Eric Arthur Blair, known as
George Orwell, the author of
„Animal Farm” was born on 25th
of June in 1903 in Montihari in
India. He was very talented and
whereby scholarship he was
able to study. He became a
great journalist, political author
and novelist. Apart from „Animal
farm”, other well-known book he
had written is Nineteen Eighty-
Four. He lived through two
World Wars and died in January
of 1950, because of
Tuberculosis.
If we would like to talk about the plot, it is very
simple. The story is just about group of animals living
on the Mr Jones’ farm. One day the quadrapeds take
over the running of a grange, and everything is
wonderful for a while — until the pigs get out of hand.
At first, the rebellion is an amazing success. The farm
animals are giddy with joy and quickly change how
everything is done on the farm.
Seven basic principles are drawn up and
painted on the side of the shed, the animals do
their tasks with far more efficiency than
possible before and work more collectively, the
harvest is the best they've ever seen, and
everyone has more food and more leisure.
The only sign of the trouble to come is that the pigs
don't seem to do much of the physical work, instead
saying that they're the best ones to do the organizing
and directing. But slowly, the pigs take more and more
control, the principles begin to change conveniently,
times get worse, and Napoleon slowly seizes control,
that will bring awful effects later to all of the
habitancy.
Animal Farm is, of
course, a satirical
allegory, very specifically
of the Russian Revolution
and of Stalin (Napoleon
in the book), but more
generally of revolution,
the idealism of utopias,
and the way in which
people take control of
societies founded on
principles of equality.
Several of the characters and
settings have obvious specific
mappings: Mr. Jones is Tsar
Nicholas II, the farm itself is
Russia, the neighboring farms
are neighboring countries
(particularly Pinchfield,
representing Germany, and
Foxwood, representing the
Allies), old Major is Marx
(with perhaps a bit of Lenin),
Napoleon as mentioned is
Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky,
and Squealer is Pravda and
the Russian government
propaganda in general.
But many of the
other characters
represent broader
classes of people or
even ideas, and the
story reads
wonderfully as both a
specific satire and a
general commentary
on revolution and
government.
I had read this book the
day before I made this
presentation. I had to read it,
because it is on the
compulsory reading list.
Accoarding to the fact how
huge impression this story
made on me, I decided to
describe just this tale.
It exposes how easily we can be
manipulated by dominating
layers, groups or even single
people. Pig arouse anger,
similarly to Bolshewicks and
especially Stalin, hovewer it
doesn’t refer to only those
people. We can find examples of
such a situations almost
everywhere, just with different
intensification.
