The 1984 novel is read online in full. Read the entire book "1984" online - George Orwell - MyBook. O'Brien and Julia

I

It was a cold, clear April day, and the clock struck thirteen. Burying his chin in his chest to escape the evil wind, Winston Smith hurriedly ducked through the glass door of the Pobeda apartment building, but nevertheless let in a whirlwind of grainy dust.

The lobby smelled of boiled cabbage and old rugs. There was a colored poster on the wall opposite the entrance, too large to fit. The poster showed a huge, more than a meter wide, face - the face of a man of about forty-five, with a thick black mustache, rough, but manly attractive. Winston headed for the stairs. The elevator was not even worth approaching. Even in the best of times, it rarely worked, and now, in the daytime, the electricity was turned off altogether. The economy mode was in effect - they were preparing for the Week of Hate. Winston had seven marches to overcome; he was in his forties, he had a varicose ulcer above his ankle: he rose slowly and stopped several times to rest. On each platform, the same face looked from the wall. The portrait was made in such a way that wherever you went, your eyes would not let go. BIG BROTHER LOOKS AT YOU- read the signature.

In the apartment, a luscious voice said something about the production of cast iron, read out the numbers. The voice came from an oblong metal plate embedded in the right wall, like a dull mirror. Winston turned the knob, his voice weakened, but the speech was still intelligible. This apparatus (it was called a telescreen) could be extinguished, but it was impossible to turn it off completely. Winston went to the window; a short, puny man, he seemed even more puny in the blue uniform of a party member. His hair was completely blond, and his ruddy face was peeling from bad soap, dull blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

The world outside, behind closed windows, breathed cold. The wind spiraled dust and scraps of paper; and although the sun was shining and the sky was starkly blue, everything in the city looked colorless - except for the posters plastered all over the place. From every noticeable angle the face of the black mustache looked. From the house opposite, too. BIG BROTHER LOOKS AT YOU- said the signature, and dark eyes looked into those of Winston. Below, above the sidewalk, a poster with a torn corner fluttered in the wind, now hiding, now revealing a single word: ANGSOTS... In the distance, a helicopter slid between the rooftops, hovered for a moment like a cadaver fly, and swept away in a curve. It was a police patrol who looked through the windows of people. But patrols didn't count. Only the Thought Police counted.

Behind Winston, the voice from the telescreen was still chatting about iron smelting and the overfulfillment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen worked for reception and transmission. He caught every word if it was not spoken in a very soft whisper; moreover, as long as Winston remained in the field of vision of the cloudy plate, he was not only heard, but also visible. Of course, no one knew whether he was being watched at the moment or not. How often and on what schedule did the Thought Police connect to your cable was anyone's guess. It is possible that everyone was being watched - and around the clock. In any case, they could connect at any time. You had to live - and you lived, according to a habit that turned into instinct - with the knowledge that your every word is overheard and your every movement, until the light goes out, is watched.

Winston kept his back to the telescreen. It's safer this way; although - he knew it - the back also betrays. A kilometer from his window, the white building of the Ministry of Truth, his place of service, piled up over the grimy city. Here he is, Winston thought with vague disgust, here he is, London, the main city of Runway I, the third most populous province in the State of Oceania. He turned to childhood - trying to remember if London had always been that way. Did these lines of dilapidated 19th century houses, propped up by logs, with cardboard-patched windows, patchwork roofs, and drunken front garden walls, always stretch into the distance? And these clearing from the bombing, where alabaster dust curled and fireweed climbed over the heaps of debris; and large wastelands, where bombs have cleared a place for a whole mushroom family of squalid boardwalk huts, similar to chicken coops? But - to no avail, he could not remember; nothing remained of childhood, except for fragmentary brightly lit scenes, devoid of background and most often unintelligible.

The Ministry of Truth — Minisight in Newspeak — was strikingly different from everything else around it. This gigantic pyramidal building, shining with white concrete, rose, ledge by ledge, to a height of three hundred meters. From his window, Winston could read three party slogans in elegant script on the white façade:

...

WAR IS WORLD

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

According to rumors, the ministry of truth included three thousand offices above the surface of the earth and a corresponding root system in the depths. There were only three other buildings of this type and size in different parts of London. They so high above the city that from the roof of the residential building "Pobeda" you could see all four at once. They housed four ministries, the entire state apparatus: the ministry of truth, which was in charge of information, education, leisure and the arts; the Ministry of Peace, in charge of the war; the ministry of love, which was in charge of maintaining order, and the ministry of abundance, which was responsible for the economy. In Newspeak: Mini-Rights, Mini-World, Mini-Love, and Miniso.

The Ministry of Love was fearsome. There were no windows in the building. Winston never crossed his threshold, never came closer than half a kilometer to him. It was only possible to get there on official business, and even then having overcome a whole maze of barbed wire, steel doors and disguised machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading to the outer ring of fences were patrolled by black-uniformed guards with gorilla faces and articulated clubs.

Appreciated the book

I am in shock, dear comrades. This is the scariest book in my life. Yes, yes, old King nervously smokes on the sidelines with his Langoliers, Tomminokers and IT. Because, in contrast to these "horror stories", Orwell's world is true, and this is what is terrible.

People, they are such gentle creatures that you can do anything with them. A person is weak, and when he is hurt and scared, he is capable of any betrayal, even betrayal of himself. Especially if he knows that he will not wait for deliverance in the form of death from this fear and this pain.

My hair just stood on end from recognizing... From the realization that it is now growing its first pseudopods, but it is already quite viable in order to grow into a monster. We already had one Big Brother, he was called the Father of Peoples, but then something did not grow together, perhaps the technical level was not enough, perhaps the Communist Party brought up too courageous people, but with such it is more difficult. The followers, again, thought more about themselves and not about the good of the party.

But now everything is ready. And the new SB will probably be even worse than Orwell's ...

Appreciated the book

Can't you understand that the task of Newspeak is to narrow the horizons of thought? In the end, we will make thought-crime simply impossible - there will be no words left for it.

