OPEN-AIR EXHIBITION
1984: GEORGE ORWELL AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA
1. Introduction
2. Portrait of George Orwell
3. The Thought-World of George Orwell
4. George Orwell and Czechoslovakia
5. Literary works of George Orwell
6. The Novel Animal Farm
7. The Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
8. Film Adaptations of the Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
9. Reflections of the Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four in Visual Arts
10. Czech Samizdat Editions of the Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
11. Czech Exile Editions of the Novel Nineteen Eighty-Four
12. Orwellian Year in Czechoslovakia
13. Josef Skála’s Observations and Fictions
14. Orwellian Year of Jaroslav Švestka
15. Post-Velvet Revolution Reflections on Orwell’s Work
1. INTRODUCTION
“The terrifying thing about modern dictatorships is that they are something entirely unprecedented. Their end cannot be foreseen. In the past every tyranny was sooner or later overthrown, or at least resisted, because of ‘human nature’, which as a matter of course desired liberty.
But we cannot be at all certain that ‘human nature’ is constant. It may be just as possible to produce a breed of men who do not wish for liberty as to produce a breed of hornless cows. The Inquisition failed, but then the Inquisition had not the resources of the modern state. The radio, press- censorship, standardized education, and the secret police have altered everything. Mass-suggestion is a science of the last twenty years, and we do not know how successful it will be.” George Orwell
2. PORTRAIT OF GEORGE ORWELL
The man the world knows today as George Orwell was born as Eric Arthur Blair on 25 June 1903 in Motihari, India. His father, Richard, was a British colonial official there and his mother, Ida, a teacher. She decided to move to the UK in the autumn of 1903, where Eric grew up in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire. Here he also began attending a Catholic convent school, but two years later transferred to St. Cyprian’s boarding school in Eastbourne, where, among other things, he experienced bullying from his classmates. He was rescued from this environment by winning a scholarship to the prestigious Eton College, which he entered in May 1917. Eric has been profoundly shaped by studying at this school, which has produced twenty British Prime Ministers. Inter alia he was taught here by the novelist Aldous Huxley. However, as his parents were unable to support him in his further studies at university, Eric Blair went to Burma as a colonial official in the autumn of 1922. During his five-year stay there, he parted not only with colonialism but also with civil service.
Thus, in the summer of 1927, he decided to return to Europe and earn a living as a freelance journalist and writer. The beginnings of this phase of his life were not easy – for some time he lived as a vagrant and homeless. He then described the world of the people at the margins of society in his reports published under the alias George Orwell (the name of a river in Oxfordshire). As the author of several novels and already a relatively well-known journalist espousing left-wing ideas, he went to Barcelona in December 1936 to support the Republicans in the Spanish Civil War. Initial fascination with the collectivist administration of the city was soon replaced by dismay at Soviet totalitarian methods, seeking enemies within their own ranks, due of which Orwell eventually had to flee from Spain. The enthusiastic socialist
thus became a critic not only of the Soviet system but of totalitarian regimes in general. During the Second World War, he began working as a journalist for the BBC, while also publishing in British newspapers.
fter the defeat of Nazi Germany, he published his famous novel Animal Farm and, fearing another war, he went to the Isle of Jura in Scotland, where, away from the public eye, without electricity or telephone, he completed his most famous work, the dystopian novel 1984. Shortly after its publication, on 21 January 1950, George Orwell died of tuberculosis in a London hospital at the age of 46.
3. THE THOUGHT-WORLD OF GEORGE ORWELL
Eric Blair decided to become a writer at the age of five, and amazed his childhood peers with his ability to invent and tell captivating stories. It is rather telling that the first word he learned to pronounce was not his mother’s name, but “atrocity”. Although this is probably a coincidence, caused by Eric’s mother’s frequent use of the word, this detail does not lack a certain symbolic level. Eric’s first published work was a poem urging British youths to take part in the Great War, printed in a local newspaper in 1914. By contrast, already as George Orwell, he warned in his novels, essays and newspaper articles against the enslavement of man, whether by British colonialism, German Nazism or Soviet Communism.
But George Orwell’s thought-world was multi-faceted and seemed to embrace all the contradictions and paradoxes of modern times. He was an atheist, but at the same time he saw the salvation of European civilisation in the Christian moral code and ultimately wished to be buried in the Anglican rite. He loved nature and animals, but was also an avid angler and hunter. Referred to as a pacifist, he made no small effort to fight the enemy with a gun in his hand. He was enthusiastic about the community created by the Spanish anarchists in Barcelona, but he was also a zealous British patriot. He considered himself a socialist, but his two most important novels, 1984 and Animal Farm, were used in the political struggle against the Labour Party, which Orwell supported. He despised the general decline of morals, but at the same time, he was not always able to act in accordance with moral principles in his personal life. He denounced advertising and the business associated with it, but worked for several years on
the BBC propaganda service. He hated fascism and Nazism, yet he supported British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain when he signed the Munich Agreement to seal the break-up of Czechoslovakia, thus delivering not only Czechoslovakia but also the German anti-fascists in Sudetenland to Hitler without firing a shot. Orwell was more worried about Soviet Communism at the time and believed the Nazi propaganda at the time claiming that the Munich Agreement opposed the Bolsheviks’ expansion into Central Europe.
George Orwell is undoubtedly one of the most influential writers of the twentieth century. Terms from his novel 1984, such as “newspeak”, “doublethink”, “memory hole” and “Big Brother” have become part of not only general education but also pop culture. And he seems to remain an inspirational figure for the twenty-first century, too. As he wrote to a friend in the autumn of 1938, “it gives one the feeling that our civilisation is sinking into a kind of fog of lies where it will be impossible to find any truth at all.”
4. GEORGE ORWELL AND CZECHOSLOVAKIA
Although George Orwell never visited Czechoslovakia, several connections can be found between this writer and the Central European country. First of all, it should be mentioned that Orwell read Karel
Čapek’s works and held him in high esteem. He was intrigued by Čapek’s drama R.U.R., as it dealt with similar themes as Orwell, i.e. the influence of modern civilisation on man and his enslavement. Orwell then mentioned Čapek directly in his 1937 account of the appalling living conditions of British miners in The Road to Wigan Pier. Five years later, Orwell even included Čapek in the BBC’s Great Dramatists radio series, and also mentioned him in an essay on the British writer and poet Rudyard Kipling, noting that the Nazis used Čapek’s word “robot” in their propaganda. Orwell also personally met Czech and Slovak interbrigadistas during his stay in Spain.
Orwell saw Czech refugees in London during the Second World War and probably felt a little guilty towards them. At the time of the September Crisis in 1938 leading to the Munich Agreement, Orwell, then living in Morocco, supported the British Prime Minister Chamberlain, believing that his policy of appeasement had saved Europe from another war. Less than two years later, however, he had sobered up from the peace illusion and wrote of the country for which the British refused to take the risk of war in the autumn of 1938: For just twenty years the Czechoslovak Republic was one of the best-governed as well as one of the most democratic states in Europe. Nevertheless, the very moment the Germans again felt strong enough to fight, it went down into a worse bondage than that of the Habsburgs.
5. LITERARY WORKS OF GEORGE ORWELL
Until the appearance of the novels Animal Farm (1946) and 1984 (1949), Orwell’s work can be characterized as gathering of experience and gradual maturation. He was, first and foremost, an essayist, a thinker with an interest in political and social issues. His novels are far removed from the aesthetics of modernism. They are unpretentious realist novels emphasising resistance to imperialism, the search for truth, as well as a belief in simple human reason and decency. In the early stages of
his work, he elaborated on his experiences from colonial administration and life among the poor. Also very important for understanding George Orwell’s thought-world are his diaries, which he wrote with the expectation that they would be published. A notable work is the lesser-known novel Coming Up for Air, published in 1939. Set in the Midlands, its protagonist is a small-time shopkeeper named George Bowling. In the novel, the author explored the theme of confronting memories with harsh realities.
