George Orwell's Animal farm and the Russian Revolution
George Orwell's Animal farm and the Russian Revolution
In Animal Farm Orwell uses a farm and the rebellion of its mistreated animals to symbolize a much more serious issue. George Orwell expresses his own political opinions in a clever and interesting way, that allows reader’s of all ages to understand a complicated situation.
In surface George Orwell’s Animal Farm seems to be just a funny fable but we can say that this novel successfully combines the characteristics of three literary forms, fable, satire and allegory. Reading the novel we will come to an understanding that the novel is a political one that has been written intentionally to convey a clear message to readers. This paper examines if there is any relationship between the Russian revolution and this novel or not, and how we can call this novel as an allegory.
As it is obvious the novel is telling a story about rulers and those that are ruled, oppressors and those that are oppressed. This fable conveys its political meaning through satire and allegory. Easily we can find the animals which are meant to represent certain types of human beings. It is a story about a revolution for an ideal, and about how that ideal is changed until it disappears altogether from the new society after the revolution. In this story Orwell attacks that new society, and despite the negative picture that he paints, he attacks it with humor. In this way we can call Animal Farm a satire. Before anything we have to examine the time when Orwell lived, to find the true reasons to call this novel a political one.
Animal Farm was published in August of 1945. In the previous four months, President Roosevelt, Mussolini and Hitler had died and Winston Churchill had been voted out of office. Germany had surrendered, and the U.S. had dropped atomic bombs over Japan. Of the big three Allied leaders, only Stalin survived.
In some ways, Animal Farm stands at the very beginning of the Cold War. During World War II, Russia had been an ally of the U.S. and England. After the battle of Normandy in February of 1944--when the Allies first began to beat back the German forces--Western nations felt a strong feeling of solidarity with the Russian people. The Russian army had suffered great...