Animal Farm
“The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.”
George Orwell wrote Animal Farm between November 1943 and February 1944, but the novel was not published straightaway, because of the USSR's status as an ally in the Second World War. George Orwell was a socialist writer, so the fact that he chose to do such a savage critique of the Soviet Union may come as a bit of a surprise to a present-day reader. One might have expected him to choose the far right, rather than the far left. But he personally felt that the Soviet Union (now Russia) of that time had itself become a brutal dictatorship, and that its original ideals had become perverted.
George Orwell's Animal Farm is undeniably one of the best short novels ever written in the English language. It is a deceptively simple tale, which even older children could read. About an animal uprising, it is written in the style of a fable, and yet it can be read on so many levels. It is clearly both a satire and an allegory, a dystopian tale, and its author George Orwell made no secret of what regime, and which politicians, he was so mercilessly parodying. Yet as with all great novels, it speaks to us today and holds many timeless truths. It is the sort of novel where a reader will find new depths in each rereading.
In his story George Orwell chronicles the rising to power of Joseph Stalin, who is depicted by the pig "Napoleon" in the novel. The story parallels his emergence as a natural leader, and gradually follows his rise to power as a dictator. Near the beginning of the novel, the farm animals overthrow their oppressor, the farmer "Mr Jones". This is a direct analogy to the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917, when the Russian Tsar Nicholas II, who had abdicated in February, was executed by the Bolsheviks along with the rest of his family, in July 1918. Interestingly, Orwell said the drunken farmer Jones, who neglects his animals, was based on the real life Tsar Nicholas II.
But their democratic coalition of animals, all with a vision of independence, comfort and freedom from constraints, is gradually broken down. There is straightaway a consolidation of power among the pigs, who do no work because they are the "brainworkers" with what is tacitly agreed as superior intelligence. Just as the Soviet intelligentsia did, the pigs establish themselves as the ruling class in the new "free" society. In Animal Farm they then immediately begin to manipulate and control the new state for their own benefit.
