Animal Farm

"Animal Farm even seems very creditable if we compare it with Voltaire and Swift. " Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker, 1946

It begins simply. The animals of Manor Farm drive out their drunken master and take the farm into their own hands. From now on there is to be a world with no exploitation in it. The first principle is clear enough: all animals are equal.

But the revolution is not yet over when power finds its own new language. The pigs take charge of running the farm. Boxer, the cart-horse, works harder than anyone and asks fewer questions than anyone. The sheep repeat whatever they hear, and the commandments change at night, quietly. In the end all that is left of that first ideal is the sentence that has become more famous than the book itself: all animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.

Orwell put a subtitle under the title: a fairy story. A short tale that takes a revolution, in under a hundred pages, from liberation to the reproduction of the very tyranny it rose against. It is that simplicity which has carried the book beyond political satire tied to one period.

The stranger story happened outside the book.

Orwell began writing Animal Farm in 1943, shortly after leaving the BBC. By the time the manuscript was ready, Britain was still at war with Germany and the Soviet Union was one of its principal allies. Publishing a satire that plainly took aim at the Russian revolution and Stalin's rule was awkward for publishers.

The manuscript came back one house at a time. Victor Gollancz declined it. William Collins and André Deutsch stepped away. Jonathan Cape first indicated willingness, then changed his mind after consulting the Ministry of Information. Orwell later wrote that in that political climate, publishing anything openly anti-Soviet had become close to impossible.

The most famous reply came from T. S. Eliot, then at Faber. In a letter dated 13 July 1944, he praised Orwell's skill as a satirist and placed him in the tradition of Swift, but did not accept the book's political conclusion. His argument was, to a degree, astonishing: the trouble on the farm was not necessarily that pigs ruled it, but perhaps that the ruling pigs were not sufficiently public-spirited.

The book the large houses had avoided was finally published by Secker and Warburg, on 17 August 1945, in a first printing of 4,500 copies. Europe had only just come out of the war, and the world saw the atomic bombing of Hiroshima that same month. Into that atmosphere came a story about revolution, propaganda, obedience and power.

Orwell had also written a preface for the book, titled The Freedom of the Press. Space was left for it in the proofs of the first edition, but Orwell never sent it to the publisher. The text was found years later among the publisher's papers and printed in 1972. Bernard Crick, Orwell's biographer, later held that its absence may have served the book well. The preface steered the reader too firmly toward Stalin and the politics of the day, while the story itself carried a wider capacity for meaning.

That may be the secret of the book's endurance. If the characters were only stand-ins for Stalin, Trotsky and the other figures of the Russian revolution, the book would probably have aged along with that era. What Orwell shows instead is a mechanism far more familiar and far more lasting: how power alters memory, how language shifts the truth, and how a society may one day find that the ideal it made a revolution for has quietly turned into its opposite.

The Persian translation appeared three years after the original, in 1948. The first translator was Amir Amirshahi, and it was that translation which established the book in Iran under the title Ghal'eh-ye Heyvanat, The Animals' Castle, rather than the original Animal Farm.

More than thirty other Persian translations have followed. Among them, the versions by Ahmadreza Kasaipour, Hamidreza Baluch, Mohammadreza Sameti, Hossein Sotoudeh, Marjan Gheybi and Abbas Zarei are regarded as sound.

Three reviews, three angles

Edmund Wilson, The New Yorker, 1946
The book took the lead review. Wilson found the theme worked out with a simplicity, wit and dryness close to La Fontaine and Gay, in a prose so plain and spare, so admirably proportioned to its purpose, that the book stands comparison with Voltaire and Swift.

Kingsley Martin
His objection came from within the left. Martin held that Orwell had given in too far to disillusion and pessimism about human nature. He also thought the direct correspondence between the book's characters and the history of the Russian revolution was a liability, since it left the book open to every kind of historical and factual objection.

George Soule, The New Republic, 1946
The harshest of the three. Soule had expected pleasure and found the book puzzling and, on the whole, dull. The allegory, he wrote, turned out to be a creaking machine for saying clumsily what had been said better directly. He granted that Orwell knew his farm animals and gave them vivid personalities.

Today, eighty-one years after that same 17 August, the argument over the historical accuracy of Orwell's allegory can still go on. But what has kept Animal Farm alive is not the detail of Soviet history; it is the picture it draws of what becomes of language in the hands of power. At the start of the book a law is written on a wall. At the end the wall is still there. Only the words have changed.

Sources and further reading

George Soule, "Orwell's Fables," The New Republic, 2 September 1946.

Edmund Wilson, review of Animal Farm, The New Yorker, 7 September 1946, p. 97. Collected in George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers, Routledge, pp. 204-205.

Kingsley Martin, review of Animal Farm. Collected in George Orwell: The Critical Heritage, ed. Jeffrey Meyers, Routledge.