George Orwell and socialism - John Newsinger
posted by Snowball @ 11:33 am
Thursday, March 26, 2015
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2 Comments:
A major reason Orwell had trouble placing Animal Farm with a publisher during the war was that the USSR was taking on the brunt of the fighting in Europe, and an obviously anti-USSR satire at such a time could be regarded as at least tasteless, untimely and perhaps implicitly pro-Nazi. That he managed to publish it for the first time in August 1945 shows it was about timing as much as anything. It was a suitable book for the developing Cold War but not WW2.
It is also telling that one of the first languages it was translated into was Ukrainian for distribution in the West, so some of its first foreign-language readers would have been fresh from actual Nazi collaboration.
Orwell was and is useful to all kinds of causes, many remote from socialism however interpreted.
http://uk.wikipedia.org/wiki/%D0%9A%D0%BE%D0%BB%D0%B3%D0%BE%D1%81%D0%BF_%D1%82%D0%B2%D0%B0%D1%80%D0%B8%D0%BD
The first Ukrainian edition published in Munich, 1947. It is more obviously anti-USSR than the first English editions. The title literally translates as "Collective Farm Of The Animals".
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