Texto para as questões 20 a 22.

The passage below is an extract from the preface of the centenary edition of Animal Farm, written by George Orwell. Read the text to answer questions 20 - 22.

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Orwell called the book “a fairy story.” Like Voltaire’s Candide, however, with which it bears comparison, it is too many other things to be so handily classified. It is also a political tract, a satire on human folly, a loud hee-haw at all who yearn for Utopia, an allegorical lesson, and a pretty good fable in the Aesop tradition. It is also a passionate sermon against the dangers of political innocence. The passage in which the loyal but stupid workhorse Boxer is sold to be turned into glue, hides, and bone meal because he is no longer useful is written out of a controlled and icy hatred for the cynicism of the Soviet system – but also out of despair for all deluded people who served it gladly.

Maybe because it gilds the philosophic pill with fairy-story trappings, Animal Farm has had an astonishing success for a book rooted in politics. Since its first publication at the end of World War II, it has been read by millions. With 1984, published three years later, it established Orwell as an important man of letters. It has enriched modern political discourse with the observation that “All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.” How did we ever grasp the true nature of the politics of uplift before Orwell explained it so precisely?

George Orwell is the pen name of Eric Blair, the son of a colonial official with long service in British India. Eric was educated as a scholarship boy at Eton and seemed to be miserable there most of the time, largely, one guesses, because of the money gap that divided him from so many of his well-heeled schoolmates. His dislike of the moneyed classes in turn influenced him toward a lifelong loyalty to democratic socialism. After Eton he went to Burma as a member of the Imperial constabulary and had the enlightening experience of discovering he was hated by the Burmese people as a symbol of British Imperialism. Hating the work himself, he quit and went back to England to try making a living by writing.

During the years when he was not very successful, he began to devote himself to work for British socialism. Afterwards he said he had never written anything good that was not about politics. Before he went to work on Animal Farm, his books were well enough received by the critics but sold modestly.

Those old enough to remember the wartime spirit of the 1940s may be startled to realize that Orwell started work on Animal Farm in 1943. As he discovered when he went looking for a publisher, Stalin’s Soviet Union was so popular that year in Britain and America that few wanted to hear or read anything critical of it. It was as though a great deal of the West had willingly put on blinders, and this was because the Red Army that year had fought the Nazis to a standstill and forced it to retreat. Suddenly Hitler’s army, which had looked invincible for so long, had begun to look vincible.

In this period the air on both sides of the Atlantic was filled with a great deal of justifiable praise for the Soviet people and their fighting forces. Stalin’s political system, with its bloody purges and police-state brutality, was an important beneficiary of all this. Looking for a publisher for his small book, Orwell was reminded that British socialists, who idealized the Russian Revolution, had never been hospitable to critics of the Soviet Union. In 1943, however, even conservatives were pro-Soviet.

It became hard to write candidly of the Soviet system without being accused of playing dupe to the Nazis. Orwell discovered how hard when he began receiving publishers’ rejections on Animal Farm. With its swinish communists, the book seemed heretical. As no wonder. Stalin and Trotsky, after all, were unmistakably Orwell’s feuding pigs, Napoleon and Snowball. It was not until the war had ended that Frederic Warburg finally published it, on August 17, 1945.

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Source: ORWELL, George. Animal Farm. London: Penguin Books, 2003. Preface by Russel Baker.