I am starting to keep my short notes for reporting, because it will be really interesting to record an event of this magnitude. It would seem that it is impossible for a born break to join the ranks of the party, but for many years I did not stop my attempts to prove loyalty, and, finally, they gave me a uniform, erasing all references to the fact that I was once born different from other party members. My new room, telescreen ... They are beautiful in their stamping. While still very young, I decided to enter the party: not in order to serve its frankly confused interests, but in order to be able to study it from the inside and, perhaps, finally understand the inner logic of its existence. Politics has always been interesting to me.
***
There is still a lot I don’t understand. I hope one day I will comprehend all these tiresome rituals of the party society, but so far they seem necessary to me only for one purpose: not to leave people time to think. I don't understand why everyone is so blindly trusting memory cells, throwing shameful evidence of their own existence at them. Who said that all the papers thrown there will burn in the fire, and will not be read? Why are many oppressed by the situation in the party, but they do not run to us - the proles? What is easier: to get lost in the slums, where thousands and millions of filthy ragamuffins live, who do not understand anything about the party lines and have not seen the TV screen. And with whom are we still at war: with Eastasia or Eurasia?
***
The children of my neighbors are just awful. Maybe these are generally robots sent to the family like telescreens in human form? They are watching my every step, probably, they are desperate to get the opportunity to give up their own parents, they are too prudent. It's amazing how they even had children, I can't imagine how they can have sex ...
***
Surprisingly, I'm starting to get some satisfaction from collective action. It's nice to feel that dozens more people share this moment with you, that you are not alone, that you will always be supported, that you do not stand out from others and do not have to painfully prove your own uniqueness every minute. It turns out to be very simple to be the same as everyone else.
***
Was wrong about the kids. Good, thoughtful children. You just need to find an approach to them. At work, for the first time, he reveled in five minutes of hatred. It is good that the party is concerned about the exit of negative emotions from the population.
***
Together with the children, I followed the neighbors to the left. Evil-minded. We must report. I will receive a reward.
***
Was wrong. Big Brother and the party do not need subjective judgment.
***
GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY TO BIG BROTHER! GLORY!
***
Big brother plus-plus! Big brother plus-plus! Big brother plus-plus!
***
BB ++ BB ++ BB ++ BB ++ BB ++ BB ++ BB ++ BB ++

Appreciated the book

The omniscient one spoke:
By spring follow
New
People on earth.
Their original songs -
Oat marshes,
Oat marshes,
Harsh pleas.
Discarding excess
For plastic words,
They smash their foreheads.
Iron mantras,
Like steel blades
Straighten the world ...
(c) Picnic

I tried to avoid reading criticism of the novel before reviewing it. I was just preparing for something great and terrible.

From the very first pages - misunderstanding. The leader of the ruling party - "forty-five years old, with a thick black mustache, rude, but manly attractive" with a piercing gaze; the opposition is represented by a former party member, now disgraced, an émigré named Goldstein - "... a Jewish face, a Jewish face ... an intelligent face and at the same time inexplicably repulsive; and there was something senile in this long, gristly nose with glasses that had slipped almost to the very tip. It looked like a sheep. " What, is it that simple? Party, Stalin and Trotsky?

Not, not easy. Don't just live in Orwell's world. Somehow it became bad form to put Zamyatin and Huxley on a par with Orwell. I do not argue, there are many analogies, but if Huxley and Zamyatin's last war ended, God knows when, then the inhabitants of Oceania can only dream of peace. And even then it is unlikely that they know the world for sure: Peace is war... Grub rations, a shortage of essential goods, periodically falling missiles and other joys of life in the rear. Plus shock work, including off-time "subbotniks", consisting of the preparation and celebration of public holidays. From social guarantees - only one: a step away from the official ideology - and you are guaranteed not a tenant, not a person. Freedom is slavery

The ideology at first also seemed absurd. Well, who will lead to such slogans and who will tolerate it? Okay, 15% of the party, but 85% of the "breaks" could not forget the revolutions of the late XIX - early XX centuries! It turns out they could. "Who controls the past," says the party slogan, controls the future, who controls the present controls the past. " And this is not just a word puzzle. A rewritten history, destruction of documents, distortion and substitution of facts is not fiction, to find examples of this - one or two (one, two, boyans, of course). "Whoever owns the information owns the world" is another commonplace that does not prevent this phrase from being fair. In Oceania, professionals are engaged in disinformation and have reached the level of art in this matter. With whom we fought five years ago, what does the word crossed out from the dictionaries mean, and even what year from the birth of Christ not everyone can say. Ignorance is power

The hero is an office plankton, a party official, who is engaged in this very disinformation. He frankly hates the party, but to live like a wolf - like a wolf and howl, even if coffee is a surrogate, and there is too little smoke, but it's still better than working hard on the native Solovki. Vaguely realizing that "something is wrong here," he once finds an interesting documentary, and doubts acquire a completely material basis. The next thought is quite logical: “We must do something!”, And the first thing to do is to find like-minded people. And he finds Her.

She is far from burning with a righteous deed Zamyatinskaya I, not freedom, leading the people to the barricades and not even Lady Godiva, simply hating the party for her happy childhood, which deprived her of purely carnal pleasures - sex, delicious food, feminine clothes and cosmetics. Interesting image of the opportunist. Born after the arrival of the new government, she takes what is happening for granted with enviable spontaneity. Violating the unwritten - there are no others - laws, she simply enjoys life and in her own way takes revenge on the party, taking the impending punishment for granted. Any high politics, underground and revolutions attract her much less than a wide bed and natural coffee, that's a smart girl.

Only the song is not at all about how Julia purred with Winston. Although about that too. =) A pencil caricature of the early history of the Union in the course of the action is filled with paints, separate lines are drawn, a background is applied - and this is a completely different picture, realistic, scary. The grotesque "newspeak", caricaturedly ridiculing the Soviet asshole and the deputy commander (Distinguished Workers of Culture and the Deputy Commander for Marine Affairs, who is not in the know) in fact turns out to be a complex and powerful tool for suppressing "old thinking". The logic is simple, but for this reason it is brilliant: we think in images, but we convey thoughts to those around us in words. If there are no suitable words in the language, then it is impossible to formulate an idea. And "extra words" are constantly cut out of dictionaries ... Indeed, why complicate everything? There is "hunger" - and there is an absolutely superfluous word "satiety". Isn't it easier to say "no_ hunger", it is immediately clear that this is the opposite of "hunger". It is so, well-fed is not hungry. But not hungry - not necessarily well-fed ...

Lies, lies, blatant lies, everywhere and everything is a lie. A breath of fresh air - a book within a book - an essay by the enemy of the people of Goldstein, which is read to his fighting friend Winston. The enemy writes soberly and sensibly, denounces, exposes and, in general, puts everything on the shelves. But even with this book, not everything is so smooth ...

In short, the fear and horror of the totalitarian regime. It can be seen that the author fought and knows what pain is. From his description of the beatings goosebumps run through the body, I want to curl up into a ball, covering my head with my hands and my liver with my legs. Eerie descriptions of either the Gestapo or the KGB-shnyh methods of interrogation confirm the idea of the protagonist

"... There is nothing worse in life than physical pain. In the face of pain, there are no heroes, no heroes, he repeated over and over to himself and writhed on the floor, holding on to his battered left elbow ..."

A separate issue is "doublethink". What it is and what it is eaten with - you cannot immediately explain, it is a rather complex and interesting socio-psychological concept.

