Dostoevsky's grandson.

AT THE END of his life Arthur Koestler (1905-83) compiled an anthology of works from his almost fifty writing years to provide a comprehensive picture of the diverse periods of his life. The reason for the volume was, as he put it, that after his "vocational change" when he had changed from politics to science and philosophy in the mid-1950s, sometimes he felt as if he had undergone a change of sex:

 
   I sometimes meet young people who 
   had read in college The Sleepwalkers 
   or some other book on natural philosophy written 
   after the "vocational change", and who had no idea 
   that the same author once wrote political novels-- 
   and I meet others, more elderly people, who have 
   read a novel called Darkness at Noon but never 
   heard of any of the books written in the second 
   period. 

Koestler divided his life and work into two or three parts. The first one he called the "Search for Utopia", which was centred on questions of politics. The second he named the "Search for Synthesis", which is divided further into two parts: first he was on the trail of synthesis through science and philosophy, and then he tentatively tried to provide a "new form of mysticism". What led him onto the road of the so-called mysticism was a kind of scientific insight: that there are some indications that a cosmic consciousness might emerge from the infinite vista revealed to us of the sub-atomic and extra-galactic worlds.

In Koestler's view the "two cultures"--humanities and natural sciences--cannot be separated; beneath both runs a uniform pattern. And this leads to the conclusion that Koestler's "mysticism", his inquiry into metaphysics and parapsychology in the last period of his life, was built on the same ground, on the same structure, as his previous works. Thus, those readers and critics who turn away from Koestler the mystic, dismissing the inquiry into telepathy, coincidences and extra-sensory perception as an old man's senility, are mistaken.

However, the interesting point perhaps is that when we look for the common pattern, basic dilemma, the leitmotif--the unity in diversity--in the works of Koestler then we find a lot of parallel reminiscence, as it were, with Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. It seems that the direct antecedent of this unity is there in the intellectual legacy of Dostoevsky. And so the unity behind the diversity in the Koestlerian lifework is, in a certain sense, the offset of the work of Dostoevsky.

I.

THROUGH THE COURSE of his life, Koestler was in many ways tied to Russians and Russia. There was his grandfather Leopold, who arrived in Hungary from somewhere in Russia--it is not known exactly where--in the middle of the 1860s. So when Koestler went to Soviet Russia in 1932, he looked up his ancestral home. When he reached the Eastern regions: