【Editor's Recommendation】
◎ The book describes a terrible world, a suffocating empire, a group of numb citizens; and in reality, we have an open and peaceful environment, people living in happiness. After reading Nineteen Eighty-Four, you will be suffocated, but you will be relieved to return to reality. Those surveillances, those atrocities, those disgusting foods will not be found in reality, and we are happy to be born in this era.
◎ "1984" is hailed as one of the far-reaching literary classics of the 20th century, and it is also one of the most critically acclaimed novels in the world; in 1984, it was adapted into the film of the same name "1984" and put on the big screen; japanese writer Haruki Murakami's best-selling novel "1Q84" is a tribute to the book. However, 1984 was also considered extremely dangerous and inflammatory for some time, and was therefore banned by many countries (not only those sometimes seen as adopting "totalitarianism").
◎ Orwell's words such as "Big Brother", "double thinking" and "new words" created in the novel have been included in authoritative English dictionaries, and even common words such as "Orwellian" and "Orwellism" derived from his surname have also appeared in the pen of journalists who report on international news.
【Introduction】
In 1984, after a series of wars and mergers, there were only three superpowers in the world — Oceania, East Asia, and Eurasia. Winston lived in Oceania under Big Brother, and here, like the other two, there were electric screens (a kind of monitor) everywhere, everyone under the watchful eye of the thought police, and history was rewritten every day according to the needs of the party.
As a peripheral party member, Winston hated Big Brother in his heart. One day, he secretly bought a red diary from a grocery store —in principle the Party is not allowed to write a diary—and began to write a diary. When he and Julia, who works in the Novel Division, start secretly having an affair against party policy, the thought police quietly keep an eye on him...
"Nineteen Eighty-Four" is George Orwell's masterpiece, which can be called the world's outstanding dystopian, anti-totalitarian political satire novel. It is called the "Dystopian Trilogy" along with the British writer Huxley's Brave New World and the Russian writer Zamyatin's "Us". The novel has been translated into many languages and has had a profound impact on the English language itself.
【About the Author】
George Orwell (1903–1950) was a British writer, journalist and social critic. His masterpieces are 1984 and Animal Farm. Born in India in 1903, he was taught at Eton College in 1917, he joined the British colonial police in Burma in 1921, but later resigned from public office because he was tired of colonial acts and obsessed with writing; returned to Britain in 1927 and began a four-year wandering life; and in 1936 he participated in the Spanish Civil War and was unfortunately injured. His life was short and turbulent, but he always recorded the era in which he lived with deep insight and sharp writing, and made predictions that transcended the times, and was praised as "the cold conscience of a generation". Translator's Profile Fu Xia, graduated from Zhejiang University with a bachelor's degree and a master's degree, is currently an associate professor at the School of Foreign Chinese of Zhejiang Sci-Tech University, and has gone to the University of Cambridge in the United Kingdom for academic visiting studies. He has published translations of "Childhood", "Rachel Carson", "1984", etc., and his translated poems "When You Are Old" and "Sick Rose" have been selected for the "Anglo-American Poetry" course of the national English major, and readers have praised his translations as "warm, clean and smooth" and "have the effect of lingering tones".
【Media Comments】
One more person watching "Nineteen Eighty-Four" will have one more guarantee of freedom.
--Anthony Burgess, a famous British writer and author of Clockwork Orange
On the one hand, there is an absurd plot, on the other hand, it is a reasonable warning; on the other hand, it is an unparalleled stimulation, on the other hand, it is difficult to deny the logic, and there is a lot of room for reflection and aftertaste after reading it.
——Wang Meng, a contemporary Chinese writer and author of "Long Live Youth"
In 1980, I read George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four in college, an experience I will never forget. ...... For me, it is no longer a utopia, but history.
——Wang Xiaobo, a contemporary Chinese writer and author of The Golden Age
【Content Appreciation】
chapter
It was a day in April, clear and cold, and the clock had just struck thirteen times. Winston Smith lowered his head and scurried into the glass door of the Victory Building, trying to escape the nasty cold wind. But he was still not fast enough to stop a whirlwind of grit from following him through the door. The hallway smelled of boiled cabbage and old floor mats. A colored poster was nailed to the wall at the end of the aisle, too large to hang indoors. There is only a huge face painted on it, more than a meter wide.
