President Lukashenko bans circulation of the novel and sends the owner of the publishing house that published the translation to jail.
There are books that never set and whose vitality is directly proportional to their disturbing force. One of these certainly 1984 by George Orwell, masterpiece of dystopiathat is of the inverted utopia, novel political-visionary on totalitarian societies written in 1948 (the title of the book given by the inversion of the last two digits of the year in which Orwell devoted himself to writing the novel).
If on the one hand the Big Brother invented by the genius of Orwell was trivialized until you become a lucky one television brand, on the other hand, in all evidence, it still creates, if not fear, at least some embarrassment. The demonstration of his subversive ability it comes from Lukashenko’s Belarus, which has some circulation prohibitedeven coming to the decision of send Andrei Yanushkevich to jailthe owner of the publishing house who published the translation last year.
It is no wonder that a worldview, such as that prefigured by Orwell, in which it exists a party that controls everything by eliminating all forms of dissidence and creating a homologating newspeakbe warned in the current Belarus Putin as a threat to the system. If anything, it is surprising that a novel retains this potential over seventy years since its first appearance. It simply must be noted as the Orwellian prophecy of a police apparatus capable of imposing total obedience on the people is the exact mirror of what in its time was the Soviet practice and what is there today Putin’s Russia with his followers.
But it should not be forgotten, confirming how little ideological was the position of the writer, who just a few months ago reading the same book, 1984, was discouraged at the University of Northamptonas it would be a novel offensive and disturbing. We are in a very different context from the Belarusian one, but paradoxically the iconoclastic fervor of the cancel culture
it can produce the same censorships, perhaps less violent and prescriptive but more creeping and just as dangerous. After all, Orwell’s novel described a system of power that he annihilated with violence every psychorrhage (i.e. any rebellious thought), but he used occult persuasion to impose a sad and squalid conformism where everything and everyone are alike. If the Soviet Union was a threat to the socialist Orwell, British capitalism was also threatening, especially that strengthened by the American postwar period. Seen from Minsk or Moscow, London or Milan, he was not wrong. Retaliation or punishment? Both things.
May 19, 2022 (change May 19, 2022 | 16:42)
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