Territorial borders are not stable, and it happens that they shift according to the balance of power between great powers. But these borders are not the only ones, and there exist many others. Some, visible and decreed or tacit, separate an individual or a group from others, when that individual or group perceives itself, or is perceived — rightly or wrongly — as radically different, foreign, dangerous to the well-being or the sense of shared identity of those who reject it. Other borders separate the periods of a life, whether those of an individual, a family, or a country. They are not necessarily perceived when they fall into place, any more than are their effects. It is nevertheless important, then, to recognize them, in order to act appropriately. It is also important later, in order to put one’s life and the gaze one casts upon it (whether for an individual or a country) into a sufficiently satisfactory order, so as to be able to take it on, to transmit its experience and its reckoning to one’s descendants, to avoid misunderstandings, idealization, the reification of a complex history into legendary narrative, so as not to repeat the same mistakes.
The Russian Revolution of 1917 was a major historical event, whose consequences, in every country in the world, are not yet extinguished. Nevertheless, the revolutionary process came to a halt long ago. At what moment should one situate the border that separates these two periods — that of the revolutionary process opened by the seizure of power in October 1917, and that of the counter-revolutionary process, for there can be no intermediate period? And how, then, to detect its early signs?
Yuri Olesha and George Orwell each wrote a remarkable book on the revolutionary process set in motion by the seizure of power in October 1917. Their two books complement each other. The one, Envy (Zavist’), was written in 1927, ten years after the seizure of power, but which was also the year of the defeat of the Trotskyist current within the Bolshevik party; the other, Animal Farm, in 1945, at the end of the war, when the prestige of the USSR and of Stalin was at its height: they who had made a decisive contribution (in particular through the Battle of Stalingrad) to the victory over Hitler. Both pose, from within the revolution or the hopes it had aroused, the same crucial questions: what signs showed that the revolutionary process had halted and begun to reverse; that the counter-revolution had completed its work of reconstructing a division of classes, between exploiters and exploited; how to detect these signs behind the appearances that mask them; how this process unfolded; where the border runs between these two major periods and those that delimit intermediate stages?
For the stakes of these two books, and particularly of George Orwell’s, are not to recount, in a metaphorical and easily recognizable form, the events and the actors of the Soviet revolution (Stalin, Trotsky, the NEP, etc.), but to make us attentive to the discreet and masked signs that allow us to follow and understand this evolution, to come or completed, in order to avoid, if possible, repeating the same mistakes, should such events occur again.
Yuri Olesha (1899–Moscow 1960). Accused in his time of cowardice and opportunism by the critics, Olesha remains an emblematic figure of one of the cruelest periods in the history of Russian literature. His tormented, painful, chaotic itinerary bears witness to what was the destiny of a large part of the Soviet artists and intellectuals grappling with the terror and the demands of totalitarianism.
George Orwell (1903–London 1950). His work bears the mark of his commitments, which themselves find their source in large part in his personal experience: against British imperialism, for social justice, against the Nazi and Soviet “totalitarianisms,” after his participation in the Spanish Civil War. His two best-known works are Animal Farm and 1984.
Olesha, Envy
p. 25. “Have you noticed that man is surrounded by little inscriptions that swarm around him?… no one notices them. They struggle for the right to life, gradually transform themselves until they become the enormous letters of posters. They revolt: one class rises up against another class.” The nature of a society, its transformations, are read not only (not so much?) in the great declarations of leaders or political parties but in the infinitesimal details of everyday life, provided one is attentive and available to notice them. Certain historians have made these details (what Perec called the infra-ordinary) a privileged element of their research method.
p. 26. “War on the kitchens is declared. Already one may consider that a thousand of them have been vanquished.”
p. 31. “His back had betrayed him. The fat of his body had a tender yellow tint… Babichev’s forebear had cared for his skin with love… The commissar had inherited this fine skin, this noble complexion.” The revolution is made of individuals, of flesh and thoughts, of emotions and desires, with their contradictions, some of which flow from their history, begun long before their birth. And which they have inherited. The gaze cast upon them can be double: to see only their actions and their commitments in revolutionary action, or also to see their origin and to mistrust them (as if they were bearers of a flaw, a defect whose effects will surely reveal themselves one day or another — this was Stalin’s policy, among others). But can one not think that it is important for him to be able to take on this history from which he issues, which is also his own, despite his commitments contrary to the interests of his ancestors, his parents, those of his family or his class? Must the revolution make a clean sweep of the past, that of a country as of that of an individual and of families, and, in order to construct the new man who will build the new society, must this man establish a radical border between his past and his present, amputate himself from his past — or is it not preferable to try to integrate the past as much as possible into this movement toward the future? If his revolutionary commitment issues only, has meaning only as the adolescent revolt against his parents, then it is doubtless fragile and risks not holding once that revolt is over. But can one put him on trial for his intentions and set him aside or eliminate him preventively? Or again trust only those of one’s clan, one’s ethnicity, one’s religion, one’s province? But those who revolt against the new order and those who put it in place are not separated by a hermetic border of ideas. Thus, the parasite, too, seems to think that one must be attentive to the signs, even discreet, even physical (not the ideas), that bear witness to an origin, even distant, genetically inscribed, of noble or rich descent.
