Animal Farm

• 1. Introduction

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  Animal Farm, George Orwell's short political fable, nearly ended in June 1944. A German V-1 flying bomb destroyed his London flat in Mortimer Crescent, Kilburn. Orwell spent hours sifting through the rubble and found the pages intact. He later told T. S. Eliot that the enclosed manuscript had been "blitzed" and was in "slightly crumpled condition, but it is not damaged in any way." The bomb turned out to be the smaller obstacle. This story of mistreated farm animals was aimed at Joseph Stalin, and in wartime Britain that made it close to unprintable. Why did a tale about pigs frighten so many publishers? Who or what did each animal stand for, and how does the farm's leadership twist language until a rule can mean its opposite? And how did a book that struggled to find a printer end up a tool of the Cold War?

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• 2. Roots of the Fable

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  In the preface Orwell described a boy of perhaps ten. The boy was driving a huge carthorse along a narrow path, whipping it whenever it tried to turn. It struck Orwell that "if only such animals became aware of their strength we should have no power over them." Men, he reasoned, exploit animals in much the way the rich exploit the proletariat.

  Homage to Catalonia, Orwell's account of the Spanish Civil War, appeared in 1938 and sold poorly. A 1947 preface for a Ukrainian edition explains what Spain taught him. Escaping the communist purges there showed him "how easily totalitarian propaganda can control the opinion of enlightened people in democratic countries." Arthur Koestler's best-selling Darkness at Noon, about the Moscow Trials, then convinced him that fiction was the better vehicle for describing totalitarianism.

  A Ministry of Information booklet for propagandists added to his anger. It told readers how to calm ideological fears of the Soviet Union. One direction was to say that the Red Terror was a figment of Nazi imagination. Orwell quit the BBC just before he began, and he wrote the manuscript between November 1943 and February 1944.

  Wladyslaw Reymont, a Polish Nobel laureate, published Bunt ("Revolt") in 1924. It tells of animals who take over their farm and plan to introduce equality, and Orwell may have drawn inspiration from it. In a 2025 article in The Guardian, Orwell's adopted son Richard Blair credited his adoptive mother Eileen Blair, Orwell's first wife, with helping to plan the book. He called it "my parents' teamwork."

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• 3. Refused by Publishers

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  Jonathan Cape, one of four publishers to refuse Animal Farm, had first accepted it. He dropped it after an official at the Ministry of Information warned him off. Cape wrote to Orwell that the fable followed the Russian Soviets and their two dictators so closely that it could apply only to Russia. He added a second complaint: "I think the choice of pigs as the ruling caste will no doubt give offence to many people." The official was probably Peter Smollett, born Hans Peter Smolka. He was later unmasked as a Soviet agent who had come to Britain in 1933 under the NKVD codename "ABO." Orwell had his suspicions. In 1949 he put Smollett on a list of Crypto-Communists and Fellow-Travellers sent to the Information Research Department.

  Faber and Faber turned the manuscript down too. T. S. Eliot, a director there, praised its "good writing" and "fundamental integrity." But Faber would take it only with some sympathy for a viewpoint Eliot took to be "generally Trotskyite." He did not find that viewpoint convincing. He argued that the pigs came across as the best people to run the farm. Someone might reply, he suggested, that "what was needed... was not more communism but more public-spirited pigs."

  In 1944 André Deutsch, then working for Nicholson & Watson, read the typescript and felt sure his firm would want it. They did not, and they lectured Orwell on what they saw as its errors. Gollancz, Orwell's regular publisher, also refused. On the 17th of April 1944 Orwell wrote in Partisan Review that it was "now next door to impossible to get anything overtly anti-Russian printed."

  Fredric Warburg of Secker & Warburg agreed to take the book in July 1944. Pressure against it came even from inside his own office. His wife Pamela felt this was no moment for ingratitude toward Stalin and the Red Army. Paper shortages caused further delay. Secker & Warburg finally published the first edition on the 17th of August 1945, as relations with Russia were cooling. Richard Blair later recalled that people were by then "fed up with all this Russian nonsense."

  The preface Orwell wrote on British self-censorship never appeared in the first edition. It began: "The sinister fact about literary censorship in England is that it is largely voluntary." The first edition left space for it in the author's proof. But the preface was dropped, and the page numbers had to be renumbered at the last minute. In 1972 Ian Angus found the original typescript, titled "The Freedom of the Press." Bernard Crick published it in The Times Literary Supplement on the 15th of September 1972.

  In America, Harcourt, Brace published the book only after many refusals. Some publishers said it was "too short for adequate marketing." In January 1946 Philip Rahv, an editor at Partisan Review, warned Orwell that the American left was "almost solidly Stalinist." Arthur Schlesinger Jr. came home from wartime service in Europe with several copies. He tried to interest his own publisher. By Schlesinger's recollection, the firm rejected it because its editor-in-chief was "a defender of Stalinism." The break came in a Cambridge bookshop in late 1945. Frank Morley, a former Faber and Faber editor, met customers asking for a sold-out copy. He made the Harcourt, Brace deal in January 1946.

