Animal farm

Title: Animal Farm
Author: George Orwell
Publisher: Penguin Twentieth Century Classics
Year of publication: 1989
Year of first publication: 1945
Genre: Fiction

Summary:
This story is a description of the history of the Russian Revolution, but instead of telling the story with real people, farm-animals were used. In the story there’re many similarities of these two events.
Mr Jones, who’s the owner of Manor Farm, was one day expelled from his property. The starving farm-animals were sick of living a life under his command. Inspired by the pig Old Major they started a revolution and sent him and his employees away.
They started to run the farm by themselves under the leadership of the pigs; Napoleon, Snowball and Squealer, who had learned how to write en read from al spelling book.
The final result of the revolution was the born of a system could “Animalism” and made of "The Seven Commandments". "The Seven Commandments" were as follows;
 Whatever goes upon two legs is an enemy.
 Whatever goes upon four legs, or has wings, is a friend.
 No animal shall wear clothes
 No animal shall sleep in a bed.
 No animal shall drink alcohol.
 No animal shall kill another animal.
 All animals are equal.
Every animals had to live by these rules.
In the start the farm was going good and although everyone had to work harder than before, everybody was very happy with the results of the revolution.
But as always the leaders wanted to be more than happy and the leader Snowball and Napoleon became rivals. An election had to decide which of them should be the leader of the farm. But the election never comes, because on the day of the election Snowball is driven away by Napoleon with dogs that he has trained secretly.
With Napoleon as leader of the farm every animals has to work harder. Those who don’t want to listen are being scarred by the dogs of Squealer, who is become Napoleon’s helper. Every something is went out wrong Napoleon blames it of Snowball, so that everybody will hate Snowball.
Under his command the Seven Commandments are changing continually, every time in favor of the regime. In the end the pig are doing everything that the rules say they can’t. The most common line is; All animals are equal, but some animal are more equal. When the pigs look in the mirror they realize that they had become the people who they hated.
Theme:
The thema of the book is the history of the Russian Revolution and the communism, in the book called Animalism. All the characters represent people or groups that had a roll in the Russian Revolution.
Old Major is the one with the great ideas but is to old to make them true by him self, similar with Vladimir Lenin or Karl Marx.
Napoleon, he becomes the leader of the revolution. He is based on the leader of the Russia Revolution Josef Stalin. He keeps the people quite with his dogs, who represents the military.
Snowball is a smart and wins easy the loyalty of the animal, but is chased away by Napoleon. His story is similar to the story of Leon Trotski, a important person in the Russian Revolution but could not find it with Stalin.
Squealer “controls” the people by propaganda. You can compare him with Vjatsjeslav Molotov, the person would controlled the propaganda in Russia, or the communistic newspaper Pravda.
The books shows the opinion of the writer that communism is a nice idea, but that it would never work because people don’t want to be equal, but always want to be more.

My opinion:
My opinion about this book is that is a good book, it’s a kind of satire. It say precisely what went wrong in Russia. It say it on a funny way and I like that. If I had to grade his book I would give it a 7,5.

Author:
The British author George Orwell, pen name of Eric Arthur Blair, b. Motihari, India, June 25, 1903, d. London, Jan. 21, 1950, achieved prominence in the late 1940s as the author of two brilliant satires attacking totalitarianism. Familiarity with the novels, documentaries, essays, and criticism he wrote during the 1930s and later has since established him as one of the most important and influential voices of the century.
Orwell's parents were members of the Indian Civil Service, and, after an education at Eton College in England, Orwell joined (1922) the Indian Imperial Police in Burma, an experience that later found expression in the novel Burmese Days (1934). His first book, Down and Out in Paris and London (1933), was a nonfictional account--moving and comic at the same time--of several years of self-imposed poverty he had experienced after leaving Burma. He published three other novels in the 1930s: A Clergyman's Daughter (1935), Keep the Aspidistra Flying (1936), and Coming Up for Air (1939). His major works of the period were two documentaries: The Road to Wigan Pier (1937), a detailed, sympathetic, and yet objective study of the lives of nearly impoverished miners in the Lancashire town of Wigan; and Homage to Catalonia (1938), which recounts his experiences fighting for the Loyalists in the Spanish Civil War. Orwell was wounded, and, when the Communists attempted to eliminate their allies on the far left, fought against them and was forced to flee for his life.
Orwell's two best-known books reflect his lifelong distrust of autocratic government, whether of the left or right: Animal Farm (1945), a modern beast-fable attacking Stalinism, and Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), a dystopian novel setting forth his fears of an intrusively bureaucratized state of the future. The pair of novels brought him his first fame and almost his only remuneration as a writer. His wartime work for the BBC (published in the collections George Orwell: The Lost Writings, and The War Commentaries) gave him a solid taste of bureaucratic hypocrisy and may have provided the inspiration for his invention of "newspeak," the truth-denying language of Big Brother's rule in Nineteen Eighty-Four.
Orwell's reputation rests not only on his political shrewdness and his sharp satires but also on his marvelously clear style and on his superb essays, which rank with the best ever written. "Politics and the English Language" (1950), which links authoritarianism with linguistic decay, has been widely influential. The four-volume Collected Essays, Journalism, and Letters of George Orwell was published in 1968.