[lbo-talk] Orwell

Yoshie Furuhashi furuhashi.1 at osu.edu
Sat Mar 20 07:28:14 PST 2004


"Chris Doss" nomorebounces at mail.ru, Sat Mar 20 07:13:09 PST 2004:


>>andie nachgeborenen andie_nachgeborenen at yahoo.com:
>>(b) Animal Farm is heavy handed, obvious, overrated, and now dated
>>and obsolete (though with a nice touch, about some animals being
>>more equal than others),
>---
>It was also taught in Soviet high schools in the Gorbachev era.

****** [Mr Igor Zakharov, a Moscow book hound] has turned up another story in which farmyard animals revolt against man, defeat him, and try unsuccessfully to run their own affairs; but this is "The Animal Riot", written in 1879-80 by Nikolai Kostomarov, an obscure Russian historian.

Mr Zakharov remembered Kostomarov when "Animal Farm" was published recently in a Lithuanian magazine. This was its first publication in the Soviet Union, although the book is well enough known there. Orwell's thinly veiled fable of the corruption of power in general and the shortcomings of Marxism in particular is treated, by Russians, as a non-specific satire on bureaucracy everywhere. Now they may have the extra reassurance of believing they thought it up first.

("Literary Oddities: Esteemed Beasts," _The Economist_, July 23, 1988, Pg. 80 (U.K. Edition Pg. 98), <http://www.netcharles.com/orwell/ctc/docs/estbsts.htm>) ***** -- Yoshie

* Bring Them Home Now! <http://www.bringthemhomenow.org/> * Calendars of Events in Columbus: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/calendar.html>, <http://www.freepress.org/calendar.php>, & <http://www.cpanews.org/> * Student International Forum: <http://sif.org.ohio-state.edu/> * Committee for Justice in Palestine: <http://www.osudivest.org/> * Al-Awda-Ohio: <http://groups.yahoo.com/group/Al-Awda-Ohio> * Solidarity: <http://www.solidarity-us.org/>



More information about the lbo-talk mailing list