Dialogues, Urban Research, and Times of War

George Orwell wrote two introductions to Animal Farm. One went unpublished, only being discovered in 1971, some 21 years after Orwell’s death. If it had gone unfound, we would be without one of Orwell’s most enduring political statements; something we will return to shortly. The second introduction to Animal Farm was written in March 1947 for a Ukrainian translation. Orwell had been approached to write it by 24-year-old Ihor Ševčenko. Ševčenko was of Ukrainian origin, his parents having fled the Russian Revolution to live in Poland. After the war, Ihor had been recruited by an old school friend to translate British and American news for Ukrainian refugees in British-occupied Germany. There he would find Ukrainians wondering how an English writer who had never visited the Soviet Union could so vividly dramatize their own traumatic experiences. World War Two resulted in two million Ukrainian Displaced People. These were housed in 100 camps scattered across Eastern Europe. Any hopes that the occupying Allied Forces had about their swift repatriation were often dashed. Many Ukrainians resisted being sent “back” to the Soviet Union, nationality having become incongruent with citizenship. The camps therefore became sites of nation-building, with landless Ukrainians bound together by their collective sense of identity and shared experience. The contemporary relevance of these Displaced People cannot escape us. As I write, bombs fall on Mariupol and Kyiv, and over four million Ukrainians (and counting) find themselves in refugee camps. Forced from home, Ukrainians are again forging and reaffirming their national identity in absentia. Ševčenko wanted Orwell’s permission to translate Animal Farm after he had read the farmyard fable to eager audiences within the camps. Orwell had somehow managed to articulate something the Ukrainian refugees knew so well: that a myth was perpetuating an exploitative social system. Orwell gave Ševčenko his consent and wrote an introduction. In it, Orwell writes: “I do not wish to comment on the work; if it does not speak for itself, it is a failure” (2012: np). Saying little about the book, Orwell’s introduction is mainly biographical. However, he did feel the need to provide two clarifications for his Ukrainian readers. The first simply explains that Animal Farm does not exactly follow the chronology of the Russian Revolution. The second corrects what Orwell feared might be a potential misreading: