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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 30 July 2009
In November 1949 the Hungarian government announced the trial for espionage of the American I.T.&T. executive Robert A. Vogeler. At the beginning of the following year Vogeler pleaded guilty and was sentenced to fifteen years imprisonment. For a while his case became a cause célèbre to the extent that the U.S. government threatened to break of diplomatic relations with Hungary. Vogeler was released in 1951 after a deal between the two governments. With the case of Cardinal Mindszenty fresh in the public memory reports had been emerging that Vogeler had been subjected to a coercion tantamount to torture, which he himself confirmed in his memoir, I Was Stalin's Prisoner (1952), which was published the same year as Whittaker Chambers's Witness. This was no mere coincidence. Reviewing the latter work John Dos Passos threw out dark hints that the authenticity of both memoirs was being confirmed by a Communist-inspired smear campaign against the two writers. Vogeler had been subjected unwittingly to a process that was on the verge of being named. He recalled how he had been reduced to exhaustion and despair by sleep deprivation and by isolation from any American contacts. The result was a splintering of his consciousness into two entities: “A new personality was struggling to take command of my body, a personality that was prepared to do everything that No. 1 suggested. But my old personality — or perhaps it was merely the instinct of self-preservation — still held its ground”.
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68. After numerous rejections by American publishers Night was finally published in 1960 by the Olympia Press (Paris) and later that year in Britain by John Calder. The quotation comes from a very full account of the novel, possibly written by Francis Pollini himself, on the dust wrapper of the Olympia Press edition.
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100. The year of the novel's action is strategically chosen — at once near to 1984 but beyond it. When the conspirators are all caught a Soviet official declares his intention to erase them from history explicitly on the model of Orwell's novel.
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103. The film was directed by Don Siegel, famous for his original version of Invasion of the Body Snatchers. In the film all the sleepers are triggered by a line from Robert Frost, whereas in the novel each sleeper has his or her own trigger phrase.