6. THE NOVELLA ANIMAL FARM
Like the novel 1984, the fable Animal Farm was inspired by the terror in the Soviet Union. In this work, Orwell capitalised on everything he had learned during the Spanish Civil War. He presented readers with a ruthless picture of a “stolen revolution”. Although it was the first of Orwell’s books to be a great success, the publication of Animal Farm did not come easy. The author completed the text in 1944, but the manuscript was initially rejected by the English publisher because the Soviet Union was still an ally against Germany at the time. The novel did not achieve huge popularity until the late 1940s, when the type of Soviet totalitarian regime spread to other countries. In Czechoslovakia, the book was published in 1946 as Farma zvířat. Another Czech edition was published in exile in 1981 as Zvířecí statek, under which title it also circulated in some samizdat versions.“Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole.”
George Orwell: Why I Write
7. THE NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
George Orwell’s last book, published in 1949, has become a classic work of dystopian literature. Set in the future in 1984, it tells the story of Winston Smith, an employee of the Ministry of Truth, who joins
a resistance group and gets ready for a mutiny but is arrested and subjected to torturous re-education. The book introduced a number of new terms into the language (“newspeak”, “doublethink”, “evaporation” and “thoughtcrime”) and became a manifesto of resistance against totalitarianism. The most striking metaphor used in the novel is that of Big Brother demanding not only unconditional devotion and trust, but also love. Orwell began working on this book early during the war, apparently inspired by Yevgeny Zamyatin’s novel We (1920) and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World (1932). The translation of 1984 into Czech was produced in samizdat; until the fall of the Communist regime, it could be published in book form only in exile.
“Totalitarianism has abolished freedom of thought to an extent unheard of in any previous age. And it is important to realize that its control of thought is not only negative, but positive.”
George Orwell: Literature and Totalitarianism.
8. FILM ADAPTATIONS OF THE NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
To date, there have been not only many film, television, radio and theatre adaptations, but even opera and ballet adaptations of Orwell’s novel 1984. The first radio version was made in 1949 by the American NBC network. The first television production was made by CBS in 1953, where Winston Smith was played by American actor Eddie Albert. A year later, a television adaptation was made by the BBC, whose good ratings contributed to the first film version. The director of this British black-and-white film was Michael Anderson with Edmond O’Brien as Winston. The next film adaptation Nineteen Eighty-Four was, with few exceptions, faithful to the source material. This British film was directed by Michael Radford in the spring and summer of 1984, when the novel’s plot takes place, starring John Hurt. The film had excellent reviews and also made its way to Czechoslovakia on videocassettes. In 2023, the Finnish- Russian film 1984 was made by director Diana Ringo. She combined Orwell’s novel with Zamyatin’s dystopian novel We. The film was shot as independent and without the support of the Russian state.
9. REFLECTIONS OF THE NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR IN VISUAL ART
Orwell’s most famous work has inspired many artists, graphic designers and painters around the world. The iconic description of Big Brother in the novel 1984 has contributed to this, as it has been rendered in many different variations (not only on book covers) around the world. Although Orwell criticized not only totalitarian regimes but also the commercialism of Western society, he eventually became part of mass pop culture himself. However, many original art projects were also created under his influence.
In Czechoslovakia, one of them is the work of Jiří Sozanský, who, in the Orwellian year 1984, organised art installations and performances in the spirit of the novel 1984 in the burnt-out Prague Trade Fair Palace. Sozanský revisited the Orwellian theme at the same place in a major exhibition in 2014, on which occasion he also published an extensive publication with the participation of a number of other artists.
