George Orwell's novel 1984 does not need an introduction, but the recent news item (allegedly, sales of this book were banned in Belarus) has only increased interest in it. Why is "1984", which was predicted to be short-lived, still relevant? And how to read the novel today?
- What does Orwell's biography say about his novels?
Although the novel 1984 is often described as anti-communist, Orwell's biography contradicts this statement somewhat. More accurately, his main text criticizes any ideology at all that existed in the writer's time.
Eric Arthur Blair (Orwell's real name) was born in 1903 in Bengal. His father was an official of the Opium Department of the colonial administration; his mother was the daughter of a local British businessman. Orwell himself later wrote that he was born into a "lower-middle-class, upper-middle-class" family.
Eric was in the British Isles a year after he was born. In England, he graduated from Eton College, where Aldous Huxley taught him French. After his studies, in a strange, inexplicable decision for his family and friends, Blair was back in the East, 18 years after his departure: in 1922 he joined the colonial police in Burma.
The future writer, already then thinking about literary work and having written a couple of essays, came to the idea that life experience is necessary for any author. True, the service disgusted him, and after enduring five years with the police, Blair went home on leave. He never came back.
Once in Britain, Eric preferred the quiet life of an official to wandering through seasonal work and work as a dishwasher in restaurants in Paris. He interacted a great deal with the lumpen and soon began to resemble the poor himself. All this was a kind of therapy, which ended up in the creation of an autobiographical book with the telling title Pounds of Dirt in Paris and London.
Along with the first major novel came George Orwell. Eric Blair, first of all, liked the name of the river in Sussex better than his own surname. Secondly, he did not want to shock his family with his books. Thirdly, in the event of writerly failure (which Orwell had always foreseen for himself) he could distance himself from his published texts.
The turning point in his biography can be called in 1936, when the writer went to Spain, where the civil war was going on. Orwell joined the Partido Obrero de Unificación Marxista, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unity, and fought on the side of the Communists. In 1937 he was shot in the neck and was forced first to hide from repression in Barcelona, and then by roundabout ways to get out of the country through an independent city with international status - the Moroccan Tangier.
From Spain, Orwell returned as a staunch opponent of Stalinism and joined the socialist Independent Workers' Party. He continued to sympathize with the Socialist Party, but believed that any regime that would be established in Spain-even communist and liberal-would be fascist.
"Any propaganda is a lie, even when you tell the truth. But it doesn't matter that much as long as you know what you are doing and why," Orwell wrote in his diary later, on March 14, 1942.
In 1938, the writer was diagnosed with tuberculosis. With the disease, he was destined to live 12 years and finish, shortly before his death in 1950, his major book, 1984. It is unclear exactly when Orwell got the idea for it, but as early as May 1944, answering a Tribune reader's question about the possibility of a totalitarian dictatorship in Britain, he wrote: "If this world comes, a world of two or three superpowers who are unable to conquer each other, and if the Leader so wishes, two times two will become five... it is true that the process is reversible.
Read more at The Chalk: https://mel.fm/zhizn/knigi/6759412-roman-preduprezhdeniye-kak-chitat-1984-oruella-i-stoit-li-eto-delat-podrostkam