The New Lifetime Reading Plan

Lolita, which deals with Humbert Humberto passion for nymphets, is of course a recognized classic. Completely origi­nal, it is an examination of love that is funny, shocking to some, sad, and sophisticated in a manner quite remote from our American notion of sophistication. Pale Pire is partly a one- thousand-line poem in heroic couplets, partly a commentary on them by a mad exiled king—or perhaps a king only in his fantasy. It is a literary joke of enormous intricacy and at the same time, in the opinion of good critics, an addition to world literature. Speak, Memory is autobiographical, a unique recol- lection of Nabokovs childhood and youth, set mainly in pre- revolutionary Rъssia.

The mad Kinbote, in Pale Fire, describes himself in terms that might apply to his creator: "I can do what only a true artist can do—pounce upon the forgotten butterfly of revelation, wean myself abruptly from the habit of things.

The critic Gilbert Highet, reviewing the remarkable thriller King, Queen, Knave, summed up Nabokov as "the most origi­nal, the most tantalizing, the most unpredictable author alive." Since then, Nabokov has passed on. But his genius is so unbound by mere chronology that the judgment will stand.

C.F.

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GEORGE ORWELL

1903-1950

Animal Farm, Nineteen Eighty-Four, Burmese Days

Eric Blair (George Orwell is a pen name) attended Eton, passed up university, and in 1922 shipped out to Burma where for a few years he served in the Burma Imperial Police. The values of the British Establishment did not take; indeed he spent the rest of his life repudiating them. Returning to England, he immersed himself in the culture of the poor, call- ing himself an anarchist, later a socialist. Unlike many British intellectuals of his time, Orwell was never seduced by Communism. The Spanish Civil War, in which he was wounded while fighting on the Republican side, intensified his distrust of ali totalitarian doctrines. Back in England he engaged in journalism and book writing, gradually working out for himself a libertarian-socialist political stance quite at vari- ance with doctrinaire Labour Party socialism.

Animal Farm made Orwell famous. Like parts of Gulliver s Traveis [52] it is a sophisticated adaptation of a simple and ancient literary form, the animal fable. Just as Candide [53] ranks as the classic satire on Leibnizian optimism, so Animal Farm has become the classic satire on Soviet Communism, and its pertinence is unchanged by the breakup of the Soviet Empire. Its lively movement, directness, and wit recall some of Voltaire^ outstanding qualities.

The two pigs Napoleon and Snowball may make us think of Stalin and Trotsky, but Orwell is not really playing roman б clef games. He is questioning the whole notion of the ordered state, perhaps questioning the value of any revolution that sets the ordered state as its goal. Funny as Animal Farm often is, it is also full of dismaying insights into the venality and hypocrisy of ali power-obsessed natures. One of these insights has entered the language: Ali animais are equal, but some animais are more equal than others.

In an article headed "Why I Write" Orwell made his pur- pose clear: "Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.^,>

Nineteen Eighty-Four is not only his finest work but one of the most influential books of our time. You might want to com­pare it with Br ave New World [117] to feel how much blacker the world became during the seventeen years, 1932 to 1949, separating these two exercises in dystopian thought.

To avoid despair we must interpret Nineteen Eighty-Four as warning rather than prophecy. We are still some distance away from the picture of the future imagined by 0'Brien, the book's most important character: "Imagine a boot stamping on a human face—forever." But Stalin^ ruthlessness and the Nazi mechanized techniques of mass torture and murder, not to mention the Cambodian, Iranian, and other horrors, have to some degree changed Nineteen Eighty-Four from a cautionary tale to a bleak commentary on our era. Newspeak, the art of the Big Lie, may have been developed by the Russians and the Germans, but it has been adopted by many quick-study leaders of the Free World. To Huxley's vision of a dehumanized future Orwell adds new dimensions of terror and torture; and of course terror and torture are now prominent features of our world's political landscape.