Eric Arthur Blair, who is more famous all around the world under his pen-name George Orwell, was born more than one hundred years ago, on 25 June 1903 in the town Motihari, British India in a family of an employee of the Opium Department of the Indian Civil Service. The iconic story Animal Farm and the novel 1984 are his brightest works written in the anti-utopian genre that flourished in the 20th century. The pioneer of the anti-utopia is considered to be a Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin, whose novel We influenced on the Orwell’s works and not less famous Aldous Huxley, the author of Brave New World. And what is more, it was Orwell, who came up with an expression the Cold War. In the essay Why I Write (1946), Orwell pointed out: “Every line of the serious work that I had written since 1936 was directed, directly or not, against the totalitarianism and for the democratic socialism as I understand it.” Orwell sharply condemned Western authors, who identified socialism with the Soviet Union, in particular, George Bernard Show. Orwell was convinced that the countries which were going to build the socialism should not try to follow the Soviet Union, but, first of all, be afraid of it.

The only mistake George Orwell made in his anti-utopia 1984 was the date. A lot of things that he described as if happening in 1984 can be observed in the nowadays world. However, he depicted the future that everyone should be afraid of at any time. “I am sure that totalitarian idea lives in the consciousness of intellectuals everywhere, and I tried to follow this idea till the end. My story is set in England to emphasize that English speaking nations are not better than others and that the totalitarianism can win everywhere if it is not fought against”, George Orwell wrote not long before his death.

• Nineteen Eighty-Four
• Animal farm
• Looking back on the Spanish War