Orwell Biography

At that time, India was part of the British Empire, and the father of the future writer, Richard Blair, served in one of the departments of the Indian Administration of Great Britain. The writer's mother was the daughter of a French merchant. Although Richard Blair Vera and Truth served the British crown until retirement in the year, the family did not acquire a fortune, and when Eric was eight years old, he was not easily determined in a private preparatory school in Sussex.

A few years later, having shown outstanding abilities in studying, the boy on a competitive basis receives a scholarship for further training in the result, the most privileged private school of Great Britain, which opened the way to Oxford or Cambridge. Later, in the essay “Why I write”, Orwell recalled that at five or six years he knew that he would be a writer, and in the end the circle of his literary addictions was determined-Swift, Stern, Jack London.

It is possible that it was the spirit of adventure and adventurism in the works of these writers that influenced the decision of Eric Blair to turn off the excessive path of the graduate of the results and enter the service of the imperial police, first in India, then in Burma. In the year, disappointed in the ideals and the system that he served, E. Blair retires and justifies the Portobello Road, in the quarter of the London poor, then leaves for Paris - the center of European bohemia.

However, the future writer led by no means a bohemian lifestyle, he lived in a working quarter, earnings with washing dishes, absorbing the experience and impressions that later writer George Orwell will melt into novels and numerous essays. The first book of J. Orwell “Burmese everyday life” on Orwell. Domiteeva - Burmes Days was published in the year and tells about the years spent in the service in the colonies of the British Empire.

Orwell has always been a politically engaged writer, shared the romanticism of the Red X, was preoccupied with the inhuman working conditions of the English miners, emphasized class inequality in English society. At the same time, he treated the idea of ​​English socialism and “proletarian solidarity” with disbelief and irony, since socialist views were more popular among intellectuals and those who belonged to the middle class, far from the most depth.

Orwell seriously doubted their sincerity and revolutionary. It is not surprising, therefore, that the writer's socialist sympathies brought him to the ranks of the Spanish Republicans, when a civil war erupted there. He goes to Spain at the end of the year as a correspondent of the BBC and the London newspaper Observer. Orwell was fascinated by the atmosphere of equality and the battle fraternity, which he felt upon arrival in Barcelona.

Socialism seemed to be a reality, and, having passed the initial military training, the writer goes to the front, where he receives a serious wound of the throat. Orwell described those days in the documentary book “In honor of Catalonia” on Orwell. While after being wounded in the hospital, Orwell writes to a friend: "I was a witness to amazing things and, finally, really believed in socialism - which was not before." However, the writer took out another lesson.

In the same place, in Catalonia, the La Batalla newspaper, the organ of the Spanish United Marxist Workers' Party, in the ranks of which J. Orwood fought, stuck the political trials in Moscow and the Stalinist reprisal against many old Bolsheviks in the year. However, even before the departure to Spain, Orwell knew about the mass processes that he called the “political killings” but, unlike most English leftists, he believed that what was happening in Russia was not “the onset of capitalism”, but there was a “disgusting perversion of socialism”.

With the passion of the neophytus, Orwell defended the original “moral concepts of socialism” - “freedom, equality, brotherhood and justice”, the process of deformation of which he captured in the satirical allegory “cattle yard”. The actions of some Republicans in Spain and the brutal practice of Stalinist repression shake his faith in the ideals of socialism. Orwell understood the utopianity of building a non -class society and the lowland of human nature, which is inherent in cruelty, conflict, the desire to rule over itself like.

The anxieties and doubts of the writer were reflected in his most famous and often quoted novels - the “Castard” and “”. An easy history of the publication of the “Castard” Animal Farm: a Fairy Story, this “Tales with a political meaning”, as the author himself determined the genre of the book. Having completed the work on the manuscript in February, Orwell, after refusing several publishers, was able to publish it only in publishers scared away the frankly anti -Stalinist character of the book.

