George Orwell. The Inaccessible Soul

Saint George, the conscience of a generation, a prophet... George Orwell was a man who would have been burned at the stake in the Middle Ages. But now 20 volumes of his legacy are studied in schools, his books have... been translated into 65 languages, films and plays have been based on them, and the total circulation of his novel 1984 alone in England has exceeded 40 million... Vyacheslav Nedoshipin is a writer, the author of the books Addresses of Love. Homes and Household Members of Russian Literature and Strolls Through the Silver Age. For many years — from a dissertation on dystopias in 1985 to articles in scientific collections and the journal Foreign Literature — he has been engaged in the work of J. Orwell and the translations of his works. The result of this work is the most detailed biography of the English classic, awarded the SP Moscow prize Venets 2020 and the Alexander Belyaev prize 2022. George Orwell. The Inaccessible Soul is not just an engaging story about the life of the writer and his books, his views and his era, but also the first Russian portrait of him. About the Russian woman he was in love with, about an officer-emigrant from Russia who saved him in Paris, and about a front-line friend from St. Petersburg whom, on the contrary, Orwell himself saved in Spain, about the writer's diaries that disappeared in the basements of Lubyanka, and about the correspondence with the USSR that was disclosed to us only in the 1990s... The book is illustrated with unique photographs from the writer's London archive, many of which are published in Russia for the first time. An ascetic, an outcast, a "white crow" — he, a fugitive from the camps of any "winners," chose the side of the humiliated and insulted all his life, chose not paradise for himself, but hell. He went "under the bridges" and into shelters with vagrants and beggars in England, worked as a dishwasher in Paris, was the first to rush into reconnaissance in Spain, and returned to London under fascist bombs when everyone else was evacuating. "The worse, the better" — this is Orwell's motto when life was at stake.