READING ANIMALK FARM
George Orwell
http://www.levity.com/corduroy/orwell.htm
Interpretation of characters
http://www.newspeakdictionary.com/go-animal_farm.html
How did George Orwell's life potentially influence his novel Animal Farm?
George Orwell wrote the manuscript in 1943 and 1944 subsequent to his
experiences during the Spanish Civil War, which he described in his 1938
Homage to Catalonia. In the preface of a 1947 Ukrainian edition of
Animal Farm, he explained how escaping the communist purges in Spain
taught him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion
of enlightened people in democratic countries." This motivated Orwell to
expose and strongly condemn what he saw as the Stalinist corruption of
the original socialist ideals.
Immediately prior to his writing, the Ministry of Information had put
out a booklet for propagandists with instructions on how to quell
ideological fears of the Soviet Union, which included directions to
claim that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination, and Orwell
had quit the BBC.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Animal_Farm…
Orwell came into direct contact with Stalin’s men while he and his wife
were fighting in the 1930s the Spanish Civil War (a proxy war between
the communists and the fascists). Orwell, a socialist, went to Spain to
fight against the fascist takeover of the country, but he found himself
nearly as disturbed by the antidemocratic tendencies of the communists
he fought alongside. In the Preface to the Ukrainian edition, Orwell
says that his time in Spain made him realize “how easily totalitarian
propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic
countries.” He set out to write Animal Farm with this idea in mind. He
wanted to pull back the curtain on Russia, to reveal the Stalinist
version of communism as a brutal farce, a betrayal of the socialist
values Orwell held dear. As Orwell said, “it was of the utmost
importance that people in Western Europe should see the Soviet regime
for what it really was" (source).
After seeing a young boy whipping a carthorse, Orwell had the idea to
make his story a fable, to link it with proud tradition of Aesop and
Jonathan Swift. As he puts it in his Preface, “It struck me that if only
such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power
over them, and that men exploit animals in much the same way as the rich
exploit the proletariat.” The fable form allowed Orwell to depict the
Soviet Union in simpler terms, to explain it clearly to common readers
and to endow it with his own unique perspective. In short, the Soviet
Union became Animal Farm.
http://www.shmoop.com/animal-farm/
