The Inversion of ‘Animal Farm’

George Orwell’s timeless classic Animal Farm, a “fairy story” aimed at young readers, has sold some 11 million copies worldwide since it was first published in 1945. Its allegorical subject, Soviet communism, is not subtle. After all, the book begins with a speech by a pig who stands in for Karl Marx and, after an egalitarian revolution by animals that take over the farm, features a power struggle between a Trotskyist pig and a Stalinist pig and ends with the pigs installed as dictators indistinguishable from the human overlords their revolution originally sought to do away with. According to Orwell's preface, not published until 1972, one of the four publishers who originally rejected the book explained to Orwell that the issue was that Animal Farm took as its subject the evils of a country that was then an ally of both Britain and the U.S. “If the fable were addressed generally to dictators and dictatorships at large then publication would be all right,” the publisher wrote. “But the fable does follow, as I see now, so completely the progress of the Russian Soviets and their two dictators, that it can apply only to Russia, to the exclusion of the other dictatorships.”