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A few weeks back, I had a posting noting that Christopher Hitchens was not exactly being accurate when he claimed that nobody had previously recognised that there was no Lenin character in George Orwell's Animal Farm. I've done a little research, and I have written up my findings in a short piece which should be going in the next issue of New Interventions. Paul F +++++++++++++++++++++++++ Hitched On His Own Petard Writing about George Orwell's Animal Farm in the Guardian on 17 April 2010, Christopher Hitchens loudly proclaimed: 'There is a Stalin pig and a Trotsky pig, but no Lenin pig. ... Nobody appears to have pointed this out at the time (and if I may so, nobody but myself has done so since; it took years to notice what was staring me in the face).' A little research would not have gone amiss. Nobody noticed at the time? Someone did. Writing in The Nation on 7 September 1946, the US left-winger Isaac Rosenfeld reviewed Orwell's tale, explaining that Snowball was 'Trotsky, with a soupçon of Lenin -- for simplicity's sake, Vladimir Ilyich is left out of the picture, entering it only as a dybbuk who shares with Marx old Major's identity, and with Trotsky, Snowball's'. This review is reproduced in Jeffrey Meyers' collection George Orwell: The Critical Heritage (London, 1975). Twenty or so years later, BT Oxley wrote in his brief George Orwell (London, 1967) that 'there is no figure corresponding to Lenin (Major dies before the rising takes place)'; and another decade down the line Alex Zwerdling, in his major study Orwell and the Left (New Haven, 1978), wrote about the discrepancies between the course of the Russian Revolution and the events in Orwell's fable, and informed us: 'The most striking of these is the omission of Lenin from the drama. Major... is clearly meant to represent Marx, while Napoleon and Snowball act out the conflict in the post-revolutionary state between Stalin and Trotsky.' David Wykes' A Preface to Orwell (Harlow, 1987) also clearly indicated the absence of a Lenin parallel in Animal Farm. A decade ago, this magazine published a pamphlet by the present author, 'I Know How But I Don't Know Why': George Orwell's Conception of Totalitarianism (Coventry, 1999, reprinted 2000); and a revised version of it was published in the collection George Orwell: Enigmatic Socialist (London, 2005). Once again, Lenin's absence was noted: 'Some of the characters are eponymous. The taciturn, devious and ambitious Napoleon is clearly Stalin, and the more inventive and vivacious Snowball is an equally obvious Trotsky... There is, however, no porcine Lenin, as Major (Marx) dies just before the animals take over the farm, although the displaying of Major's skull is reminiscent of the rituals around the embalmed Bolshevik leader.' Many other authorities have attempted to find Lenin somewhere in the piggery. Jenni Calder's 'Animal Farm' and 'Nineteen Eighty-Four' (Milton Keynes, 1987) claimed that 'Major is a composite of Marx and Lenin'; a view that also appeared in Averil Gardner's George Orwell (Boston, 1987), Jeffrey Meyers' A Reader's Guide to George Orwell (London, 1984), Brodies Notes (London, 1976), and York Notes (Harlow, 1980). On the other hand, Robert Lee's Orwell's Fiction (London, 1969) and Ruth Ann Lief's Homage to Oceania (Ohio, 1969) both reckoned that Major was Lenin. Finally, in International Socialism, no 44 (Autumn 1989), John Molyneux took a quite different viewpoint: 'It is clear that Napoleon represents Stalin, just as Old Major is Marx and Snowball is Trotsky. Who then represents Lenin? Since Orwell depicts the Rebellion as led by two pigs, Napoleon and Snowball, one is forced to the conclusion that Napoleon also represents Lenin. Thus in Animal Farm the figures of Lenin and Stalin are merged into one character.' So the absence in Animal Farm of a pig representing Lenin, or of a character that at least partly represented him, has been discussed by a wide variety of writers over no less a time than six decades. Hitchens' unique discovery is thus nothing but a hollow boast, one based equally upon arrogance and ignorance. I will not say that nobody has praised Christopher Hitchens for his modesty. But I doubt if many people have. Paul Flewers ________________________________________________ Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