"Doublethink means the ability to simultaneously hold two conflicting beliefs<...>To tell a deliberate lie and at the same time believe in it, forget any fact that has become inconvenient, and extract it from oblivion, as soon as you need it again, deny the existence of objective reality and take into account the reality that you deny - all this is absolutely necessary. Even when using the word "doublethink", it is necessary to resort to doublethink. For by using this word you admit that you are cheating with reality; another act of doublethink - and you erased it in your memory; and so on ad infinitum, and the lie is always one step ahead of the truth. Ultimately, it was thanks to double-mindedness that the party managed (and who knows, for thousands of years to come) to stop the course of history. "

Doesn't fit in your head? Yes, at first it is difficult to imagine such a thing, but, again, during the course of the novel, the author repeatedly gives examples of doublethink in action, and it no longer seems such a perversely fantastic way of thinking.

Actually, there is no reason to hope for a happy ending with such an alignment, but of all the options for an unhappy ending, Orwell chooses, as for me, the most cruel ... What the party does with the disobedient is pure sadism, but ideologically justified.

Summary: This is one of the hardest dystopias I've read so far. Certainly strong in both artistic and philosophical sense, I do not recommend reading the novel to vulnerable individuals sobbing over "Flowers for Algeron", pregnant women and persons prone to suicide. The rest - a master read!

NB four, not five stars - for too transparent hints. This makes it impossible to abstract from Soviet realities and perceive "1984" as a purely abstract world of the future.

The spread of the military dictatorship in the 20th century could not hide from the attentive gaze of writers who sensitively recorded the slightest fluctuations in public opinion. Many writers have occupied one side or another of the barricades, not moving away from the political realities of their time. Among the brilliant talents who share the ideas of humanism and individualism of the individual, grossly trampled upon in authoritarian states, George Orwell, the author of the brilliant dystopia "1984", stands out. In his work, he portrayed a future that should be feared at all times.

The novel tells about a possible scenario for the development of the world. After a series of bloody wars and revolutions, the Earth was divided into three superpowers, which are constantly at war with each other in order to distract the population from unresolved internal problems and completely control it. The description of the book "1984" should start with the main character. In one of these empires lives a hero - an employee of the Ministry of Truth, a government body specializing in the destruction and rewriting of the past to new standards. In addition, it is engaged in the promotion of the values of the existing system. Every day, Winston sees how what is happening in real life is reshaped to suit the political interests of the ruling elite, and thinks about how right what is happening. Doubts creep into his soul, and he starts a diary, to which he boldly confides them, hiding from the ubiquitous cameras (his TV screen not only broadcasts what needs to be watched, but also films his chambers). This is where his protest begins.

There is no place for individuality in the new system, so Smith carefully conceals it. What he writes about in his diary is a thought crime and is punishable by death. It is not easy to hide anything from Big Brother (the supreme ruler of Oceania): all the houses are made of glass, everywhere there are cameras and bugs, the thought police are watching every move. He meets Julia, a very relaxed person who also harbors an independent personality. They fall in love with each other, and they designate the abode of the proles, the lowest caste of workers, as a meeting place. They are not watched so zealously, because their intellectual level is below average. They are allowed to live according to the customs of their ancestors. There, the heroes indulge in love and dreams of revolution with the hands of those same breaks.

In the end, they meet a real resistance spokesman who gives them a forbidden book on the philosophy of the coming coup. The thought police find a couple reading it: a reliable person turned out to be an agent of the thought police. After being brutally tortured, Winston and Julia surrender and betray each other. In the ending, they sincerely believe in the power of Big Brother and share the generally accepted view that everything is fine in the country.

How did Orwell come up with the name 1984?

The author wrote his work in 1948, and chose a title for it, changing the order of the last two numbers. The fact is that at this time the world got to know the most powerful army in Europe, originally from the USSR. Many people, tortured by privations and military actions, had the impression that another, no less merciless and dangerous enemy had come to replace the German fascist aggressor. The threat of the Third World War, despite the defeat of the Third Reich, was still in the air. And then the question of the legality of any dictatorship was actively discussed by people from all over the world. Orwell, seeing the horrific consequences of the struggle of authoritarian regimes and their willfulness within their states, became a staunch critic of tyranny in all its manifestations. He feared that in the future an oppressive government would destroy "the freedom to say that twice two is four." Fears for the fate of civilization gave rise to the concept of the dystopia "1984". As you can see, the writer guessed the triumph of totalitarianism in the near future: only 36 years after the book was written. This means that the situation was conducive to gloomy predictions, which, largely due to the skillful propaganda of humanistic ideals in literature, did not come true.

Orwell's art world

Geopolitical system. The action takes place in a country called Oceania. It has two rivals: Eurasia and Eastasia. Now with one, now with the other alliances are concluded, and at this time a war is going on with the other. Thus, the external threat becomes the binding force of the internal order. She justifies the shortage of food, total surveillance of everyone, poverty and other social problems.
Big Brother (in some translations of the novel "1984" sounds like "Big Brother"). To make it all look organic, employees of the Ministry of Truth rewrite yesterday's newspapers every day and distribute them retroactively. All the miscalculations of the Big Brother - the supreme ruler of Oceania - are also smoothed out. The cult of his personality is very developed and plays the role of a national ideology: he is something like God. Peculiar icons with his image and slogans on his behalf are hung everywhere. In these details it is easy to see striking similarities with the geopolitical situation of those years.
Ingsots is the ruling party brought to power by Big Brother and Emmanuel Goldstein (an allusion to Lenin and Trotsky). First of all, it uses psychological control over citizens, the greatest importance is attached to the mental activity of people. In order to have absolute power over it, officials are rewriting history right down to yesterday's newspapers.
Oppositionist Goldstein. Of course, the party (it is one for the whole country, personifies the power as a whole) has an internal enemy - a certain Goldstein and his organization "Brotherhood". He is a fictional head of a fictional opposition, a magnet that attracts those dissatisfied with the existing system and condemns them to arrest and torture. It was his non-existent ranks that pulled the main characters of the dystopia "1984". Bogus criminal cases and swearing at a resistance figure add to the agenda of Oceania's citizens, who already see nothing but violence.
Doublethink. However, the absurdity of this political system lies in the fact that words familiar to us from childhood acquire the opposite meaning: the ministry of love is engaged in torture and executions, and the ministry of truth is recklessly lying. Famous FAC teams for Oceanians “War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is power ”are perceived by people intimidated and dull by endless propaganda as common truths, although we have antonymic pairs before us, nothing more. But in the atmosphere of a dictatorship, too, they were given a philosophical meaning. War serves as a guarantor of internal stability: no one will go to the revolution, if only for patriotic motives, because the homeland is in danger. The problems of the world are alien to wartime. The freedom of Orwell's heroes is that they feel safe, and they have nothing to hide. They are in unity with society and the state, which means that if the country is free (and the soldiers defend independence on the battlefield), then the individual is also independent. Hence, slavish worship of Big Brother will bring true harmony. And ignorance will contribute to this, because an ignorant person does not know doubts and is firmly moving towards a common goal in the same rank with his comrades. Thus, outright absurdity has long been a national idea in many authoritarian countries.
Newspeak. This is an invention of the philologists of Oceania. They created a new language of abbreviations and jargon to make thought crime (doubting the correctness of generally accepted attitudes) impossible. Newspeak was supposed to paralyze thought, because that for which there is no word ceases to exist for man. The heroes of "1984" will not even be able to communicate normally without language, therefore, there will be no talk of any rebellion.
The Proles are a working class making up about 85% of the population. The authorities let their lives take their course, since these people were dull from hard primitive labor and were not capable of revolutionary thinking. Their orders are determined by tradition, and their opinions are determined by superstition. But Winston is counting on their breakthrough.
The Thought Police is a spy organization that monitors the mental activity of Oceania citizens.