p. 39. “It’s Ivan, my brother. A layabout… He ought to be shot.” Decisions, even grave ones, with consequences sometimes dramatic for the course of events or the fate of many individuals, are not always rational but, on the contrary, often infiltrated by emotions, by fraternal rivalries (whether of brothers in reality or of the incarnation, the reactivation of infantile fraternal relations) or by revolt against parents or those who, consciously or not, embody them. The deep motivations are not always noble nor in the sole interest of the revolution. But so many writers (not to mention historians) have evoked or described these human weaknesses (Büchner: Danton’s Death; the Weiner brothers: The Gospel of the Hangman, for example).
Olesha, in the rest of the text, will give us an explanation (doubtless not the only one) of the origin of this rivalry-to-the-death between the two brothers: p. 87, “André was then in emigration and Ivan (Babichev) had written to him: ‘We now have a martyr in the family (the third brother, shot for terrorism). How happy grandmother would have been!’ And André had replied: ‘You are nothing but a scoundrel!’ That is how the discord settled in between the two brothers.” Death is indeed quite present there.
Likewise p. 64. “I should like to express my feelings to you. I feel only one: hatred… You were crushing me, you were perched on my back.” Where to draw the border between noble feelings — those of revolt against injustices, in particular those that others suffer — and the others — such as hatred, in particular for that of which one believes oneself, rightly or wrongly, gravely or trivially, to have been the victim? There is doubtless no “pure” revolutionary commitment (or any other vocation, that of doctor or benefactor) in which the desire to transform society and to abolish the exploitation of man by man does not also contain jealousy, the desire to avenge humiliations received or felt, the will to power, the taste for risk or for the game, etc. It is preferable to know it (the one who commits himself and his comrades), so as to avoid idealism, blindness, the excusing of inexcusable behaviors in the name of the glorious objective.
p. 41. “Whereas among us one speaks only of aim, of usefulness… imagine that someone… kills himself, without the slightest cause, out of mischief.” If he thinks that such a suicide, gratuitous and public, might have such an effect, it is because he thinks that society has become quite serious, pragmatic, and that its objectives are now merely utilitarian: bread (or sausage: p. 54. “Babichev is a man of power, a Communist, he is building a new world. And glory, in this new world, is born of the fact that a new quality of sausage has come from the hands of a pork butcher. It is not of that glory that the famous men, the monuments, history spoke to me.”) but not dream and play, figures and statistics and not the arts; and that all must work: no more dreaming (even of the future society, even in utopia: utopia belongs to the past, it made it possible to reach the seizure of power — would rational reflection alone have made it possible, would it have reached the same result?). He seems to oppose two positions: that which places the preservation of life above all but which can flow from the fear of risking one’s life, whatever the reasons for this risk-taking as much as for the supreme value accorded to it and which makes man “the most precious capital” — (and renders suicide particularly shocking); and that which has only contempt for life and does not hesitate to sacrifice individuals, sometimes en masse, if it sees its interest there, or that of its cause.
p. 68. “You called me a drunkard for the sole reason that I had addressed a young girl in an imaged language that you cannot understand. What one does not understand always seems either ridiculous or frightening.” The borders within society grow radicalized. There has doubtless always been a significant gap between the language of the elites and that of the people, the classical language and the language ceaselessly being made in the present. But, in totalitarian regimes, this difference becomes dangerous, for the uncontrolled language, less comprehensible to the leaders, can become an instrument as much as an element of resistance. The leaders want to impose a single language, a newspeak that limits as much as possible the risk of ambiguity and polysemy, that allows simplistic slogans to be at once heard and registered. At what moment did the USSR tip over from artistic creative ferment, in literature, painting, theater, architecture, cinema, photography, etc., to an official art (those who did not pour themselves into the mold, who did not accept to produce according to the norm, were forbidden expression and work, deported or liquidated)? Olesha, like so many others, paid the price of his incapacity, or his refusal, to pour himself into the official mold.
p. 70. “I am going to wage war (on you) to defend your brother, tenderness, the lyrical, the individual.” Confrontation on the terrain of feelings (of the place of feelings in society), not of class, nor of culture, is part of political confrontations.
p. 103. “The new man grows accustomed to despising the old feelings (pity, tenderness, pride, jealousy, love). So there it is. I should like to organize a last parade of these feelings.”
