Koestler was a descendant of a wealthy family, born in Budapest. He studied in Vienna Polytechnic but he didn't graduade; he went to Palestine and began working as a correspondent for German newspapers in the Middle East. He returned to Germany and in 1931 became a member of the German Communist Party. In 1932 he visited Turkmenistan and recorded the living conditions in Central Asia, in 1936 and 1937 he traveled to Spain as a correspondent for an English newspaper. He was arrested by the Franco regime, imprisoned as a spy and sentenced to death. After a worldwide outcry, he escaped execution and was released.
He returned to France where he began writing in German about his experiences of Franco's imprisonment and his dissapointment by Stalin's policies. The novel was translated directly into English by sculptor Daphne Hardy and in 1940, shortly before the German invasion of Paris, she left for England with the translation in her luggage. Koestler was arrested as a Jew in Paris and imprisoned in the camp of Verne, from where he was released with the intervention of the British. He went to England but his original manuscript was lost forever. People became acquainted with Hardy's translation of the book, which was published in England in 1940 under the title Darkness at Noon and has since been translated into dozens of languages around the world.
From 1940 Keistler wrote in English, both novels and essays and autobiographical works. In the 1970s he turned to anthropology and parapsychology, arguing that death does not mean total extinction. In March 1983, while suffering from leukemia and Parkinson's disease, he committed suicide with his very young wife, who left a note stating that she could not live without him.