main characters

Winston Smith is the main character of the novel "1984", an employee of the Ministry of Truth. He is 39 years old, he is thin and unhealthy in appearance. He has a harsh, harsh face and a tired look. He is prone to thought and doubt, surreptitiously hates the existing system, but does not have the courage to protest openly. Since childhood, Winston was selfish and weak: his family lived in poverty, and he always complained of hunger, took food from his mother and sister, and once took away a chocolate bar from his sister, ran away, and when he returned, he found no one. So he ended up in a boarding school. Since then, his nature has changed little. The only thing that elevated him was his love for Julia, which gave him courage and readiness to fight. However, the man does not stand up to the tests, he is not ready to sacrifice for the sake of his beloved woman. Orwell mockingly assigns him a humiliating phobia - the fear of rats, which ruins Smith's frank impulses. It was the cage with rodents that made him betray his beloved and with all his soul join the ideology of Big Brother. Thus, the image of a fighter with the system degrades to the typical character of a timeserver and a slave of the conjuncture.
Julia is the main character of the dystopia "1984", Winston's beloved woman. She is 26 years old. She works in a literary workshop, is engaged in writing novels on a special device. She has a solid sexual experience, corrupts party members, being a symbol of indomitable human nature with its instinctive logic of behavior. She has thick dark hair, freckles on her face, a pretty appearance and a beautiful feminine figure. She is brave, much bolder and more frank than her beloved. It is she who confesses her feelings to him and attracts him to the countryside in order to express innermost thoughts. With her licentiousness, she protests against the Puritanism of the party, wants to give her energy for the sake of pleasure and love, and not for the glory of Big Brother.
O'Brien is a well-established party member, an undercover agent of the Thought Police. Well-mannered, restrained, has an athletic build. Deliberately creates the impression of opposition. He is a reasoner, his role is similar to the meaning of the image of Mephistopheles in the fate of Faust. He appears to Winston in dreams, gives rise to doubt in his thoughts that he shares the political views of the majority. The hero all the time throws logs into the fire of Smith's protest, finally, openly persuades him to participate in the impending rebellion. It is later revealed that he was a provocateur. O'Brien personally leads the torture of his "friends", gradually knocking out their individuality. The cruel inquisitor displays a rare charm, a clear mind, a broad outlook and a gift of persuasion. His position is much more consistent and logical than what the prisoners are trying to oppose to him.
Syme is a philologist and one of the founders of Newspeak. All minor characters are drawn by the author schematically and only in order to show the injustice and depravity of the state system in the dystopia "1984".

The meaning of the book

J. Orwell portrayed a senseless and merciless duel between the personality and the system, where the former is doomed to perish. The authoritarian state denies the human right to individuality, which means that everything that is dear to us will be trampled upon if the state's power over society is absolute. The writer warned us against collectivism of thought and against the permissiveness of the dictatorship under whatever slogans, which certainly cannot be trusted. The meaning of the work "1984" is to represent the world, dialectically evolved according to the laws of today to a state of tyranny, and to show its squalor, its total inconsistency with our values and ideas. The author took the radical ideas of contemporary politicians to the extreme and received not fantasy, no, but a real forecast for the future, to which we, without knowing it, are approaching in the present. Any dystopia exaggerates the colors in order to make humanity think about what will happen next, if we allow the arbitrariness of today.

In the middle of the 20th century, Oceania had many prototypes. D. Orwell spoke especially sharply about the USSR. He often spoke in the press criticizing the country's authoritarian system, repressive domestic policies, aggressive behavior on the world stage, etc. Many of the details from the book are strikingly reminiscent of the realities of Russia during the Soviet period: the cult of personality, repression, torture, scarcity, censorship, etc. Perhaps the work was in the nature of a very specific satirical attack on the Soviet Union. For example, it is known that the famous "twice two equals five" the writer came up with when he heard the expression "five years in 4 years."

The ending

The discrepancy between human nature and dictatorship is emphasized in the ending of the novel "1984", where the personalities of the main characters were erased beyond recognition. Winston, after prolonged physical suffering, admits that O'Brien is showing not four fingers, but five, although this is not true. But the inquisitor goes further in his experiments: he pokes a cage with rats in the face of the prisoner. For Smith, this is beyond all power, he is madly afraid of them and betrays Julia, begging to give her to the rats instead of him. However, she also betrays him under torture. So the fighters against the system become disappointed in each other, all their dreams become like childish babble. After that, they can no longer even think about protest, all their thoughts are completely controlled by the thought police. This crushing internal defeat contrasts with Oceania's latest "victory" in the war against Eurasia. To the sound of the fanfare, Smith truly fell in love with Big Brother. Now he is part of the general consensus.

Criticism

For the first time the novel “1984” was translated into Russian in the 50s of the last century, in 1957 (during the thaw after Stalin's death) a book was even published in samizdat. However, Soviet criticism preferred not to notice the pronounced hint of an authoritarian regime in the Russian latitudes and characterized it as a decadent phenomenon of the decaying imperialist West. For example, the 1983 Philosophical Encyclopedic Dictionary says about dystopia: "For Orwell's ideological legacy, both reactionary, ultra-right forces and petty-bourgeois radicals are waging a fierce struggle." Their foreign colleagues, on the contrary, noted the powerful social issues and political implications of the work, focusing on the humanistic message of the author.

Modern readers evaluate the novel in two ways: they do not deny it artistic value, but they do not highlight any special semantic diversity. Left-wing politician and writer Eduard Limonov notes that Orwell carried out a certain propaganda mission of his party (Trotskist), although he does it with high quality. However, it remains unclear that the writer rejects the ideals so dear to the heart of Leiba Trotsky. For example, the idea of a world state is clearly presented as a path to totalitarian power, which causes such a categorical rejection in the author.

