Related Literary Works: Orwell subtitled Animal Farm "A Fairy Story."
Characters in fairy tales tend to be two-dimensional stereotypes used to
reveal some broad observation about life. As the critic C.M. Wodehouse wrote
in a piece on Animal Farm in 1954, a fairy tale has no moral. It simply says, "Life
is like that—take it or leave it." Animal Farm uses the format of a fairy tale to
expose the evils of totalitarian exploitation. Rather than attack totalitarianism
directly, the book shows its offenses plainly and clearly and lets the reader
deduce the dangers posed by totalitarian governments. The literary work
most often mentioned alongside Animal Farm is 1984, another Orwell novel.
1984, published in 1949, envisions a future in which a dictatorship monitors
and controls the actions of all of its citizens. Like Animal Farm, 1984 depicted
the horrific constraints that totalitarian governments could impose on human
freedom.
Related Historical Events: In 1917, two successive revolutions rocked Russia
and the world. The first revolution overthrew the Russian Monarchy (the
Tsar) and the second established the USSR, the world's first Communist state.
Over the next thirty years the Soviet government descended into a
totalitarian regime that used and manipulated socialist ideas of equality
among the working class to oppress its people and maintain power. Animal
Farm is an allegory of the Russian Revolution and the Communist Soviet
Union. Many of the animal characters in Animal Farm have direct correlations
to figures or institutions in the Soviet Union.