But there was a war, and in front of the threat of fascist slavery, Moscow political processes and the Soviet-German Pact of Nonfall were replaced by the periphery of public consciousness-freedom of Europe was put on the map.At that time, and in those conditions, criticism of Stalinism was inevitably associated with a lunge against the fighting Russia, despite the fact that Orwell determined his attitude to fascism in the years, picking up weapons to protect republican Spain.

During World War II, George Orwell works on the BBC, then the editor of the literary department in the newspaper, and at the end of the war-a reporter in Europe. After the war ended, the writer settled on the coast in Scotland, where he completed the novel “”, which saw the light of the year. The writer died in January of the year. In our country, the novel became known to the wide reader in the year, when three satirical anti -utopias are published in different magazines: “We” E.

Zamyatin, the “Brave New World” by O. Huxley and the “Castard” by J. during this period reassessing not only the Soviet, but also the literature of the Russian abroad and the work of foreign authors. Books of those Western writers who were excommunicated from the Soviet mass reader are actively translated, as they allowed themselves critical statements addressed to us, those who were averted in our reality that today we ourselves are not acceptable and reject.

This primarily applies to satirics writers, those who, due to the specifics of their mocking and ulcerative muse, are the first to be called to diagnose, noticing the signs of public ill health. In the same period, a long -term taboo was removed from another anti -utopia by J. Orwell - “”, a novel that was either silent for us or was interpreted as anti -Soviet, reactionary.

The position of critics who wrote about Orwell in the recent past can be explained to some extent. The whole truth was not yet available about the Stalinism, that abyss of lawlessness and atrocities against the classes and entire nations, the truth about humiliation of the human spirit, mockery of free thought, about the atmosphere of suspicion, the practice of denunciations and many-many-many other people, which historians and publicists opened to us, which was told about the works of A.

Solzhenitsyna, V. Grossman, A. Rybakova, M. Dudintsev, D. Granin, Yu. Dombrovsky, V. Shalamov and many others. Then the Stalinist barracks socialism was perceived by many as inevitability, a given that has no alternative: the born in captivity does not notice it. Apparently, it is possible to refure the “sacred horror” of Soviet critic, who already read “” about the poster “” about the poster “enormous, more than a meter in width, the face of a person about forty-five, with a thick black mustache, a rude, but manly attractive on each site from the wall looked like the same face.

The portrait was made in such a way that wherever you get up, your eyes did not let you go. Translation: V. Golyshev], a clear hint of the “father of peoples” was able to dull the sharpness of the critical perception of the work. But the paradox is that in the essay “why I write” Orwell defines his task as criticizing socialism on the right, and not an attack on the left. He admitted that each line written by him since the year, "was directly or indirectly directed against totalitarianism in defense of democratic socialism, as I understand it." Expensive ambitions, hypertrophied egoism and hypocrisy can lead to the perversion and betrayal of these ideals.

The characters of the "Castard", rebuilding against the tyranny of the owner of the Jones farm, proclaim a society where "all animals are equal." Their revolutionary slogans resemble seven biblical commandments, which everyone should strictly follow. But their first idealistic phase, the phase of egalitarianism, the inhabitants of the “Castard” will pass very quickly and will first come to the usurpation of power by pigs, and then to the absolute dictatorship of one of them - Borov named Napoleon.

As the pigs try to imitate the behavior of people, the content of the slogans-resources gradually changes. When the piglets occupy Jones’s bedroom, thereby violating the commandment “No animal should sleep on the bed”, they make an amendment to her - “No animal should sleep on the bed with sheets.” Not only the substitution of the slogans and the displacement of concepts, but also the restoration of Status quo ante, only in an even more absurd and perverted form, for a “enlightened” power of a person, occurs.