The critic, publicist and poet Dmitry Bykov highly values the artistry of Orwell's text, but he does not find deep social thoughts there. And the writer (in the genre of popular science literature) Kirill Yeskov completely criticized the dystopian novel "1984" for the excessive utopianism of the phenomena recreated in it. He emphasized the unviability of many of them.

Interesting? Keep it on your wall! Exactly 70 years have passed since in 1948 George Orwell, under the impression of Yevgeny Zamyatin's dystopian novel We, wrote his famous dystopia 1984. In the USSR, this anti-totalitarian novel was published only in the era of Gorbachev's liberation Perestroika - in the Novy Mir magazine for 1989, no. 2, 3, 4 - translated by V. P. Golyshev.

Quotes from the book:

"The masses do not know how bad they live if they have nothing to compare with"

“At each site, the same face looked from the wall. The portrait was made in such a way that wherever you went, your eyes would not let go. BIG BROTHER IS LOOKING AT YOU, the signature read. "

"The discontent generated by a meager and joyless life is systematically directed to external objects and dispelled with the help of such techniques as a two-minute hate."

“And if the facts say otherwise, then the facts need to be changed. This is how history is continually being rewritten. This daily erasure of the past, which the ministry of truth is engaged in, is as necessary for the stability of the regime as the repressive and espionage work carried out by the ministry of love. "

“Doublethink means the ability to simultaneously hold two opposing beliefs. The Party intellectual knows in which direction to change his memories; hence, he is aware that he is cheating with reality; however, with the help of doublethink, he assures himself that reality remains inviolable. "

"The Ministry of Love was fearsome."

“The ministry of truth — mini-rights in Newspeak — was strikingly different from everything else around it. This gigantic pyramidal building, shining with white concrete, rose, ledge by ledge, to a height of three hundred meters. From his window, Winston could read three party slogans in elegant script on the white façade:

"WAR IS THE WORLD"

"FREEDOM IS SLAVERY"

"LACK OF KNOWLEDGE IS POWER"

“No one heard what Big Brother was saying. Just a few words of encouragement, like those that the leader utters in the thunder of the battle - even if indistinct in themselves, they instill confidence in the fact that they were uttered. "

“They began to gallop around him, shouting:“ Traitor! ”,“ Thought-criminal! ”- and the girl imitated every movement of the boy. It was a little scary, like the fuss of tiger cubs, which will soon grow into cannibals. "

“And somewhere, it is not clear where, anonymously, there was a leading brain that drew a political line according to which one part of the past had to be preserved, another falsified, and the third destroyed without a trace.”

"Thought crime does not entail death: thought crime IS death"

“The enemy of the people Emmanuel Goldstein ... an apostate and renegade, once, a long time ago (so long ago that no one remembered when), was one of the leaders of the party, almost equal to Big Brother himself, and then took the path counter-revolution, was sentenced to death and mysteriously fled, disappeared. "

“Pages with frayed edges opened easily — the book was in many hands. The title page read:
EMMANUEL GOLDSTEIN
THEORY AND PRACTICE OF OLIGARCHIC COLLECTIVISM ”.

"The proles, who were usually not interested in war, had, as it happened from time to time, a fit of patriotism."

“For a long time, the superiors seem to be firmly in power, but sooner or later a moment comes when they lose either faith in themselves, or the ability to govern effectively, or both. Then they are overthrown by the middle ones, who have attracted the lower ones to their side by playing the role of fighters for freedom and justice. Having achieved their goal, they push the lower into their former slavery position and themselves become higher. "

“Although Goldstein was hated and despised by everyone, although every day, a thousand times a day, his teachings were refuted, crushed, destroyed, ridiculed as pathetic nonsense, his influence did not diminish in the least. All the time there were new fools, just waiting for him to seduce them. Not a day went by without the Thought Police unmasking the spies and saboteurs acting at his behest. He commanded a huge underground army, a network of conspirators seeking to overthrow the system. It was supposed to be called the Brotherhood. "

“Winston stood at attention in front of the TV screen: a wiry, relatively young woman in a short skirt and gym shoes had already appeared there.
- Flexion of the arms and stretching! she cried out. - We do it according to the account. And one, two, three, four! And one, two, three, four! More fun, comrades, more life! And one, two, three, four! And one, two, three, four! "

“Usually, people who displeased the party simply disappeared and no one else heard of them. And it was useless to wonder what became of them. "

“This morning, an unstoppable wave of spontaneous demonstrations swept across Oceania. The workers left factories and institutions and marched through the streets with banners, expressing gratitude to Big Brother for a new happy life under his wise leadership. "

“The ministry provided not only the various needs of the party, but also produced similar products - a lower grade - for the needs of the proletarians. Low-quality newspapers were made here, containing nothing but sports, criminal chronicles and astrology, fancy five-cent novellas, obscene films, sensitive songs composed in a purely mechanical way - on a special kind of kaleidoscope, the so-called versifier. "

“Today, for example, in 1984 (if the year is 1984), Oceania was at war with Eurasia and was in an alliance with Eastasia. Neither publicly, nor in private, did anyone mention that in the past the relations between the three powers could be different. Winston knew perfectly well that Oceania was actually at war with Eurasia and had been friends with Eastasia for only four years. But he knew furtively - and only because his memory was not completely controlled. Officially, ally and enemy never changed. Oceania is at war with Eurasia, therefore, Oceania has always been at war with Eurasia. The present enemy has always embodied absolute evil, which means that neither in the past nor in the future, an agreement with him is unthinkable. "

“But everything is fine, now everything is fine, the fight is over. He won a victory over himself. He loved Big Brother. "

“The more powerful the party is, the more intolerant it will be; the weaker the resistance, the more severe the despotism. "

“Freedom is the ability to say that twice two is four. If this is allowed, everything else follows from here "

“A metallic voice from the loudspeakers thundered about endless atrocities, massacres, evictions of entire nations, robberies, violence, torture of prisoners of war, bombing of civilians, propaganda fabrications, impudent aggression, violated treaties. Listening to him, after a minute you could not believe it, and after two it was almost impossible not to get mad. "

“A party member is not supposed to have any personal feelings and no interruptions in enthusiasm. He must live in constant frenzy - hating external enemies and internal traitors, triumphing another victory, bowing to the power and wisdom of the party. "

“The conquest of the world is believed most of all by those who know that it is impossible. This bizarre combination of opposites - knowledge with ignorance, cynicism with fanaticism - is one of the distinguishing features of our society. "

