3 ms·

On your reading maybe. If Orwell wanted to set 1984 in Stalin’s Russia then he would have done

• selcuka 3y ago
  It never occurred to me that it could be read another way, but apparently people have different interpretations [1]. Asimov's review [2] seems to support my interpretation, too: > It was most popular at first with people who leaned towards the conservative side of the political spectrum, for it was clearly an anti-Soviet polemic, and the picture of life it projected in the London of 1984 was very much as conservatives imagined life in the Moscow of 1949 to be. [1] https://fee.org/articles/orwell-s-1984-how-to-misread-a-classic/ https://fee.org/articles/orwell-s-1984-how-to-misread-a-clas... [2] http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm http://www.newworker.org/ncptrory/1984.htm
  • gizajob 3y ago
    I read it, totally unprompted by school, when I was a teenager and was pretty stunned by it. I didn’t see it as a tome about Stalinism at all because I didn’t know about Stalinism then, but instead read it as something much more profoundly universal. Even profoundly British too, I think it could have been written without any influence from Stalinism even though in later years I see the obvious parallels and influences of that particular issue. The fact remains that I think there’s something much more profound about humanity in the collective than warrants a strictly Stalinist or communist reading. What it says about the structure of human societies is fairly common and universal - doesn’t take a spin on a Marxist reading to think it’s just repeating that class analysis.