Our Notes & References

Very rare: we couldn’t trace any example in WorldCat, but we could locate a copy in the Moscow Russian State Library (but not in the Russian National Library in St. Petersburg).

This is the second edition of the first and highly symbolic Russian translation of Orwell’s masterpiece, published almost 20 years after the first (also very rare).

Orwell, whose explicit target in this novella was the political transformation of the Soviet Union between the Bolshevik Revolution and the Stalinist era, actively sought to have his work translated into Russian and the other Slavic languages. In 1947, two years after the original publication in English of Animal Farm, he wrote that “one of the most important problems at this moment is to find a way of speaking to the Russian people over the heads of their rulers” (Karp). Thus in 1949, just half a year before his death, he accepted an offer from the émigré, CIA-backed publishing house Posev (Possev) to publish the novella in book form in Russian, and smuggle it into the USSR, following the serialised publication in its magazine (Posev, no. 7-32, 1949), in the translation by the prominent scholar Gleb Struve and his wife Mary Kriger.

This was the first of many Russian translations of Orwell’s book, but it remained the only one during many years. The work appeared in the Soviet Union only in 1988. It is notable for Posev’s excision of two passages in which Orwell satirises religion – a fact which only came to light decades later, after this bowdlerised text had already gone through four editions (1950, 1967, 1971 and 1978).

Bibliography

Karp, M. “Orwell in Translation,” British Library European studies blog (online).