Chalikova Victoria Atomovna
Eternal year

In 1984, the world celebrated a very strange anniversary: not the date of birth or death of the writer, not the year when his book was published, but the year that marked the time of action in the book. The case seems to be the only one in world literature. That year ("the last year of stagnation," according to the latest chronology), there were also reports in our newspapers about the "jubilee" book, vague and so contradictory that they can be counted as one of the first and completely unintended manifestations of pluralism. Some articles said that this anti-Soviet novel, against the will of its talented author, became a "mirror of capitalist reality"; in others, on the contrary, it was argued that the author was mediocre, and that a conjunctural wave lifted him to the crest of world fame. The last statement can be refuted without even reading the novel - it is enough to look into any bibliographic publication. So, in the bibliography of utopian literature, published in Boston in 1979, on the pages allotted to 1948-1949, it is indicated: "Blair E.," 1984 "(pseudonym: J. Orwell) - a classic totalitarian dystopia" (a kind of negative utopia) ... Only a rare estimate in bibliographies - "classical" - distinguishes the famous book: in 1948-1949, every third of the utopias that were published was negative. Yes, these are the years of the Cold War, but we turn at random ten pages back and forth - and it turns out that in 1936-1937 and in 1972-1973 the same picture. Almost all of these books are now forgotten, and the glory of Orwell, like his predecessors - Zamyatin and Huxley, does not fade. Confrontation gave way to convergence, and the stream of 1984 was cutting cold and warm currents, and when the imaginary year caught up with the chronological one, the book's popularity reached its peak. According to Futurist magazine, by February 1984 there were eleven million copies in England alone. We note right away that the expectation of an Orwellian nightmare just by 1984 is the result of a massive aberration of the reader's perception: the hero lives in his mid-twenties under Angsoc - therefore, "the last totalitarian revolution in the world" took place in the middle of the 20th century. In any case, having torn off a leaf of the calendar, people sighed with relief: no matter how nightmare this world is, Orwell's is more terrible. It seems that 1984 is a year that will never come, futurists have reassured us. But is not the opinion of historians more accurate about the fantasies of Orwell and Huxley: if we have not yet lived to see the future they described, then we owe it to them to some extent. And if we do come to him, we will have to admit that we knew where we were going.

The debate over whether and when will come is meaningless in relation to the novel. As a fact of the spiritual biography of mankind, 1984 came once and for all - that summer of 1949, when the novel was printed simultaneously by the printing houses of London and New York. “We were seized by such an acute horror,” recall the first readers of the novel, “as if it was not about the future. We were afraid today, we were mortally afraid. " The fantastic 1984 replaced the real one in the minds of people and, perhaps, in their history. “I don’t think,” reflects the English writer J. Wayne, “that the arrival of totalitarianism in Europe was delayed by two novels -“ 1984 ”and“ Blinding Darkness ”by Koestler (1) ... but they played a huge role in this."

Released at the turn of two half centuries, the novel, as it were, summed up the first - with its two world wars, great revolutions and Hiroshima. It was in this half-century that those events took place that mark, mark centuries in history, defining one as the “age of the Enlightenment”, the other as the “age of great geographical discoveries”, and the third as the “age of genocides”.

The short life of Eric Blair (1903-1950) fell on the first half of the century, but the work and fate of George Orwell belong to his second half - a time when literary innovation seeks extremely natural forms, and the struggle for a place in the sun is replaced by a desire for simplification. Orwell's "eccentricities" - simple food, coal, candles, a goat, a vegetable garden - today have become the norm for many people in his circle. Of course, Orwell was clearly aware of what makes an artistic plot out of his life. He ends his 1940 autobiographical note with the remark: "Although everything written here is true, I must confess that my real name is not George Orwell." Memoirists believe that the choice as a pseudonym for the rude and "natural" name of the English rivulet - Orwell - was determined by his desire to create a "second self" - simple, clear, democratic ... But for Orwell in every role there was a risk of doublethink, and the only antidote to doublethink - the memory of what happened before. In the face of death, he settled these scores with the last severity, inscribing scores in his will, writing in his will a request not to write a biography of Eric Blair, for "every life seen from the inside is only a chain of amazing compromises and failures."

So, he composed destiny - like many writers, perhaps with an unusually pronounced selectivity. The trail was not as wide as it was deep. He did not travel around the world, did not give himself up to the life of a literary bohemia. But he passionately sought to ensure that the main events of the century - the economic depression, fascism, world war, totalitarian terror - became events in his personal life. Therefore, he was unemployed, and a vagabond, and a dishwasher, and a soldier (being a pacifist), and a correspondent for newspapers and radio (with aversion to politics and propaganda); was detained on suspicion of espionage, fled with someone else's passport. With an early and intensive tuberculosis process, all this was especially dangerous, and according to the initial social possibilities, it was not at all necessary. He was the second child in an impoverished but aristocratic (by Scottish standards) family of an Anglo-Indian official (born in Bengal), and although humiliating, on a scholarship, his stay in an elite preparatory school cost him dearly (the terrible world captured by him in his posthumously published story about childhood, he once called his "little 1984"), it opened the way for him to college and to a brilliant career. But after graduating from Eton, he went to Burma as a police officer. Then for several years he lived in Paris as an outcast and a failure, but soon his books "went". He wrote the autobiographical dilogy A Dog's Life in Paris and London and The Road to Wygen. The second is a feature documentary about a business trip (from a well-known left-wing publisher) to the unemployed mining north of England, punctuated by his first political confession - the repentance of an egocentric intellectual in the face of a great popular disaster.

In life, each event is important in its own way - fate always has a center, which is both its beginning and its end. Orwell's fate was determined by one of the most difficult events in modern history - the Spanish Civil War.

By joining the anti-fascist militia POUM, whose leaders were in open opposition to the Spanish Communist Party and sharply condemned the Stalinist terror, Orwell put himself in the position of a man who could be accused of treason at any moment - only because the POUM was suddenly declared a "Trotskyist gang" and "Franco's fifth column".

The poet's line: “I will still fall on the one, on that one, civilian one” - amazingly accurately falls on the fate of Orwell. Wounded dangerously in the throat (he lost his voice for almost a year), Orwell no longer fought, but the Spanish War remained his only War and in a more intimate sense. He went to Spain from the left newspaper, because from the right one could only go to Franco. Then he believed that left-wing politicians and people were fighting for one cause. In Catalonia, he saw that this was not the case, that the people needed land and freedom, and the left, just like the right, needed ideology and power. But the most terrible thing for him was the realization that it was impossible to tell about this situation. Orwell understood this non-existence of entire layers of human society as the fate of a person in a totalitarian world. And spiritually accepted this fate. Saved by friends and wife from arrest, torture, humiliation, death, he, an Englishman to the core, lived, according to the testimony of friends, the rest of his life in deep identification with the victims of fascism and Stalinism. "And", not "or"! and in 1943, in the days of Stalingrad, alone against everyone and everything around, he began to write the anti-Stalinist satire "Animal Farm" (2), which neither the left nor the right dared to publish for a long time. The bitter taste of loneliness is felt in his confession to a friend, the writer Koestler: "In 1936, in Spain, history stopped." Spain gave him a position that was accepted in its essence once and for all and that is why it freely changes with respect to everything temporary, opportunistic, formal. He said, it would seem, clearly about the essence of this position: "Every serious line of my works since 1936 has been written directly or indirectly against totalitarianism and in defense of democratic socialism, as I understood it." This remained his inner conviction - as an artist and publicist, he was given to depict only ugly shadows and ominous contours of the anti-ideal. His artistic symbols - Angsoz, Big Brother, Doublethink, Newspeak - became the leading concepts of political thinking in the second half of the 20th century, and the model of the society in which Winston and Julia live and die are compared by capacity and strength to Hobbes's Leviathan by political scientists.

