Animal Farm
In Our Time: Culture
BBC
4.5 • 1K Ratings
🗓️ 29 September 2016
⏱️ 51 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss Animal Farm, which Eric Blair published under his pen name George Orwell in 1945.
A biting critique of totalitarianism, particularly Stalinism, the essay sprung from Orwell's experiences fighting Fascists in Spain: he thought that all on the left were on the same side, until the dominant Communists violently suppressed the Anarchists and Trotskyists, and Orwell had to escape to France to avoid arrest.
Setting his satire in an English farm, Orwell drew on the Russian Revolution of 1917, on Stalin's cult of personality and the purges. The leaders on Animal Farm are pigs, the secret police are attack dogs, the supporters who drown out debate with "four legs good, two legs bad" are sheep.
At first, London publishers did not want to touch Orwell's work out of sympathy for the USSR, an ally of Britain in the Second World War, but the Cold War gave it a new audience and Animal Farm became a commercial as well as a critical success.
Featuring:
Steven Connor - Grace 2 Professor of English at the University of Cambridge
Mary Vincent - Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield
Robert Colls - Professor of Cultural History at De Montfort University
Producer: Simon Tillotson
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in September 2016.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Thank you for downloading this episode of In Our Time, for news about in our time and for |
| 0:05.0 | recommendations about our archive, please follow us on Twitter at BBC in Our Time. |
| 0:10.0 | I hope you enjoy the programs. |
| 0:12.0 | Hello, George Orwell wrote Animal Farm at the height of the Second World War. |
| 0:16.0 | He struggled to find a publisher. |
| 0:18.0 | Stalin's Russia, our great ally at the time, was crucial in the battle against Hitler and all its attack on Stalinism |
| 0:25.0 | was thought far too insulting. Why the publishers asked was Stalin presented as a |
| 0:29.8 | pig and his supporters as pigs, could all well not have chosen a more sympathetic animal |
| 0:34.6 | for such an important ally. |
| 0:37.0 | The Cold War changed all that. |
| 0:38.7 | From soon after its eventual appearance in August 1945 until the fall of the Berlin Wall, Animal Farm was celebrated in the West as an allegory of all that was wrong with the communism of the Soviet Union. |
| 0:50.0 | The CIA even funded a film version in the 1950s, an irony for a book that explores the dangers of propaganda. |
| 0:57.0 | With me to discuss Animal Farm, a Stephen Connor, the Grace Two Professor of English at the University of Cambridge, Mary Vincent, |
| 1:05.4 | Professor of Modern European History at the University of Sheffield, and Robert Coles, |
| 1:10.1 | Professor of Cultural History at De Monford University. |
| 1:13.0 | Steve Connor. |
| 1:14.4 | We call him George Orwell, but his real name was Eric Blair. |
| 1:16.7 | What was his early life like? |
| 1:18.0 | Well, he was born into what he himself described as the lower upper middle class, |
| 1:22.4 | sort of declining gentility, certainly getting |
| 1:26.1 | poor and poorer. |
| 1:27.1 | Actually born in India, but came back to Britain at a very young age. |
... |
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