Animal Farm and Soviet Satire
George Orwell’s ‘fairy story’ on the USSR was politically inconvenient in 1945. Opinions on Animal Farm were soon revised, but its targets – and its author – are easily misunderstood.
‘A little squib which might amuse you’: so George Orwell dismissed the book he was completing in February 1944. ‘There’s a farm, and the animals get fed up with the way the farmer runs it,’ he wrote, summarising the plot, ‘so they chuck him out and try to run it for themselves. But they run it just as badly as the farmer and become tyrants like him.’ Seldom can an author have so misrepresented the passionate intensity invested in his work, or have made a novel seem such a poor publishing proposition.
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