During his lifetime, Orwell was most often called a dissident within the left. Now his fate repeats the posthumous fate of Dickens, about whom Orwell himself said: "It can be appropriated by anyone who wishes." Was it not so with Dostoevsky? Descendants always fight for ancestors who have become classics. Judge for yourself: "He was the forerunner of the neoconservatives, or rather the early neoconservatives, because he sought political and moral wisdom in the instincts of the common man, and not in intellectual attitudes," says the extreme right-wing Norman Podhoretz with conviction. And the ideologue of the "new left" Raymond Williams with no less passion asserts: "In its deepest layers, the English" new left "- the descendants of Orwell, a man who aspired to live, like most Englishmen, outside the official culture."

The atomic bomb finished Orwell: it deprived him of the opportunity to choose between East and West, insulted his patriotism. Indeed, even in 1940, when he was attracted by "revolutionary pacifism" and tried to resist the outbreak of the war as "imperialist", he burst out: "Oh! What will I do for you, England, my England? " He began to look for a political solution in the projects of creating a sovereign free Europe - the "Socialist States of Europe".

Despair turned out to be creatively fruitful: having passed through it everything that he understood, read and wrote before, secluded himself in the cold and half-starvation of the northern island, he wrote this novel with such a catastrophic speed for health that there were not seven months left after its publication and triumph. it was enough only for a will, archives, revisions, a few reviews and fruitless attempts to explain what he wanted and did not want to say with his novel.

And the world already understood what Orwell was. Strong antibiotics, unavailable at that time, flew from the states, in Switzerland friends were preparing a place for him in a sanatorium: before his death, as it happens, he suddenly felt better. One of the closest, Richard Rees, did not have time to say goodbye: he left for Canada. “I was in a literary meeting; suddenly someone came in and said, "Orwell is dead." And in the ensuing silence, a thought struck me: from now on, this direct, kind and furious man will become one of the most powerful myths of the 20th century. "

Part one

I

The lobby smelled of boiled cabbage and old rugs. There was a colored poster on the wall opposite the entrance, too large to fit. The poster showed a huge, more than a meter wide, face - the face of a man of about forty-five, with a thick black mustache, coarse, but masculinely attractive. Winston headed for the stairs. The elevator was not even worth approaching. Even in the best of times, it rarely worked, and now in the daytime the electricity was completely cut off. The economy was in effect - they were preparing for the Week of Hate. Winston had seven marches to overcome; he was in his forties, he had a varicose ulcer over his ankle; he rose slowly and stopped several times to rest. On each platform, the same face looked from the wall. The portrait was made in such a way that wherever you went, your eyes would not let go. BIG BROTHER IS LOOKING AT YOU, the signature read.

In the apartment, a luscious voice said something about the production of cast iron, read out the numbers. The voice came from an oblong metal plate embedded in the right wall, like a dull mirror. Winston turned the knob, his voice weakened, but the speech was still intelligible. This apparatus (it was called a telescreen) could be extinguished, but it was impossible to turn it off completely. Winston went to the window: a short, puny man, he seemed even more puny in the blue uniform of a party member. His hair was completely blond, and his ruddy face was peeling from bad soap, dull blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

The world outside, behind closed windows, breathed cold. The wind spiraled dust and scraps of paper; and although the sun was shining and the sky was harsh blue, everything in the city looked colorless - except for the posters plastered all over the place. From every noticeable angle the face of the black mustache looked. From the house opposite - too. BIG BROTHER IS LOOKING AT YOU - the signature said, and dark eyes looked into Winston's. Below, above the sidewalk, a poster with a torn off corner fluttered in the wind, now hiding, now revealing a single word: ANGSOTS. In the distance, a helicopter slid between the rooftops, hovered for a moment like a cadaver fly, and swept away in a curve. It was a police patrol who looked through the windows of people. But patrols didn't count. Only the Thought Police counted.

Winston kept his back to the telescreen. It's safer this way; although - he knew it - the back also betrays. A kilometer from his window, the white building of the Ministry of Truth, his place of service, piled up over the grimy city. Here he is, Winston thought with vague disgust, here he is, London, the main city of Runway I, the third most populous province in the State of Oceania. He turned to childhood - trying to remember if London had always been like that. Did these lines of dilapidated 19th century houses, propped up by logs, with cardboard-patched windows, patchwork roofs, and drunken front garden walls, always stretch into the distance? And these clearing from the bombing, where alabaster dust curled and fireweed climbed over the heaps of debris; and large wastelands, where bombs have cleared a place for a whole mushroom family of squalid boardwalk huts, similar to chicken coops? But - to no avail, he could not remember; nothing remained of childhood, except for fragmentary, brightly lit scenes, devoid of background and most often unintelligible.

The ministry of truth — minigrights in Newspeak — was strikingly different from everything else around it. This gigantic pyramidal building, shining with white concrete, rose, ledge by ledge, to a height of three hundred meters. From his window, Winston could read three party slogans in elegant script on the white façade:

WAR IS WORLD

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

LACK OF KNOWLEDGE IS POWER

The Ministry of Love was fearsome. There were no windows in the building. Winston never crossed his threshold, never came closer than half a kilometer to him. It was only possible to get there on official business, and even then having overcome a whole maze of barbed wire, steel doors and disguised machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading to the outer ring of the fence were patrolled by black-uniformed guards who looked like gorillas and armed with articulated clubs.

Winston turned sharply. He gave his face an expression of calm optimism that was most appropriate in front of the TV screen, and walked to the other end of the room, to the tiny kitchenette. Leaving the ministry at that hour, he donated lunch in the dining room, and there was no food at home - except for a slice of black bread, which had to be kept until tomorrow morning. He took from the shelf a bottle of colorless liquid with a simple white label: Victory Gene. The gin smelled nasty, oily, like Chinese rice vodka. Winston poured an almost full cup, braced himself, and swallowed like medicine.

