Our Notes & References

First edition of the first Russian translation of this “lost classic”, funded by the CIA.

Homage to Catalonia was the third of Orwell’s works to become available to Russian readers, following his renowned pieces Animal Farm (published in serial form in 1949 and as a book in 1950 by Posev, Frankfurt-am-Main) and 1984 (serialised in 1955). Published under a false imprint, the edition took the form of a small-format book, easy to smuggle. However, it appears to have gone largely unnoticed by the Russian audience. A 1997 article by V. Mosina (Russian Academy of Sciences) notes that it was first translated by V. Voronin in 1991; the first book edition of Voronin’s translation appeared only in 2003 (Derde).

Pamiati Katalonii was translated and published with the assistance and financial backing of the CIA, through its covert publishing front, ALI (Associazione Letteraria Internazionale) in Rome (cf. Matveev). “It was this secrecy that led to several riddles related to some of Orwell’s books which are still not solved. The biggest of them is the mystery of the Russian Homage to Catalonia. A small grey book that would easily fit into an ordinary pocket printed by Editions de la Seine in Belgium does not have either the date of publication or the name of the translator […] There is some hope that after the CIA archives are declassified the name of the translator will be found there” (Karp, p. 227). The Paris publisher “Editions de la Seine” was in fact a creation of ALI staff, according to one of its former employees, Liudmila Thorne.

Orwell wrote this poignant memoir shortly after returning from the Spanish Civil War in 1937. Affiliated with the anti-Stalinist communist party POUM (Workers’ Party of Marxist Unification) in revolutionary Catalonia, he witnessed first-hand the hostilities, as well as the internal divisions and contradictions among the left. This frank and bitter account presents the war in all its harsh reality—exposing the intrigues and falsehoods of those who sought to exploit it, as well as the fervent dedication of those who truly believed in their cause. The war became one of the defining events in Orwell’s political outlook and creative work: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism and for democratic socialism, as I understand it,” he wrote in his 1946 essay Why I Write.

The memoir was published in 1938 by Secker & Warburg in the UK, but it met with little commercial success during Orwell’s lifetime. The only translation to appear before his death was the Italian edition in 1948. It was only after the success of his later works that Homage to Catalonia was recognised as a “lost classic” (Buchanan), and, according to some scholars, went on to become “the highest selling and most read book about the civil war” (Preston). The humanist, nuanced message at the heart of the work is particularly striking:

“One of the most horrible features of war is that all the war-propaganda, all the screaming and lies and hatred, comes invariably from people who are not fighting. The P.S.U.C. militiamen whom I knew in the line, the Communists from the International Brigade whom I met from time to time, never called me a Trotskyist or a traitor; they left that kind of thing to the journalists in the rear […] And apart from the libels of the inter-party feud, all the usual war-stuff, the tub-thumping, the heroics, the vilification of the enemy — all these were done, as usual, by people who were not fighting and who in many cases would have run a hundred miles sooner than fight. One of the dreariest effects of this war has been to teach me that the Left-wing press is every bit as spurious and dishonest as that of the Right”.

The edition also includes a translation of “Looking Back on the Spanish War” (pp. 281–312). Written in 1942 and published in 1943, Orwell’s essay is divided into seven sections that reflect on the horrors of the war and its political context, concluding with a poem he wrote about an Italian militiaman. It appears, however, that the edition was printed without the final page containing the poem’s last stanza; none of the copies we found list more than 312 pages in their collation.

Uncommon: OCLC locates 6 holdings in the US (Drew University, Yale, University at Albany, Amherst, Towson University, UNC) and a handful elsewhere, including 3 in the UK but apparently none at the BL.

Bibliography

Buchanan, Tom. “Three Lives of Homage to Catalonia” // The Library. 3 (3), pp. 302–314, 1 September 2002.

Derde, Lisa. Vertaling Van Dystopische Literatuur in Het Russisch: Een Vergelijking Van Twee Vertalingen van Orwells, 1984, Universiteit Gent, 2021.

Karp, Masha. George Orwell and Russia, Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.

Matveev, Pavel. “Pisatel pravdy. K 70-letiiu so dnia smerti Dzhordzha Orvella (1903–1950)” // Literaturno-khudozhestvennyi zhurnal “Etazhi”, 2020.

Orwell, George. “Why I Write”, Gangrel, No. 4, Summer 1946 // Orwell Foundation.

Preston, Paul. “Lights and Shadows in George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia” // Bulletin of Spanish Studies, pp. 1–29, 2017.