The owner of the face was about forty-five years old, with a thick black beard and a rough and handsome silhouette.
Winston headed for the stairs, and he hadn't even thought about taking the elevator. Even when conditions are good, it rarely runs, let alone now has power outages during the day, in preparation for the thrifty movement for Hate Week. Winston lived on the seventh floor, and at the age of thirty-nine he suffered from varicose ulcers above his right ankle, so he climbed the stairs slowly and had to rest several times along the way.
Every time he stopped at the landing, he could see the poster facing the elevator wall, with a huge face staring at him. This figure is designed with painstaking care, and when you move, those eyes move with you. "Big Brother is looking at you," the text below illustrates. In the apartment, a rounded voice is broadcasting a series of numbers related to pig iron production. The sound came from the rectangular metal plate embedded in the wall on the right that resembled a frosted glass mirror. Winston turned down the switch, the volume was somewhat lower, but still legible. This instrument (also called the electric screen) can turn down the volume, but it can't turn it off completely. He walked to the window, his thin body wrapped in a blue party uniform, even thinner. His hair was pale and his face was rosy and natural, but his skin was rough from inferior soap, blunt razor blades, and the cold winter that had just passed.
Outside the apartment, even through the closed windows, it still looked cold. Downstairs on the street, a small whirlwind of dust and confetti swirled in the air. Despite the sun and the glare blue sky, everything seems to have lost its color except for the ubiquitous poster. The thick black bearded face is looking at you condescendingly from every corner. There is such a picture in front of the house directly opposite, and the caption is also "Big Brother is looking at you", and those black eyes are staring at Winston.
There was another poster on the street downstairs, a corner broken, crackling in the wind, closing for a moment, and revealing a word "Yingshe" for a while. In the distance, a helicopter skimmed over the roof, hovered in the air like a green-headed fly for a moment, drew an arc and left quickly, it was a police patrol spying on people's windows. However, the patrol is not terrible, the terrible thing is the thought police. Behind Winston, voices from the electric screen were still chattering about pig iron production and the over-completion of the ninth three-year plan.
The electric screen could receive and send messages simultaneously, and any sound winston made could be captured by it as long as it was slightly above the very faint whisper. Not only that, but as long as he is within the visible range of the metal plate, he will be seen. Of course, it's impossible to know if you're being watched at some point. How often the ideological police monitor, or what kind of system to use to monitor whom, these can only be guessed. But what is certain is that they can monitor anyone at any time. Whenever they want, they can connect to your line at any time. You can only live this way—and live like this, from habit to instinct—imagining that every sound you make will be monitored, that every move will be monitored, except in the dark. Winston had his back to the electric screen all the time, which made it safer. Although he knew very well that even a back could reveal information. A kilometer away, the Ministry of Truth, where he worked, a white building stood on a filthy field.
Here—he thought with some disgust—it turned out to be London, the premier city of the Airspace, which itself was the third most densely populated province in Oceania. He racked his brains to retrieve a glimpse of his childhood memories, trying to recall London: nineteenth-century dilapidated houses, walls supported by wooden frames, windows blocked by cardboard, roofs covered with corrugated iron, collapsed courtyard walls crooked from side to side; dusty everywhere bombed, overgrown with broken bricks, and many shacks like chicken coops popped up from the rubble. Has london always been like this? Unfortunately, he couldn't remember anything.
Except for still images with bright colors but blank backgrounds and blurry indistinguishables, childhood memories have vanished. The Ministry of Truth—the shinto "True Ministry"—is very different from the other buildings that come into view. It is a huge pyramid-shaped building, with white concrete shining and layered, three hundred meters high, straight into the sky. From where Winston stood, three slogans of the Party could be seen, engraved in elaborate lettering on the front of the white building of the Ministry of Truth:
