Assignment in Anti-Utopia
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.31861/pytlit2024.110.342Keywords:
Utopia, dystopia, totalitarianism, “1984”, Orwell, Churchill, Stalin, HitlerAbstract
The investigation proposes a comparative analysis of three modern bestsellers of non-fiction which being too different in their subject matter nevertheless are connected with the name of the English writer George Orwell and his famous novel “1984”. An attempt is made to clarify the cause of that. The one is the 75th anniversary since the book came out, and the other – an extreme relevance of the famous dystopia that turned out to be on time and called for very much at our difficult time first of all because of the events connected with the military aggression of Russia. The war I Ukraine ruined the remnants of illusions about the Soviet/social brotherhood of people discovering clearly the essence of the Russian empire totalitarian regime. The comparative analysis of the books proposed (Lynskey Dorian. Ministry of Truth: A Biography of George Orwell “1984”, 2019; Ricks Thomas E. Churchill and Orwell. The Fight for Freedom, 2017; Laurence Rees. Hitler and Stalin. The Tyrants and the Second World War, 2020) made it possible to identify a general direction of the authors’ thoughts that was prompted namely by Orwell – the necessity to reveal the essence of totalitarianism and the possibility to live in future without the Great Brother. But is there ever such a possibility? The authors very often come to sad conclusion that makes the Orwell’s predictions concerning the further development of the history and society true.
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