Olesha presents feelings as criteria for evaluating the state of a society: just as there is realpolitik, he fears the establishment of a cynical society, entirely devoted to productivist efficiency, in which feelings (such as love and the desire for children, for example) would be regimented, limited, directed, controlled, authorized within official channels (military parades, love of the fatherland and of work, etc.): a society of robot-men, such as the “good son” embodies, the one who declares to Babichev: p. 77. “I want to be a machine,… I am jealous of the machine. Am I not worth as much as it?”
p. 124. “It (the machine he built) now sings our mawkish romances of the old century…, it falls in love, it is jealous, it weeps, it dreams.” (cf. the computer of 2001: A Space Odyssey; and contradiction with the robot-woman of Metropolis). But to put the machine in the foreground, to strive to transform man into a machine, so that he be efficient and docile (the model worker, the robot whose danger Chaplin warned us of in Modern Times), the Stakhanovite hero, just like the apparatchik totally devoted (totally submitted) to the police and state machine. At what moment does the golem become dangerous to man, without it even being necessary to attribute revolt to him? Is it solely a question of size, of time (the time needed to make him indispensable, to make him an inevitable, “unavoidable” element of society; or else when the people has grown so accustomed to him that he has become alienated from it and that, as in The Servant by Joseph Losey, it is the valet who has taken, insidiously, subtly, possession of the master, who has set his grip upon him)?
p. 140. “Let us drink to the youth that has passed, to the conspiracy of feelings that has failed, to the machine, which does not exist and which will never exist.” At what moment does lucidity arrive, and the acknowledgment of defeat, the renunciation of the struggle, for an individual as for a party, a class, a society? From when to date the people’s resignation and its acceptance of the power that reigns unshared, in the absence of adversaries and in the indifference of the people? Does this resigned lucidity not mark the end of the revolutionary process, the border that separates it from the counter-revolutionary process? Thus:
p. 157. “He felt that a border had been traced between two existences… One had to be done with all that had been… It was enough to cross the border and this infamous, horrible life, this life that was not his own, would become the past.”; p. 159. “We have forgotten the most important feeling, indifference… Let us be indifferent… I am going to announce good news to you: today, Kavalerov, it is your turn to sleep with Anechka (the old widow, with the big heart). Hurrah!” (1927)
Orwell, Animal Farm
From respect for the characteristics of each, to illusory, artificial, forced equality and unity, or to the recomposition of inequality, of political terror, and of the exploitation of all by a group constituted on racial bases, around the dictator.
At the beginning of their revolt, when they began to express it, before even envisaging the struggle and still less its success, the relations between the animals of the farm are made not so much on an equality whose criteria would remain to be defined as on the respect for the characteristics of each: the exact opposite of uniformization. p. 8. “They made themselves comfortable, each according to the laws of its species.” But this respect for the tastes and small habits of each quickly gives way to a rigid and omnipresent control, as if opposition to power might nest in these details or as if this inevitable heterogeneity might dangerously crack the social and ideological bloc that the leaders had imposed on the others. p. 22. “Will I have permission to wear ribbons in my mane?” asks the coquettish mare.
Individual characteristics, that to which each also holds, are not always “noble,” any more than the feelings whose necessary defense Olesha proclaimed, precisely because they were a priori indefensible. Like Isaac Babel who, in one of the Odessa Tales, had the old prostitute ask the political commissar what he would do with the whores, Orwell refuses to sort through that to which each holds, on condition that it not be hostile or dangerous to the others. For both know that this “moral” and ideological control flows from the refusal of all difference and prepares the bed of the censors, including elements of private life, with their power of denunciation and chastisement.
Unity is more easily made against the one (or the group) who is designated and defined as the common enemy. But this unity is artificial and masks the other divisions or contradictions. p. 15. “Let there prevail, among the animals, in the course of the struggle, perfect unity and flawless camaraderie. All men are enemies. The animals among themselves are all comrades.”, including the rats. The search for equality thus gives way to that for unity in the name of the common cause. This unity is defined not by the tasks to accomplish, nor by ethical and moral landmarks, nor by the same philosophy, the same worldview, but solely by the radical opposition, without compromise or possible intermediary, between all the animals, whoever they may be, effacing, for a time, the old rivalries and divisions.
