Abstract
His mother was a country girl; his father was a military captain, not wealthy, but he owned land, plenty of it, and his income was steady and ample. Then, a tragedy, and his father was lost, his income all but lost, and he was left with little but his mind and his middling education.
A version of this essay was originally published by Harper’s Magazine.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The translation of “Animal Riot” was a huge lift, but there’s yet another heroic act of translation that awaits someone: Bunt by Wladyslaw Stanislaw Reymont (serialized in 1922, published as a book in 1924, and now public domain). The short novel may have also had a part in the origin of Animal Farm.
- 2.
Also: “The Freedom of the Press,” 1945/72.
- 3.
Edited By Christopher John Murray. Routledge, 2003.
- 4.
Was Orwell being clever? “Karamazov” as “Kostomarov.”? The Dostoevsky scene is noted and reproduced in “Pigs, Goats, Tea Parties, Walking Magnets & Scotch Central,” included in this collection.
- 5.
“A Very Remarkable Prophecy of the Rise of Fascism.” Orwell, the Lost Writings. Arbor House, 1985. Also in Complete Works. Dated to 1943.
- 6.
Routledge, 1977.
- 7.
University of Toronto Press.
- 8.
Macmillan, 1940.
- 9.
“Mykola Kostomarov (1817–185) and the Creation of a Ukrainian Ethnic Identity.” Slavonica.
- 10.
Edited by Peter Davison. George Orwell: A Life in Letters. Liveright, 2013.
- 11.
Yevgeny Ivanovich Zamyatin. Isaac Deutscher, in his essay “The Mysticism of Cruelty,” observes that Orwell “borrowed the idea of 1984, the plot, the chief characters, the symbols, and the whole climate of the story, from Evgeny Zamyatin’s We.” Deutscher’s conclusion is cited in Frances Stoner Saunders’ The Cultural Cold War (The New Press, 1999), as well as in Corruptions of Empire by Alexander Cockburn (Verso Books, 1988).
- 12.
George Orwell: A Life. Little Brown, 1981.
- 13.
The inscription is not known at this time. Routledge, 1944.
- 14.
Very likely volume 5 of Life and Letters (1930), which published a work of literary biography, “Alexander Blok.”
- 15.
“The Islanders,” which satirized the English bourgeoisie way of life, was published in Russia in late 1917. The introduction to The Complete Works of George Orwell: Smothered Under Journalism (Secker & Warburg, 1946, edited by Ian Angus, Peter Hobley Davison, Sheila Davison) speculates on the early fate of “The Islanders” in English translation: “The satire on England which Orwell refers to is a longish short story called ‘The Islanders,’ a bitingly satirical picture of English smugness and philistinism. … It was translated into English but was turned down by publishers because of its ‘anti-English’ bias”.
- 16.
“Review of ‘We’ by E. I. Zamyatin.” Tribune, January 4, 1946.
- 17.
Chatto & Windus, 1932.
- 18.
The lists were discovered, written about, and then, in the fashion of Orwell’s own analysis of self-censorship, ignored for the reason that this particular truth “just wouldn’t do” to talk about. Perhaps our propriety isn’t independent of that fact that Orwell—via the Congress for Cultural Freedom and what was to become the “Cold War”—is arguably the most subsidized literary writer in the history of Western literature. (The term “Cold War” is Orwell’s own coinage.)
- 19.
Michael Shelden. Orwell: The Authorized Biography. Politico Publishing, 2006.
- 20.
“Letters to Dorothy Plowman.” Orwell literary estate, 1941.
- 21.
Tanya Paperny, the translator, was consciously trying to stay agnostic as to the Animal Farm / “Animal Riot” question.
- 22.
George Orwell: A Life. Little Brown, 1981.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2023 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Reed, J. (2023). 2015: Revisionist History: The Origin of Animal Farm (Was a Little-Known Story, “Animal Riot,” by Russian/Ukrainian Scholar Nikolai Kostomarov). In: The Never End. Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_4
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-0765-6_4
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Singapore
Print ISBN: 978-981-99-0764-9
Online ISBN: 978-981-99-0765-6
eBook Packages: Political Science and International StudiesPolitical Science and International Studies (R0)