English Test 68
Directions for Questions from 1 to 5:
In an essay called ‘Why I Write’ written in 1947, Orwell says that his desire has been to make political writing into an art. He starts to write a book,
he says, from ‘a sense of injustice, not from the idea that he is going to produce a great work of art: I write it because there is some lie I want to
expose, some fact to which I want to draw attention, and my initial concern is to get a hearing. From the sketch of the political background to
Animal farm it will be quite clear that one of the purposes of the book is to expose the lie which (it seemed to Orwell) Stalinist Russia had become. It
was supposed to be a Socialist Union of States, but it had become a dictatorship. Not only that. There were socialists in Britain and in the West
generally who were so eager to advance the cause that everything the Soviet Union did had to be accepted. The Soviet Union, in fact, damaged the
cause of true socialism. In a preface he wrote to Animal farm he says that for the past ten years I have been convinced that the destruction of the
Soviet myth was essential if we wanted a revival of the ‘socialist movement’. Animal farm attempts, through a simplification of Soviet history, to
clarify in the minds of readers what Orwell felt Russia had become. The clarification is to get people to face the facts of injustice, of brutality. And
hopefully to get them to think out for themselves some way in which a true and democratic socialism (in Orwell’s phrase) will be brought about. But
Orwell’s purpose goes beyond the particular example of the Russia Revolution. In Animal Farm he criticizes something inherent in an all revolutions
and he himself was conscious of this. Russia is the immediate example, but the book, Orwell himself said, is intended as a satire on dictatorship in
general. The time will come when the details of Russian history that roused Orwell’s anger will be forgotten, and Animal Farm will be read for its
bitter, ironic analysis of the stages all revo