But does this radical border that effaces all the others not constitute an original weakness of the process? It is not realistic, it creates an artificial unity, which the construction of a permanent enemy against whom unity must be made will help to maintain. As soon as it is no longer necessary, it will reveal its illusory character but will be maintained by force, then by terror, or in order to try to mask the reality of the social divisions, on ethnic and racial bases: p. 123. “It was laid down as a principle that any animal finding a pig in its path should give way to it.”
This process will find its logical culmination shortly afterward: p. 145. “There was now only a single commandment: ‘All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others.’” The revolutionary process will then have accomplished its full turn, and a system of explicit exploitation and oppression will have, from within this very process, reconstituted itself, identical to the one against which the revolt had taken place, the only difference being the identity of its beneficiaries.
Realpolitik against utopia, slogans against dreams
p. 16. “I am going to tell you my dream of last night.” At the origin of the revolt there is, to be sure, the unbearable nature of exploitation, but this alone would doubtless not have sufficed to make it explode: the dream being just as necessary. Afterward, it will be forbidden: one must no longer dream, it is useless because, like the emotions, the dream weakens energy and thus productive work. The dream will end up disappearing: p. 139. “Of all the beautiful things Snowball had made the animals dream of, there was no longer any talk.”
From now on it will be the orders and the slogans, ever more reduced, concentrated, that will guide and advance the process. p. 30. “The Seven Commandments, in large white letters on the tarred wall.”; then: p. 40. “Snowball declared that the Seven Commandments could be reduced to a single maxim: Four legs good, two legs bad!” These simplistic slogans permit neither reflection nor debate, but only the indoctrination of the most malleable mass of society, in order to make of it a docile and efficient instrument of power against all those who might or would contest it.
p. 65. “From that moment, in addition to his own motto: ‘I will work harder,’ he took for a maxim: ‘Napoleon ((the great leader)) is never wrong.’”
Fantasy, play, the free exercise of the imaginary and of thought were replaced by imposed and rigid rituals: p. 65. “After the salute to the flag, the animals were required to file past the skull (of Old Major), as a sign of veneration.” Likewise, artistic creativity, the cultural universe, froze, became instruments of power, with a purely utilitarian function of indoctrination. p. 99. “‘Beasts of England’ (the song of revolt and victory) was no longer heard. In its place, Minimus, the poet, composed new verses.”
Language, too, is transformed: words become coded, so that the untruths and lies pass more easily: p. 120. “It had appeared necessary to proceed with a readjustment of the rations (Squealer always spoke of a readjustment, never of a reduction).”
But the process of reducing political thought and strategic reflection to the most simplistic began early, shortly after the seizure of power: p. 21. “From the teachings of Old Major, the three of them had elaborated a flawless philosophical system.” This simplism was supposed to allow all, even the most stupid and the most politically uncultivated, to understand and appropriate the decisions of the leaders, but it in truth aimed to prevent all reflection and all debate, felt to be dangerous for the power.
The confiscation of debates and decisions by the ruling group. p. 37. “Debates were the affair of Snowball and Napoleon. They never agreed: whatever the opinion of the one, it was known that the other would oppose it.” Double information: the confiscation by a restricted group of the debates preliminary to decisions; but also the deep divisions, due not to divergences of orientation but to rivalries between leaders for exclusive power. Once initiated, this confiscation of the loci of decision, an essential element of power, will keep growing: p. 62. “Napoleon, followed by his mastiffs, announced that there would no longer be any Sunday assembly… Henceforth, all questions… would be settled by a committee of pigs, under his presidency.”
Likewise, the ruling group constitutes a praetorian guard for itself. p. 41. “Napoleon took the puppies from their mothers, saying that he would personally provide for their education.” Another rupture, double here as well: in the parent-child relations, the latter being withdrawn from the former and educated, collectively, apart from all, which permitted all manner of indoctrination and the formatting of brains and of absolute loyalty. The terrain of family relations, of education within the family or outside it, also constitutes stakes, ideological and practical: what type of society, what interpersonal relations, what type of new man and how to fabricate him, etc.?
