George Orwell was born in 1903 in India. In 1911 his family returned to England, where he was brought up in atmosphere of "impoverished snobbery." He considered himself first an anarchist, then a socialist. He reported on the Spanish Civil War (1936), worked as a journalist wiht the BBC and newspaper. His real name was Eric Blair and he derived his pen-name from the beautiful river Orwell in East Anglia, Britain. He wrote several books in 1930s.
The heroes of his early novels (including Burmese Days and Coming Up for Air) share with Orwell himself the desire and ability to cut through lies and pretence to find out truth about a situation or a person. Orwell was very conscious of the ways in which language can be used to hide the truth, and he shows how goverments can use language to decive the people. He is probably best known for his novels Animal Farm (1945) and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1948). In his book Nineteen Eighty-Four he describes a future world where every word and action is seen and controled by the state, which has developed a kind of television that can watch people in their own homes. For Orwell, the quality of the language suggests the quality of the society that uses it, so that a goverment controls a language in order to control completly the people who use it. Orwell recognizes the important part that the state must play in a fair society, but he also feels that all human beings need to be able to be private sometimes so that they can be themselves. His real masterpiece Animal Farm (1945) is a political allegory. In this allegorical novel Orwell described the generation of the Russian Revolution. After driving away the farmer, Mr Jones (reprezents Czar Nicolas II), the animals have taken over the Manor Farm and have estabilished a "People´s Democracy" (a term which is, of course, a pleonasm). Comrade Napoleon (Stalin), one of the pigs, is their leader. Their state is based on a principe: "Four legs good, two legs bad." In the course of time, the pigs developed into a ruling class with all the privilegies for which they had formerly hated Mr Jones, and assume the role of dictators.
The book, written more than 60 years ago, is still topical and today´s Napoleons are ready to misuse the common people and apply their ´justice´.
