George Orwell: An Indomitable Soul

“Saint George,” “the conscience of the generation,” “the prophet”… George Orwell was a man who, in the Middle Ages, would have been burned at the stake. But now his twenty volumes of legacy are studied in schools, his books are translated into 65 languages, and films and stage productions have been made based on them. And the total print run of his novel “1984” in England alone has surpassed 40 million… Vyacheslav Nedoshivin is a writer and author of books “Addresses of Love. Homes and Householders of Russian Literature” and “Walks in the Silver Age.” For many years—from a dissertation on dystopias in 1985 to articles in academic collections and journals (“Foreign Literature”)—he studied the work of J. Orwell and translated his writings. The result of this work was a detailed biography of the English classic, awarded the “Venets” prize of the Moscow State (SP Moscow) (2020) and the A. Belyaev Prize (2022). “George Orwell. Unassailable Soul” is not just an engaging account of the writer’s life and his books, his views and his era—it is also his first “Russian portrait.” About the Russian woman he loved, about the émigré officer from Russia who saved him in Paris, and about his front-line friend from St. Petersburg—whom Orwell himself, in turn, saved in Spain. About the writer’s diaries that disappeared in the basements of Lubyanka, and about correspondence with the USSR that was made public here only in the nineties… The book is illustrated with unique photographs from the writer’s London archive, many of which are published in Russia for the first time. “An ascetic, an exile, a ‘white crow’—he, the fugitive from camps of any ‘victors,’ chose the side of the humiliated and insulted all his life. He didn’t choose paradise, but hell. He went ‘under the bridges’ and into shelters with drifters and the poor in England, worked as a dishwasher in Paris, was the first to rush into reconnaissance in Spain, and returned to London under fascist bombs, when everyone else, by contrast, was evacuating. ‘The worse, the better’—that was Orwell’s motto, if life was what was at stake.”