10. CZECH SAMIZDAT EDITIONS OF THE NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
The novel 1984 was first published in London on 8 June 1949. Unlike Animal Farm, which was published in Czech before February 1948, this famous work by Orwell could only be published in samizdat
in Communist Czechoslovakia. In 1976, the poet and translator Miroslav Drozd published the two aforementioned Orwell’s novels in the samizdat edition Auroboros, with Josef Kreuter collaborating on the 1984 translation. The consequence was the dismissal of Miroslav Drozd and his friends Ludvík Fojtík, Jan Misiarz and Michal Novotný from the Institute of Technical and Economic Information. In the mid- 1970s, the novel was also published in volume 13 of the Edice Expedice samizdat edition, which was run by Václav Havel and Daňa Horáková. The attractiveness of 1984 for the dissent milieu is also seen in its numerous other samizdat editions in various Czech translations, for example, in Edice Klenotnice, Edice Popelnice, Hřbet, Krtek a Datel, Krameriova Expedice 78, and in the series Proti všem. In addition, other works by Orwell, notably Animal Farm (Farma zvířat; in some versions Zvířecí statek), have also been published in samizdat. A number of Orwell’s other texts were published in samizdat magazines (Obsah, Prostor, Revolver Revue, etc.).
“It would certainly be commendable to publish this Orwell’s book in Czech and to spread it as widely as possible in our country of ‘socialist realism’. But also to read a selection of it on the relevant radio stations (it can easily be recorded on tape!).”
From a letter of I. S. (magazine Svědectví, 1984)
11. CZECH EXILE EDITIONS OF THE NOVEL NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR
The Czech translation of an excerpt from 1984 was published in exile a year after its English publication. It was printed in the pages of the magazine Skutečnost, which was run by an editorial board based in Paris and Geneva. An obituary of George Orwell, written by Peter Demetz, was also published in the same magazine in 1953. In the Czechoslovak exile, Orwell and his work continued to receive attention in the following years, but the novel 1984 was not published in Czech in book form until 1984 by the exile publishing house Index based in Cologne, Germany. Orwell’s best-known work was translated
with a spirit by Eva Šimečková and an engaging afterword was written by her husband, the writer Milan Šimečka. This afterword was also published in volume 274 of the samizdat Petlice edition, edited by Ludvík Vaculík in Prague.
“When I first read Winston‘s story, I was already in my thirties, just
a little younger than Winston, and everything that had befallen him could still befall me. Like him, I had matured in a totalitarian system, had never been anywhere else, and was uncertain about the past, the present, not to speak about the future.”
From the afterword by Milan Šimečka: Náš soudruh Winston Smith (Our Comrade Winston Smith, 1984)
12. ORWELLIAN YEAR IN CZECHOSLOVAKIA
At the beginning of 1984, few people expected indeed that the Communist regime in Czechoslovakia would dismantle in five years, followed by the collapse of the entire Soviet bloc. After nearly half a century of totalitarian and authoritarian systems, it seemed to many dissidents that the Orwellian vision was materialising in their country. In the autumn of 1983, nuclear weapons and mobile launchers were deployed on Czechoslovak territory. The new stage of the Cold War between the superpowers was accompanied by an ideological mobilisation of society. The dissent movement was in a significant decline during this period, mainly due to the repressive measures of the secret police.
13. JOSEF SKÁLA’S OBSERVATIONS AND FICTIONS
In Communist Czechoslovakia in the mid-1980s, the public could only learn about Orwell’s work from samizdat and exile publications or from broadcasts on foreign television and radio stations. One of the few official exceptions was Josef Skála’s pamphlet Postřehy a fikce George Orwella (George Orwell’s Observations and Fictions), published by Svoboda publishing house. In his text, the author combined
a polemic with Orwell’s 1984 with a critique of the current domestic situation and foreign policy of Western countries, especially the USA. Josef Skála graduated from the Faculty of Journalism at Charles University in Prague. Initially, as an ‘ideo-collaborator’ of Státní bezpečnost (State Security Service) with the codename “Josif”, he was trained for a career as an intelligence officer; later on, he worked in the Communist party
and trade union apparatus and taught Marxist philosophy. In 1980, he defended his dissertation on the topic of “social consciousness and contemporary ideological struggle” at the Political University of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist Party. In 1986, he was elected to the leadership of the
International Union of Students. After 1989, he run a bussiness and was active in the conservative wing of the Communist Party of Bohemia and Moravia in the capacity of its vice-chairman for several years.
