Animal Farm

George Orwell’s Animal Farm is most famous in the west as a stinging critique of the history and rhetoric of the Russian Revolution. Retelling the story of the development of Soviet communism in the form of an animal fable allegorizes the rise of power of the dictator Joseph Stalin. Published in 1945, Animal Farm expressed the events of the time as well as people’s reaction towards those events. Many of the book reviews in the following year agreed this was true. According to the August 25, 1946 New York Times Book Review, “Animal Farm may be taken as the most compact and witty expression of left-wing British reaction to Soviet communism.” Time Magazine referred to the book as a “laugh-and thought-provoking satire on Communism and the Soviet Union.” Newsweek’s September 9, 1946 issue believed Animal Farm “created a minor stir…attacked from the far Left, and cheered from the far Right.” And Nation’s September 7, 1946 publication thought Orwell’s novel “...