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• 4. Who Is Who

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  Old Major, the aged prize boar whose speech starts the rebellion, merges Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin. His skull is put on revered public display, which recalls Lenin's embalmed body resting in its mausoleum. Napoleon, the Berkshire boar who drives out his rival and slowly begins to live like a human, stands for Joseph Stalin. Snowball's life tracks that of Leon Trotsky. Orwell never has him murdered, but he is exiled and turned into an image of evil.

  Mr. Jones, the drunken owner of Manor Farm, represents Tsar Nicholas II. The Tsar was forced to abdicate after the February Revolution of 1917. The Bolsheviks executed him with his family on the 17th of July 1918. Mollie, the vain young mare who leaves for another farm and is hardly mentioned again, echoes the people who left Russia after the Tsar fell. Four young pigs protest Napoleon's takeover, are silenced and are later executed. They probably recall the Great Purge victims Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin and Alexei Rykov.

  Boxer, the cart-shire horse, believes that "Napoleon is always right." When he collapses from age while working on the windmill, Napoleon sells him to a knacker for whisky money. Squealer tells the animals that the van belonged to an animal hospital. Boxer has been compared to Alexey Stakhanov, the diligent role model of the Stakhanovite movement.

  The Ukrainian victims of the Holodomor are represented by the hens. Their eggs are taken from them despite early promises, and they are starved into submission after a failed revolt.

  Moses the raven, Mr. Jones's pet, tells the animals about Sugarcandy Mountain, a happy country beyond the clouds. Orwell calls institutionalised religion "the black raven of priestcraft." He adds that it promises "pie in the sky when you die" while "faithfully serving whoever happens to be in power." Napoleon lets Moses stay with a daily gill of beer, much as Stalin brought back the Russian Orthodox Church during the Second World War.

  Benjamin the donkey may carry a piece of Orwell himself. His most frequent remark is "Life will go on as it has always gone on - that is, badly." The scholar Morris Dickstein sees "a touch of Orwell himself in this creature's timeless scepticism." Friends called Orwell "Donkey George" after the character. Benjamin and the goat Muriel, who both read well, survive the purges by staying out of politics.

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• 5. The Farm Mapped to History

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  The animals' revolt against Farmer Jones is Orwell's version of the Bolshevik Revolution of October 1917. The Battle of the Cowshed has been read as the allied invasion of Soviet Russia in 1918. It also stands for the defeat of the White Russians in the civil war. The wave of rebelliousness through the countryside after the Rebellion stands for the failed revolutions in Hungary and Germany. Napoleon's dealings with the go-between Whymper and the Willingdon markets parallel the Treaty of Rapallo.

  The pigs' decision to keep the milk and apples for themselves is, in Orwell's words to Dwight Macdonald, "the turning point of the story." It stands for the crushing of the left-wing Kronstadt revolt against the Bolsheviks in 1921. The animals' struggle to build the windmill suggests the five-year plans. Napoleon's puppies, raised apart from the others to serve him, parallel the nurture of the secret police. In chapter seven, animals confess to crimes they never committed and are killed. Orwell here alludes directly to the purges, confessions and show trials of the late 1930s.

  Frederick, the owner of Pinchfield Farm, pays Napoleon for timber with counterfeit money. He then attacks without warning, using blasting powder to blow up the windmill. The sequence parallels the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact of August 1939. The brief alliance and the invasion may allude to Operation Barbarossa as well.

  Peter Edgerly Firchow and Peter Davison read the Battle of the Windmill as the Second World War, with Stalingrad and Moscow in view. A single word shows how closely Orwell watched real events. He first wrote that during the battle "All the animals, including Napoleon," took cover. After meeting Józef Czapski in Paris in March 1945, he asked the publisher to change it to "All the animals except Napoleon." Czapski survived the Katyn Massacre and opposed the Soviet regime. Yet he told Orwell that Stalin's character and greatness saved Russia from the German invasion. Orwell passed this on to Arthur Koestler.

  In 1946 Orwell wrote that he intended the book "primarily as a satire on the Russian revolution." He added that "revolutions only effect a radical improvement when the masses are alert." His biographer Jeffrey Meyers observed that "virtually every detail has political significance in this allegory." Some readers extend the warning to any system in which institutional checks weaken, whatever its ideology.

  In the closing scene, Napoleon dines with newly allied human farmers while the other animals watch through the window. Orwell saw the Tehran Conference of 1943 as a display of "the best possible relations between the USSR and the West." He predicted, correctly, that those relations would unravel.

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• 6. Words as Weapons

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  The original English title carried the subtitle A Fairy Story, and American publishers dropped it in 1946. For the French edition, Orwell suggested Union des républiques socialistes animales. Its abbreviation, URSA, is the Latin word for "bear," a symbol of Russia. The title also plays on the French name of the Soviet Union.

  Seven Commandments are painted on the barn. The first says that whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy, and the last says "All animals are equal." Others forbid wearing clothes, sleeping in a bed, drinking alcohol and killing another animal. Napoleon and his pigs secretly revise them whenever they break one. Eventually only the seventh remains, rewritten as "All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others."

