Æ
novel, 2+2=5 is obscenely false, like saying black is white or up
is down – but in Stalin’s Russia it decorated billboards.
The Soviet experience furnished Nineteen Eighty-Four with
many of its most striking features. The Stalinist habit
of removing the names of purged communists from history
books and airbrushing their faces from photographs inspired
Oceania’s category of ‘unperson’. In creating Big Brother,
all-seeing yet unseen, Orwell drew on accounts of Stalin’s
mystique, such as this passage from André Gide: “His portrait
is seen everywhere, his name is on everyone’s lips, and praise
of him occurs in every public speech. Is all this the result of
worship, love or fear? Who can say?”
Orwell’s arch-heretic Goldstein is clearly based on Trotsky
(whose real name was Lev Bronstein) but also resembles Andrés
Nin, the POUM leader who was tortured and executed by the
NKVD while the author was in Barcelona. The young Spies
who denounce their parents to the Thought Police are modelled
on the cult of Pavlik Morozov, the 13-year-old Soviet ‘boy hero’
who was allegedly murdered in 1932 for betraying his father
to the secret police. (Historians now believe that the murder
was itself a legend created by Soviet propagandists.) Less well-
informed readers may not have realised that many of Orwell’s
futuristic atrocities had already happened, but observers of
totalitarianism realised exactly what he was doing.rwell’s greatest achievement in writing Nine-
teen Eighty-Four was, therefore, not inven-
tion but synthesis. He hit upon some of the
novel’s key ideas at least as early as 1937, and
outlined it in his notebook (under the work-
ing title The Last Man in Europe) in late
1943, though he didn’t type the final words
until December 1948. The book was thus
the culmination of over a decade of reading, writing and think-
ing, which enabled him to gradually fuse multiple sources into
a single scene or concept.
Take the Ministry of Love, the windowless torture complex
in which O’Brien physically and psychologically dismantles
Winston. Orwell only ever spent one night in a cell, after he
contrived to have himself arrested for drunkenness in London
in 1931 in order to experience incarceration for himself, but
even that minor incident yielded an image used in Nineteen
Eighty-Four – a prisoner squatting over a broken toilet.
For more information he turned to accounts such as The
Woman Who Could Not Die (1938), Iulia de Beausobre’s memoir
of two years in the Soviet prison system, and Darkness at Noon
(1940), the first novel about the Great Purge, whose author
Arthur Koestler had been incarcerated by Franco’s forces in
Spain. Orwell’s scenes in the Ministry of Love are full of obser-
vations borrowed from Koestler’s novel. Koestler himself inte-
grated the memories of his friend Eva Striker, who had beenSTA
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Erased from history
Marxist revolutionary Leon
Trotsky (born Lev Bronstein)
addresses the Red Guard in
1918 during the Russian Civil
War. After opposing Stalin in the
1920s, he was exiled and erased
from official Soviet records,
becoming an ‘unperson’