Events are recognized in the cattle yard, recognizable: Napoleon’s opponent is expelled from the farm in the incendiary political debate of Snowball, nicknamed Cicero. He is deprived of awards, honestly won in a historical battle at a barn, won by free animals over the farmers. Moreover, Cicero is declared a spy of Jones - and the fluff and feathers are already flying on the farm, or even the heads that chop stupid chickens and ducks for “voluntary” confessions in “criminal” ties with the “spy” by Cicero.

The final betrayal of “animalism” - the teachings of the deceased theorist, Borov named Major - occurs with the substitution of the main slogan “All animals are equal” by the slogan “All animals are equal, but some of them are more equal than others”. And then the hymn “Cattle Housing, cattle is unclaimed” and the abolition of the democratic appeal “Comrade” is prohibited.In the last episode of this incredible story, the survivors of the farm with horror and amazement contemplate through the Svinsky feast, where the worst enemy of the farm Mr.

Pilkington proclaims a toast for the prosperity of the cattle yard.

Pigs stand on the hind legs, which is also prohibited by the commandment, and their snouts are already indistinguishable among the drunk faces of people. As befits in a satirical allegory, each character is the bearer of a particular idea, embodies a certain social type. In addition to the cunning and insidious Napoleon, the Cicero Political Flight of Cicero is included in the system of characters of the “Castard Courtyard”; lead named a snitch, demagogue and sink; The young Molly Molley, ready to sell the acquired freedom for a piece of sugar and bright ribbons, because on the eve of the uprising, it occupied the only question - “will there be sugar after the uprising?

In satire, irony, grotesque and piercing lyricism rarely are adjacent, for the satire, unlike the lyrics, appeals to the mind, and not to feelings. Orwell manages to combine the seemingly incompatible. Pity and compassion causes a not far, but endowed with a huge force, the boxer horse. He is not sophisticated in political intrigues, but honestly pulls his strap and is ready to work for the good of the farm even more, even heavier, until the powerful forces leave him, and then he is being taken to the stomach.

In the sympathy of Orwell to the Tower of the Boxer, one cannot help but see his sincere sympathy for the peasantry, whose simple way of life and difficult work the writer respected and appreciated, because they “mixed their sweat with the ground” and; Therefore, they have a greater right to land than Gentlei petty -free nobility or “upper middle class”. Orwell believed that ordinary people are genuine keepers of traditional values ​​and morality, and not intellectuals fighting for power and prestigious posts.

However, the writer's attitude to the latter was not so unambiguous. Orwell is an English writer to the bones of the bone. Его «английскость» проявлялась в обыденной жизни, в его «любительстве» Оруэлл не получил университетского образования ; Dress in an eccentric manner; In love for the earth in their own garden, its own goat walked; In the proximity to nature, he shared the ideas of interference; In commitment to traditions.

But at the same time, Orwell has never been characteristic of “island” thinking or intellectual snobbery. He was well acquainted with Russian and French literature, closely watched the political life of not only Europe, but also other continents, always attributed himself to “political writers”. With particular force, his political engagement manifested itself in the novel “”, the novel-antiopia, the novel-prelimination.

Hobbes, like Orwell, tried to solve the issue cardinal for his time: who should have power in a civilized society, and what is the attitude of society to the rights and obligations of the individual. But perhaps the most noticeable influence on Orwell was the work of the classic of the English satire of Jonathan Swift. Without Sviftian Yehu and Guugangnmi, a “farm” could hardly appear, continuing the tradition of anti -utopia and political satire.

In the 20th century, the synthesis of these genres arises - a satirical utopia, dating back to Evgeny Zamyatin’s novel “We”, completed in M ​​and first published in the West in the year. Isaac Doycher in the book "heretics and renegades" [Deutscher Isaak. Heretics and Renegades. Hamish Hamilton, London, at the same time, there is an indication that by the time of acquaintance with the novel “We”, Orwell has already matured the concept of his own satirical utopia.

American professor Gleb Struve, a connoisseur of Russian literature, told Orwell about Zamyatin’s novel, and then sent him a French translation of the book.