Rok 1984 – Nowy wspaniały świat. Pułapki czytelnicze (i nie tylko)

Abstract

The author deals with the phenomenon of Orwell’s novel Nineteen Eighty-Four and its impact on the culture of the Polish People’s Republic. The analysis of the reasons to ban the novel by the censorship is accompanied by an attempt to reconstruct its importance for the understanding of the communist system by the reader and the forming of public spiritedness. The very fact that Nineteen Eighty-Four was the second most frequently published underground novel, following the Animal Farm, by Orwell indicates its potential impact. A cultural historian must bear in mind the fact that Huxley’s Brave New World had a different status. Although it is difficult to predict what effect presumably this novel would have had on what people might have been aware of – owing to its different cultural context, for instance, its narrower readership would not contribute to letting foresee the direction Poland was soon to go in: the change leading to the third, ideology-driven stage of liberalism. Today, the importance of the two novels lies in making us reflect upon the ways ideological systems worked in history. Although Brave New World preceded Nineteen Eighty-Four, it describes the world following the one of Orwell’s novel and made possible by the communist ideology, so convincingly depicted by Orwell.