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Twelve Orwell’s Bestiary The Political Allegory of Animal Farm I read extensively in the history of the Russian Revolution before writing this essay. In contrast to many critics who claimed the meaning of this satirical fable was so obvious that there was nothing more to say about it, I likened Animal Farm to the attacks on Stalin by Trotsky, Gide and Koestler, and showed that every detail in the book has a precise political significance. Orwell’s hostility to the Russian Communists was a direct result of his experiences in Spain in 1937 when the Loyalists, like the revolutionaries in China in 1927, were betrayed by the Russians, and the Trotskyists whom Orwell had joined were mercilessly persecuted by their former comrades.1 Orwell writes in his Preface to the Ukrainian edition of Animal Farm (1947):“These man-hunts in Spain went on at the same time as the great purges in the USSR and were a sort of supplement to them. . . . Nothing has contributed so much to the corruption of the original idea of Socialism as the belief that Russia is a Socialist country and that every act of its rulers must be excused, if not imitated. And so, for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the Socialist movement.” Orwell often discussed and repeated the theme of this book. In “Inside the Whale” (1940), he states,“The Communist movement in western Europe began as a movement for the violent overthrow of capitalism, and degenerated within a few years into an instrument of Russian foreign policy”; and he writes in his essay on James Burnham (1946), “history consists of a series of swindles, in which the masses are first lured into revolt by the promise of Utopia, and then, when they have done their job, enslaved over again by new masters.” Orwell’s attempt to communicate the terrible discoveries he made in Spain was a failure in practical terms, for Homage to Catalonia sold badly and 12. orwell’s bestiary 115 was largely ignored. Yet he felt it was vital to stimulate others into political awareness. As he writes in the Preface to Animal Farm: “Up to 1939, and even later, the majority of English people were incapable of assessing the true nature of the Nazi regime in Germany, and now, with the Soviet regime, they are still to a large extent under the same sort of illusion. . . . It was of the utmost importance to me that people in western Europe should see the Soviet régime, for what it really was.” An experimentation with literary techniques that could most forcefully convey his social and political ideas is characteristic of all Orwell’s nonfiction : the autobiographical Down and Out in Paris and London; the sociological reportage, The Road to Wigan Pier; and the personal, political and military history Homage to Catalonia. Orwell had considerable success as a polemicist and pamphleteer, but this genre was too blunt and too direct, and his views were extremely unpopular at the time he expressed them. Animal Farm was written between November 1943 and February 1944, after Stalingrad and before Normandy, when the Allies first became victorious and there was a strong feeling of solidarity with the Russian allies, who even in retreat had deflected Hitler from England. Distinguished writers like Wells, Shaw, Barbusse and Rolland had praised Russia highly. Orwell’s book belongs with Trotsky’s The Revolution Betrayed (1937),2 Gide’s Return from the USSR (1937) and Koestler’s Darkness at Noon (1941), three prescient attacks on the Stalinist regime; and it anticipates postwar denunciations like Crossman’s compilation, The God That Failed (1949), and Djilas’ The New Class (1957).3 Animal Farm was rejected in 1944 by Gollancz, Cape and Faber & Faber because it criticized a military ally, and Orwell planned to publish it himself as a two-shilling pamphlet until Secker & Warburg accepted what became Orwell’s first financial success. Orwell believed “the business of making people conscious of what is happening outside their own small circle is one of the major problems of our time, and a new literary technique will have to be evolved to meet it.” His choice of a satiric beast fable for Animal Farm (1945) was exactly what he needed. The fantastic genre enabled him to avoid the difficulty of assimilating his personal experience into a traditional novel, a form in which he was never entirely at ease...

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