  Squealer is a composite of the Soviet nomenklatura and of journalists at the daily Pravda, able to justify every twist in Stalin's policy. His tools include false data and the sheep. The sheep bleat "four legs good, two legs bad" to drown out debate, much as Stalin used hysterical crowds against Trotsky. When the pigs begin walking on two legs, Squealer trains the sheep to change it to "Four legs good, two legs better!"

  Orwell's narrator is plain and unbiased, and the good animals say what they mean. The wicked ones, Napoleon among them, bend language to their ends. Orwell felt that politicians commonly used words to deceive and confuse. Critics link the book with Nineteen Eighty-Four as Swiftian satire and see a bleak view of the future in both.

  Masha Gessen suggests that the final commandment was likely inspired by an official shift in 1936-37. Communist Party publications suddenly named the Russian nation and language "first among equals." The songs follow the same pattern. "Beasts of England" is banned, and an anthem glorifying Napoleon takes its place, with a poetic pig named Minimus as its author. This parallels "The Internationale" and its adoption and repudiation as the Soviet anthem in the 1920s and 1930s.

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• 7. Praise, Balloons, and Bans

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  George Soule, in the American magazine New Republic, said the book "puzzled and saddened me. It seemed on the whole dull." He thought the allegory a "creaking machine" and complained that it dealt with stereotyped ideas about a country Orwell probably did not know well. He conceded that its commercial success was assured.

  Reviews in Britain came quickly. The Guardian on the 24th of August 1945 called it "a delightfully humorous and caustic satire on the rule of the many by the few." The same day, Tosco Fyvel in Tribune called it "a gentle satire on a certain State." Julian Symons objected on the 7th of September. A reviewer, he wrote, "should have the courage to identify Napoleon with Stalin, and Snowball with Trotsky."

  Between 1952 and 1957 the CIA, in an operation codenamed Aedinosaur, sent millions of balloons carrying copies into Poland, Hungary and Czechoslovakia. Those countries' air forces tried to shoot the balloons down. The Information Research Department, a secret British propaganda agency, had the book translated into languages including Arabic. Orwell allowed a Russian translation in the paper Posev and refused any royalties in advance. A Ukrainian translation produced in Germany was largely confiscated by American wartime authorities and handed to the Soviet repatriation commission.

  The John Birch Society in Wisconsin challenged the book in 1965 over its talk of the masses revolting. A superintendent in Bay County, Florida, banned it in 1987. The board restored it quickly after complaints that the ban was "unconstitutional." Stonington, Connecticut, removed it from its curriculum in 2017. Abroad, the book was kept from the 1977 International Book Fair in Moscow. It was also banned from schools in the United Arab Emirates over its pigs and alcohol.

  China censored all online posts about the book in 2018, yet by 2019 it was still on sale. Writing in The Atlantic, Amy Hawkins and Jeffrey Wasserstrom said it was "as easy to buy 1984 and Animal Farm in Shenzhen or Shanghai" as in London or Los Angeles. Time named it among the 100 best English-language novels. It ranked number 31 on the Modern Library list of best 20th-century novels, and it won a Retrospective Hugo Award in 1996. In a 2016 poll it was Britain's favourite book from school.

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• 8. Retellings

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  A BBC radio version produced by Rayner Heppenstall aired in January 1947. Orwell listened at his home in Canonbury Square, London, with Hugh Gordon Porteous and others. He later wrote to Heppenstall that Porteous, "who had not read the book, grasped what was happening after a few minutes." In January 2013, BBC Radio 4 broadcast Orwell's own dramatisation, narrated by Tamsin Greig, with Toby Jones as Squealer and Ralph Ineson as Boxer.

  In 1950 the cartoonist Norman Pett and his writing partner Don Freeman were secretly hired by the Information Research Department. Their task was a comic strip of the book. It never ran in the United Kingdom but appeared in Brazilian and Burmese newspapers. In 1974 E. Howard Hunt revealed that the CIA's Psychological Warfare department had sent him to get the film rights from Orwell's widow. The agency then funded the 1954 animated film, in which Napoleon is eventually overthrown in a second revolution.

  Peter Hall directed a stage version at the National Theatre in London on the 25th of April 1984. It had music by Richard Peaslee and lyrics by Adrian Mitchell, and it toured nine cities in 1985. Guy Masterson premiered his solo version at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh in January 1995. Robert Icke's adaptation, with puppetry by Toby Olié, opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre in January 2022. The Russian composer Alexander Raskatov's opera premiered in Amsterdam on the 4th of March 2023.

  In October 1945 Orwell wrote to Warburg about the cartoonist David Low as a possible illustrator, but nothing came of it. Quentin Blake illustrated a Folio Society edition in 1984. Ralph Steadman illustrated the fiftieth-anniversary edition of 1995. In 2020 the studios Nerial and The Dairymen released a video game, with the Orwell Estate's permission, on Windows, macOS, iOS and Android.

  A live-action television version in 1999 showed Napoleon's regime collapsing in on itself, reflecting the fall of Soviet communism. The 2025 animated film directed by Andy Serkis changes the target to business corruption in the 21st century. It adds a piglet named Lucky as the audience's stand-in and makes Snowball female.

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