“The crooked mirror in which Orwell sees the historical controversy of our epoch is a kind of prototype. It is an example of the blind alley into which one is led by the delusion of ‘supra-partisanship’. It is an extraordinarily graphic demonstration of the false objectivism of an intellectual whose break-up with reaction is but halfway, because he is unable to stand even on the side of social progress; an intellectual who
becomes the more defenceless a plaything of reaction the more he is carried away by the illusion of his ‘independence’.”
Josef Skála: Postřehy a fikce George Orwella (1985)
14. ORWELLIAN YEAR OF JAROSLAV ŠVESTKA
In 1984 Jaroslav Švestka, a forestry worker, undertook an interesting literary experiment titled Orwellův rok (Orwellian Year). In the form of diary entries, he compared the novel 1984 with the reality of that year in Communist Czechoslovakia. He sent the text in chapters to his friend Daniel Havránek by post to West Germany for possible publication. However, one shipment did not arrive to Nuremberg. During its
inspection, members of the State Security secret police, who had violated the privacy of correspondence, discovered the “subversive” work. The author compared the literature with reality only until July 1984, when he was arrested by the State Security. On 28 April 1986, he was sentenced by the Regional Court in České Budějovice to two years’ imprisonment without parole and three years’ probation for the crime of conspiracy against the state. On 28 August 1986, the Supreme Court of the Czechoslovak Socialist Republic mitigated the sentence to one year’s imprisonment, of which Švestka served nine months
in a prison with a strict regime.
Two Slovaks, Stanislav Fila and Milan Jamrich, were prosecuted for distributing the novel 1984 in the mid-1980s. They were sentenced to six months in prison. Another Orwell’s novel, Animal Farm, was mentioned in the 1986 sentence of Eduard Vacko, who was sentenced to eighteen months in prison for distributing samizdat.
“The Truth shall prevail – right after the Lie has died of overwork fatigue.”
Jaroslav Švestka: Orwellův rok (Orwellian Year)
15. POST-VELVET-REVOLUTION REFLECTIONS ON ORWELL’S ŒUVRE
The collapse of Communism in Czechoslovakia paved the way not only for the publication of the novel 1984, but also the publication of George Orwell’s entire multi-layered œuvre, including his essays, feuilletons and diary entries. The first official book edition of 1984 was published in the translation
of Eva Šimečková, ironically by the publishing house Naše vojsko (Our Army), which had previously published numerous propaganda publications. This very successful version was re-published in many further editions. Later translations by Jan Kalandra, Edita Kovalová and Petra Martínková were also published. A great wave of interest from publishers followed the release of the copyright on Orwell’s work in 2021. A year later, the “graphic novel”, as Matyáš Namai called his book based on Orwell’s work, was published. A number of articles and studies came also to life after 1989 comparing Orwell’s dystopian novels with the everyday reality of totalitarian regimes, whose authors have stressed the relevance
of his literary visions in the context of contemporary debates about surveillance, censorship and political correctness. Others, on the other hand, pointed to his left-wing thinking and social and political engagement.
Authors of the texts
Petr Blažek, Petr Koura, Ladislav Nagy, Erika Stařecká, Teresa Urbář, Hana Zdražilová, Kryštof Zeman
Translation Tomáš Hausner
Language editing David Svoboda
Production assistance Erika Stařecká, Kryštof Zeman
Graphic design and typesetting Matěj Bárta
Print Bárta & Bárta