i was disappointed with orwell's "animal farm" just because my expectations of it were enormous. i was hoping to read an original story, a metaphor offering a prototype for the mechanisms of a revolution. i was looking to discover a guidebook, a bible telling all the dos and don'ts of each revolutionary.
instead i read the history of the russian revolution. smaller scale, different country, different actors and seemingly universal context. not really. each character and each event appeared to have its counterpart in the real persons and occurrences in russia, throughout the first half of the century. at least this is how i saw it:
pigs=the bolsheviks; humans=capitalists; mr. jones=tzar; snowball=trotsky; napoleon=stalin; boxer=stakhanov; squealer=nkvd; the sheep=proletariat; mollie=intellectual elite who fled the soviet union; building the windmill=5 year plan etc.etc.
so it felt, really like revising russian history. but it must be said it was brilliantly written. "animal farm" must have had a huge impact on intellectual elite of the generation of my parents...
