Animal Farm - by George Orwell

A true modern classic, conceived by one of the most influential writers of the 20th century, Animal Farm is a fable about power. It narrates the uprising of animals on a farm against their owners. Progressively, however, the revolution degenerates into a tyranny even more oppressive than that of humans.

Written during the Second World War and published in 1945 after being rejected by several publishers, this short narrative caused discomfort by fiercely satirizing the Stalinist dictatorship at a time when the Soviets were still allies of the West in the fight against the Nazi-fascist axis. In fact, the references are clear: the despotic Napoleon would be Stalin, the banished Snowball would be Trotsky, and the political events - purges, institution of a police state, biased distortion of History - mimic those that were taking place in the Union Soviet. With the intensification of the Cold War, the same reasons that caused embarrassment at the time of its publication led Animal Farm to be widely used by the West in the following decades as an ideological weapon against communism. Orwell himself, a supporter of socialism and an enemy of any form of political manipulation, felt uncomfortable with the use of his fable as a pamphlet. After the profound political transformations that have changed the face of the planet in recent decades, Orwell's small masterpiece can be seen without the reductionist ideological bias. More than sixty years after it was written, it maintains the freshness and brilliance of a perennial allegory about the human weaknesses that lead to the corrosion of great projects of political revolution. It is ironic that the writer, to create this cruel portrait of humanity, used animals as characters. In a way, the political intelligence that humanizes its animals is the same that animalizes men. Written with perfect command of the narrative, attention to detail and extraordinary ability to create characters and situations, Animal Farm happily combines two rich literary traditions: that of moral fables, which go back to Aesop, and that of political satire, which Perhaps its greatest representative was Jonathan Swift. "The best satire ever written on the dark face of modern history." Malcolm Bradbury "A book for all types of reader, its brilliance still intact after sixty years." Ruth Rendell