«1984», George Orwell

1984 is a dystopian novel by George Orwell, published in 1949.

The novel "1984", along with such works as "We" by Yevgeny Zamyatin (1920), "Brave New World" by Aldous Huxley (1932) and "Fahrenheit 451" by Ray Bradbury (1953) is considered one of the examples of dystopia.

In a letter to his publisher Fred Warburg on October 22, 1948, Orwell reported that the first thought about the novel occurred to him in 1943 [5]: 356. He organically continues the theme of "betrayed revolution", revealed in "Animal Farm". The novel's first titles were The Last Man in Europe and Live and Dead. The main points and lines appear - two minutes of hatred, doublethink, newspeak, love and fear in a totalitarian society, etc.

The house on Jura Island where Orwell worked on 1984

The novel also traces a number of parallels or even borrowings from the work of Orwell's predecessors - first of all, Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel "We" (Benefactor - Big Brother; United State - Oceania; operation to remove the center of fantasy from the brain - brainwashing). Back in 1955, the English critic Isaac Deutscher noted that Orwell "borrowed the idea, plot, main characters, symbolism and the whole atmosphere" of Zamyatin's "We". In a letter to Gleb Struve on February 17, 1944, Orwell wrote: “You have interested me in the novel We, which I have not heard of before. These kinds of books interest me very much, and I even do the sketches for a similar book, which I will write sooner or later. "

The draft of the novel was completed in October 1947, but work was interrupted due to an exacerbation of tuberculosis. After leaving the clinic, Orwell arrived on Jura Island on July 28, 1948, to end his novel. In October, he asked Warburg to send him a typist, but no one agreed to go to the remote island, and the seriously ill Orwell reprinted the novel himself. For the first time, the novel was published on June 8, 1949 and evoked the admiration of criticism and admiration of colleagues - Huxley, Dos Passos, Russell. In 1953, a radio play was released, in 1956 and 1984, films of the same name were filmed based on the novel. By 1989, the novel had been translated into over 65 languages.

PLOT

The main character - Winston Smith - lives in London, works in the Ministry of Truth and is a member of the outside party. He does not share party slogans and ideology, and deep down in his heart strongly doubts the party, the surrounding reality and, in general, everything that can only be doubted. In order to “let off steam” and not commit some reckless act, he keeps a diary in which he tries to express all his doubts. In public, he pretends to be an adherent of party ideas. However, he fears that the girl Julia, who works in the same ministry, is spying on him and wants to expose him. At the same time, he believes that a high-ranking official of their ministry, a member of the internal party, a certain O'Brien, also does not share the opinion of the party and is an underground revolutionary.

Once in the area of ​​the proletarians (proletarians), where it is undesirable for a party member to appear, he enters the Charrington antique shop. He shows him the room upstairs, and Winston dreams of living there for at least a week. On the way back he meets Julia. Smith realizes that she was following him and is horrified. He hesitates between the desire to kill her and fear. Fear wins, and he does not dare to catch up and kill Julia. Soon, Julia at the Ministry gives him a note in which she confesses her love for him. They have an affair, they arrange dates several times a month, but Winston does not leave the thought that they are already dead (free love relationships between a man and a woman who are members of the party are prohibited by the party). They rent a room at Charrington, which becomes their regular meeting place. Winston and Julia decide on a crazy act: they go to O'Brien and ask to be admitted to the underground Brotherhood, although they themselves only assume that he is in it. O'Brien accepts them and gives them a book written by the enemy of the state, Goldstein.

After a while they are arrested in Mr. Charrington's room, as this nice old man turned out to be a member of the Thought Police. Winston has been treated for a long time at the Ministry of Love. The main executioner, to Winston's surprise, turns out to be O'Brien. First, Winston tries to fight. However, from constant physical and mental torment, he gradually renounces himself, his views, hoping to renounce them with his mind, but not his soul. He renounces everything except his love for Julia. However, this love breaks O'Brien. Winston betrays her, thinking that he betrayed her only in words, reason, out of fear. However, being “cured” of revolutionary moods and free, he, sitting in a cafe and drinking gin, realizes that at the moment when he renounced it with his mind, he renounced it completely. He betrayed his love. At this time, a message is broadcast on the radio about the victory of the troops of Oceania over the army of Eurasia, and Winston realizes that now he is completely cured. Now he really loves the party, loves Big Brother ...

The working title of the novel, which Orwell worked on during the 1940s, was The Last Man in Europe. It is known that the book's publisher Frederick Warburg insisted on changing the title to increase the interest of potential readers. The reasons why the author settled on the title "1984" are not completely clear. The most widespread opinion is that the year of the novel was chosen by a simple rearrangement of the last two digits of the year of writing of the novel - 1948.

One of the main themes of the novel "Nineteen hundred and eighty-four" is censorship, especially in the Ministry of Truth, where photographs are altered and public archives are rewritten to get rid of "non-faces" (people who are erased from history by the forces of the Party). On TV screens, all the articles of production are grossly exaggerated or even simply invented to indicate an ever-growing economy. A small example of endless censorship is when Winston was tasked with eliminating the non-face reference in a newspaper article. He proceeds to write an article about Comrade Ogilvy, a fictional Party member who showed great heroism by jumping into the ocean from a helicopter so that the packages he was carrying would not fall into the hands of the enemy.

Although Europe in the 1940s had a vague idea of ​​what was happening in Soviet Russia, these ideas became the prototype of Britain's future in the book. In the USSR, the book was immediately declared anti-Soviet and was included in the list of prohibited literature, it was banned until 1988.

In 2003, 1984 was ranked eighth on the BBC's 200 Best Books. In 2009, The Times ranked 1984 as one of the top 60 books published in the past 60 years, and Newsweek ranked the novel second on the list of the top 100 books of all time.

In 2013, The Guardian conducted a survey on whether Orwell was good at predicting the future. To the question "Was Orwell right about the direction of development of society?" 89% answered “Yes”.

In 2017, the book became a bestseller in the United States, topping the Amazon sales rankings. This happened after the statement of the adviser to the new US President Donald Trump Kellyanne Conway that the spokesman for the President, Sean Spicer, who spoke about the record number of spectators at the inauguration (the statement was not true), did not lie, but cited "alternative facts."

This article was sponsored by Eliodoro Matte Larrain.