George Orwell
George Orwell (1903 - 1950) was an important prosaist, journalist and essayist. His real name was Eric Blair but from 1930 he used the pseudonym Orwell (a name of an English river). He was born in India into a family of English civil servants. He was sent back to England to be educated at Eton, a prestigious school for rich boys, and as a scholarship student he felt the weight of his lower social status. After Eton he went to Burma, where he joined the Imperial Police. His discomfort in this service was captured in his famous essay Shooting the Elephant (1950) and his novel Burmese Days (1934). Orwell felt sympathy for people of lower economic classes. He struggled to survive[1] at low-paying jobs, first in Paris and later in London. This experience was displayed in his next autobiographic novel Down and Out in Paris and London (1933). He sympathised with the socialists and participated as a volunteer in the Spanish Civil War on the side of the Republicans. He dedicated his documentary book Homage to Catalonian (1938) to them. However, he was not a follower of any political party; he took an independent view and was sceptical of communism as well as capitalism. He continued to write novels, essays, and political articles during the 1930s and 1940s.
His most famous books are the political allegories of Stalinism - Animal Farm (1945) and the anti-utopian Nineteen-Eighty-Four (1949). Animal farm is a modern fable. Orwell satirises the events of the Russian Revolution and the subsequent rise to power of the communist dictatorship. The farm represents the land that was a symbol of the Soviet Union. Farmer Jones (the tsar) virtually exploits the farm animals (the people), because he has always done so and he feels it right. When the animals are driven to revolt, they are led by the intelligent pigs. The plot[2] parallels historical events: the idealistic revolution, the establishment of secret police (the dogs), forced civilisation of the farm and the exploration of the workers, as represented by the horse Boxer. The leader-pig Napoleon has become more like the old farmer, even walking on his hind legs, while the enslaved animals live in despair. The revolutionary doctrine that "All animals are equal" has been corrupted to "Some animals are more equal than others".
Nineteen-Eighty-Four describes England under a dictatorship of mechanised bureaucracy. It is a story of Winston Smith, the man who was dissatisfied with the system, but had no chance of changing it and finally his personality was absolutely destroyed. Orwell shows the real totality with all its atrocities and nonsense.
George Orwell died from tuberculosis in 1950.
[1] protloukat se
[2] zápletka
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