His face immediately turned red, and tears flowed from his eyes. The drink looked like nitric acid; not only that: after taking a sip, it felt as if you had been hit on the back with a rubber truncheon. But soon the burning sensation in my stomach subsided, and the world began to look more cheerful. He pulled out a cigarette from a crumpled pack with the inscription "Cigarettes Victory", absentmindedly holding it vertically, as a result all the tobacco from the cigarette spilled out on the floor. Winston was more careful with the next one. He returned to the room and sat down at a table to the left of the telescreen. From a drawer he took out a pen, a bottle of ink, and a thick red-spine notebook with a marbled binding.

For some unknown reason, the telescreen in the room was not installed as usual. It was placed not in the end wall, from where it could view the whole room, but in a long one, opposite the window. On the side of it was a shallow niche, probably intended for bookshelves, where Winston was sitting now. Sitting deeper in it, he turned out to be out of reach for the telescreen, or rather, invisible. They could, of course, eavesdrop on him, but they could not observe while he was sitting there. This somewhat unusual layout of the room, perhaps, prompted him to do what he intended to do now.

But besides, she came across a marble-bound book. The book was amazingly beautiful. The smooth, creamy paper turned a little yellow with age - such paper had not been produced in forty years, or even more. Winston suspected the book was even older. He spotted it in a junk shop window in a slum area (where exactly he had already forgotten) and was eager to buy. Party members were not supposed to go to ordinary shops (this was called "buying goods on the free market"), but the ban was often neglected: many things, such as laces and razor blades, could not be obtained in any other way. Winston quickly looked around, ducked into the shop and bought a book for two fifty dollars. Why - he himself did not yet know. He stole it home in a briefcase. Even empty, it compromised the owner.

Now he intended to start a diary. This was not an illegal act (nothing illegal existed at all, since there were no longer the laws themselves), but if the diary was discovered, Winston would face death or, at best, twenty-five years in a hard labor camp. Winston inserted a quill into the pen and licked it to remove the grease. The pen was an archaic instrument, they were rarely even used for, and Winston got his secretly and not without difficulty: this beautiful cream paper, it seemed to him, deserves to be written on with real ink, and not scribbled with an ink pencil. Actually, he was not used to writing with his hand. Except for the shortest notes, he dictated everything in speech-writing, but here the dictation, of course, was not suitable. He dipped his pen and hesitated. His stomach gripped. Touching the paper with a pen is an irreversible step. In small, clumsy letters, he wrote:

And he leaned back. A feeling of complete helplessness overcame him. First of all, he did not know if it was true that the year was 1984. About this - no doubt: he was almost sure that he was 39 years old, and he was born in 1944 or 45; but now it is impossible to establish any date more precisely than with an error of a year or two.

And for whom, he suddenly wondered, this diary is being written? For the future, for those who have not yet been born. His thoughts circled over the dubious date written on the sheet, and suddenly stumbled upon the Newspeak word doublethink. And for the first time, the whole scale of his undertaking became visible to him. How to communicate with the future? This is inherently impossible. Either tomorrow will be like today and then it won't listen to it, or it will be different and Winston's adversity won't tell him anything.

Winston sat staring blankly at the paper. Harsh military music rang out from the telescreen. Curious: he not only lost the ability to express his thoughts, but even forgot what he wanted to say. How many weeks had he been preparing for this moment, and it did not even occur to him that more courage would be required here. Just write down - what is easier? Transfer to paper the endless disturbing monologue that has been ringing in his head for years, years. And now even this monologue has dried up. And the ulcer over the ankle itched unbearably. He was afraid to scratch his leg - this always caused inflammation. Seconds dripped. Only the whiteness of the paper, and the itching over the ankle, and the rattling music, and the slight drunkenness in his head - that was all that his feelings were now perceiving.

And suddenly he began to write - just out of panic, very vaguely aware that he was coming from the pen. Beaded, but childishly gnarled lines crawled up and down the sheet, losing first the capital letters, and then the dots.

April 4, 1984 Yesterday at the cinema. Mostly war films. One very good ship with refugees is being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. The audience is amused by the shots where a huge fat man is trying to sail away and a helicopter is chasing him. first we see how he walks like a dolphin in the water, then we see him from a helicopter through the sight, then he is all perforated and the sea around him is pink and immediately drowns as if he had collected water through the holes, when he went to the bottom, the audience cackled. Then a boat full of children and a helicopter hovering over it. there on the nose was a middle-aged woman who looked like a Jewess and in her arms was a boy of about three years old. The boy screams with fear and hides his head on her chest as if he wants to screw into her, and she calms him down and covers with her hands, although she herself turned blue with fear, all the time she tries to cover him with her hands better, as if she can shield him from bullets, then the helicopter dropped on them A 20-kilogram bomb was a terrible explosion and the boat shattered into pieces, then a wonderful shot of a child's hand flies up, up straight into the sky, it must have been removed from the glass nose of a helicopter and loudly applauded in the party ranks, but where the proles were sitting, a woman raised a scandal and a cry, that this should not be shown in front of children where it is good where it is good in front of children and scandalized until the police took her out, it is unlikely that they will do anything to her, you never know what the proles say, the typical prolov's reaction to this no one pays ...

Winston stopped writing, partly because his hand had cramped. He himself did not understand why he splashed this nonsense onto the paper. But it is curious that while he was moving the pen, a completely different incident lingered in his memory, so much so that at least now write it down. It became clear to him that because of this incident he decided to suddenly go home and start a diary today.

It happened in the morning at the ministry - if such a nebula can be said to have happened.

The time was approaching eleven zero-zero, and in the documentation department, where Winston worked, employees removed chairs from the booths and placed them in the middle of the hall in front of a large TV screen - they gathered for two minutes of hatred. Winston prepared to take his place in the middle ranks, when suddenly two more appeared: familiar faces, but he did not have to talk to them. He often met the girl in the corridors. He did not know her name, he only knew that she worked in the literature department. From the fact that he sometimes saw her with a wrench and oily hands, she was servicing one of the novel machines. She was twenty-seven, freckled, with thick dark hair; kept self-confident, moved in a sporty manner swiftly. The scarlet sash - the emblem of the Youth Anti-Sex Union - was tightly wrapped several times around the waist of the jumpsuit, emphasizing the steep hips. Winston disliked her at first sight. And he knew why. She smelled of the spirit of hockey fields, cold baths, tourist outings and in general orthodoxy. He disliked almost all women, especially the young and pretty ones. It was women, and the young in the first place, who were the most fanatical adherents of the party, swallowers of slogans, voluntary spies and sniffers of heresy. And this one seemed to him even more dangerous than the others. Once she met him in the corridor, glanced sideways - as if she had pierced her with a glance - and a black fear crept into his soul. He even had a flicker of suspicion that she was in the Thought Police. However, this was unlikely. Nevertheless, whenever she was around, Winston felt an awkward feeling, mixed with hostility and fear.