THE ANGLOSPHERIC DIFFERENCE:

I have taught the fable to high school and college students as an entertaining "animallegory" with a serious Aesopian moral: power corrupts. Yet there is a danger if one leaves it at that, neglecting to study the historical correspondences closely. That neglect results in downplaying the Russian parallels, even though the allegorical links between Russian history and the fable's characters and events are quite exact.

On the other hand, one can also to focus too much on the Russian correspondences and so elide Orwell's larger warning against not just Stalin's dictatorship, but political tyranny in general. I witnessed this firsthand when I interviewed Chinese theatergoers who had attended a stage performance of Animal Farm in Beijing. I expressed surprise that the Chinese cultural censorship bureau had approved staging a satire about the beastliness of communism. They looked at me quizzically.

"You see, Animal Farm is an allegory," they said. "It's a satire of Russian history, not Chinese history."

If I ever add a chapter to my textbook on the historical context of Animal Farm, I must remember that unsettling lesson, as if from Mao's Little Red Book.  While Animal Farm is indeed an allegory of Bolshevik communism, it is also about evil regimes that may arise anywhere, not just in the Soviet Union under Lenin and Uncle Joe.

Yet communism meant Stalinism when Orwell was writing Animal Farm. The Soviet Union was the only communist nation on earth in the mid-1940s. (The People's Republic of China was officially founded in October 1949, three months before Orwell's death in January 1950.) So the wartime difficulties that Orwell faced in criticizing allied Russia and communism were different from those in later years, when communism spread throughout the world.

No less difficult for Orwell in 1944-45 was the struggle to secure a publisher in wartime England. Animal Farm was rejected by several British and American publishers on political grounds alone. British publishers deemed it "dangerous to the war effort" to criticize the Soviet Union--at least, not until Nazism was finally defeated. American publishers felt similarly when approached by his agent in mid-1945. (Some publishers were simply obtuse. For example, failing to grasp the satire, Dial Press in New York told Orwell that they didn't market "animal stories.")

Nonetheless, within a year of war's end, Western public opinion toward Russia was already cooling. The timing of Animal Farm's American publication was perfect. Critics hailed it as a modern classic equal to Aesop and Fontaine. It was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection and became a runaway bestseller in the fall of 1946, selling more than a half million copies by the end of the year.

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