Abstract
In 1947, when Orwell started out to write a satirical book which was to present a warning against a possible totalitarian future placed arbitrarily in 1984, Hitler’s ghastly dictatorship over Germany lay only two years in the past. Stalin, an equally terrifying totalitarian figure, still reigned from the Kremlin over his Gulag archipelago. As a satire, with its fiction-props of the all-powerful, all-ruthless Party and its immortal leader Big Brother, its lies and its Thought Police and the vaporizing of dissidents, 1984 was aimed against Stalinism. Moreover it was aimed against contemporary Stalinism and its Western well-wishers who saw Stalinist repressiveness as Utopia.
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© 1985 The Council of Europe
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Fyvel, T.R. (1985). 1984 as a Satire on the Relations between Rulers and Ruled. In: Shoham, S.G., Rosenstiel, F. (eds) And He Loved Big Brother. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07831-8_9
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-07831-8_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-07833-2
Online ISBN: 978-1-349-07831-8
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