
.
.George
ORWELL
Eric Arthur Blair
(25 June 1903 – 21 January 1950), better known by his pen name
George Orwell, was an English novelist and journalist. His
work is marked by keen intelligence and wit, a profound awareness
of social injustice, an intense, revolutionary opposition to
totalitarianism, a passion for clarity in language and a belief in
democratic socialism.
Considered perhaps the 20th
century's best chronicler of English culture, Orwell wrote
literary criticism and poetry, as well as fiction and polemic
journalism. He is best known for the dystopian novel Nineteen
Eighty-Four (1949) and the satirical novella Animal Farm
(1945). His Homage to Catalonia (1938), an account of his
experiences as a volunteer on the Republican side in the Spanish
Civil War, and his numerous essays are also widely acclaimed.
Orwell's influence on culture, popular and political, continues.
Several of his neologisms, along with the term Orwellian, now a
byword for any draconian or manipulative social phenomenon or
concept inimical to a free society, have entered the vernacular.
Animal Farm
is a dystopian allegorical novella by George Orwell. Published in
England on 17 August 1945, the book reflects events leading up to
and during the Stalin era before World War II. Orwell, a
democratic socialist and a member of the Independent Labour Party
for many years, was a critic of Joseph Stalin and was suspicious
of Moscow-directed Stalinism after his experiences with the NKVD
during the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell
described Animal Farm as his novel "contre Stalin".
The original title was
Animal Farm: A Fairy Story, but A Fairy Story was
dropped by the US publishers for its 1946 publication. Of all the
translations during Orwell's lifetime, only Telugu kept the
original title. Other variations in the title include: A Satire
and A Contemporary Satire. Orwell suggested for the French
translation the title Union des républiques socialistes
animales, recalling the French name of the Soviet Union,
Union des républiques socialistes soviétiques, and which
abbreviates URSA, which means "bear", a symbol of Russia, in
Latin.
The novel addresses not only the
corruption of the revolution by its leaders but also how
wickedness, indifference, ignorance, greed and myopia destroy any
possibility of a Utopia. While this novel portrays corrupt
leadership as the flaw in revolution (and not the act of
revolution itself), it also shows how potential ignorance and
indifference to problems within a revolution could allow horrors
to happen if smooth transition to a people's government isn't
satisfied.
Nineteen Eighty-Four
(sometimes
unofficially abbreviated to 1984), by George Orwell,
published in 1949, is a dystopian novel about the totalitarian
regime of the Party, an oligarchical collectivist society where
life in the Oceanian province of Airstrip One is a world of
perpetual war, pervasive government surveillance, public mind
control, and the voiding of citizens' rights. In the Ministry of
Truth (Minitrue), protagonist Winston Smith is a civil servant
responsible for perpetuating the Party's propaganda by revising
historical records to render the Party omniscient and always
correct, yet his meagre existence disillusions him into rebellion
against Big Brother, which leads to his arrest, torture, and
conversion.
As literary political fiction,
1984 is a classic novel of the social science fiction
sub-genre, thus, since its publication in 1949, the terms and
concepts of Big Brother, doublethink,
thoughtcrime, Newspeak, Memory hole, et cetera,
became contemporary vernacular, including the adjective
Orwellian, denoting George Orwell's writings and
totalitarianism as exposited in Nineteen Eighty-Four and
Animal Farm (1945).
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