By the Known Rules of Ancient Liberty: A Review of Masha Karp’s “George Orwell and Russia”

“Lest I should have appeared overly critical, allow me to restate that even in this, her analysis is exceptional and that overall, George Orwell and Russia is a uniquely penetrating study of Eric Blair’s life and legacy.”

In his brilliant anti-Stalinist 1953 book The Captive Mind, Czesław Miłosz, who had recently defected from communist Poland, wrote the following about George Orwell’s most famous novel:

“A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s 1984; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of writing is forbidden by the New Faith because allegory, by nature manifold in meaning, would trespass beyond the prescriptions of socialist realism and the demands of the censor. Even those who know Orwell only by hearsay are amazed that a writer who never lived in Russia should have so keen a perception into its life. The fact that there are writers in the West who understand the functioning of the unusually constructed machine of which they themselves are a part astounds them and argues against the ‘stupidity’ of the West.”

In her recent study George Orwell and Russia, Masha Karp does not cite the above passage, even though it beautifully buttresses one of her main arguments: that Orwell understood more than most the nature and workings of Soviet totalitarianism. In fairness, though Miłosz refers to Russia, he, being a Polish dissident, is perhaps not particularly relevant to Karp, given her focus on the Soviet Union itself (rather than the Warsaw Pact). This is symbolic of both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness of Karp’s book. While its focus means Karp can delve deep into her subject to produce arresting and original insights, it risks degenerating into a distorting narrowness—a trap Karp does not always manage to avoid.