The unity and equality proclaimed at the outset give way to privileges and to a division of labor between exploited and exploiters. p. 33. “The pigs did not work: they distributed the work and saw to its proper execution.” — a first indication, in the reality of the division of labor, of the difference between the animals, which constitutes a double border. This border on the one hand separates the animals from one another, according to the criteria of breed and, in so doing, marks the end of the egalitarian fiction, in particular with regard to the social divisions and the process of production. The material advantages followed inevitably: p. 43. “So it was admitted that the milk and the apples would be prerogatives of the pigs.”
Logically, what is next effaced is the economic border that had been established at the beginning between the animals of the farm, resolved to live in autarky, and the peasants and merchants: p. 73. “Henceforth, Animal Farm would maintain commercial relations with the neighboring farms.” But at the same time it is a political and ideological border that falls: the decision, taken by the ruling group, without debate, aims only to permit its enrichment. But the fiction of the contribution of all to the construction of the new society, or at least of the defense of the process that leads to it, serves to make the weakest accept the sacrifices that these choices demand.
The rewriting of history. p. 64. “And as for the Battle of the Cowshed, the time will come when it will be realized that Snowball’s role has been greatly exaggerated.” Another rupture, double: between living, transmissible memory and obligatory, untouchable, imposed memory; between the just putting-into-history (and thus evolving, in respect for the work of historians and their permanent reevaluation) and the lie of state, which rewrites history. This official history imposes itself all the more easily as the direct witnesses of the events disappear: p. 136. “The time came when the days before the Uprising no longer meant anything to them.”
The guiding thread of this rewriting of history was the definition of a new global, single enemy, toward whom all dissatisfactions, frustrations, disappointments, angers were incited to direct themselves, following the same logic that had been set up at the origin of the revolt (all the animals, without distinction, against all the humans), with the sole difference that Snowball (one of the principal leaders of the revolt and of the struggle to drive out the farmer) had replaced “the humans.” pp. 78–79. “Comrades, do you know who is the enemy who has overturned our windmill? It is Snowball… They got into the habit of imputing to him every crime, every mishap.”
The establishment of a police dictatorship was the logical consequence of this. p. 79. “Snowball’s activities must be submitted to an implacable investigation, decreed Napoleon.” The logical consequence, once again, was to reinforce the systematic police control over all, since anyone could be an enemy. p. 91. “We have reason to think that certain secret agents of Snowball are hidden among us.” The border between private life and public life leaped away, as did those between legal activity and illegal activity, accomplished act and possibility of illegal act. But thus was reinforced the border that separates the ruling group from all the others. It did not take long for it to separate the supreme leader from all the others: p. 101. Napoleon was no longer ever designated by a single patronymic, but… “Our leader,… terror of Mankind, protector of the Sheepfold, and so forth.”
The logical sequel to this was the disappearance of the border between reality and fiction, another structuring border of the psyche as much as of interpersonal relations. It was fiction, in the sole interest of the leaders, that took on the function of reality, and all had to submit to it, which did not for all that save them from death. p. 93. “Napoleon invited them to confess their crimes… Yes, they had maintained secret relations with Snowball… The dogs slit their throats on the spot.”
Clover, one of the pioneers of the revolt, who was, along with her companion, one of the noblest and most courageous figures of the revolt and of the daily struggle for the establishment of a just society, expresses her distress at the end of the book, p. 97: “She could not have said how it had come about, times have come when… one witnesses executions of comrades torn to pieces with full-bared teeth after confessing dreadful crimes.”
To recognize the premonitory signs of a reversal of the revolutionary or reformist process, and the scansions, the significant stages of this evolution, is important, without waiting for the after-the-fact work of historians. But for the actors of the events, those who seek to provoke them and act upon them and those who suffer their consequences, this necessary recognition is neither spontaneous nor easy.
Olesha relies on the characters of the emblematic figures of this initial period of the revolution. Thus, the entrepreneur, whom nothing distinguishes from his capitalist equivalent. He has faith in the efficiency of rational management as well as in the good functioning of his body and his mind, refuses fantasy, believes in progress. He is sure that his success will bring about the happiness of the masses and the improvement of their living conditions. He does not doubt the legitimacy and the importance of the place he occupies in the current social order. He thinks, consequently, that the obstacles that might be put in his path must be removed by all means, in the interest of all. He poses for himself only realistic, practical problems, and his enjoyment is to solve them. He is at the extreme opposite of the utopians, of whom Marx, like so many other revolutionaries, was one.
Facing him, the parasite, his fool. He too seeks to remain himself, as long as possible, for he can neither will nor act otherwise. He defends the past, with its qualities and its defects, its strengths and its weaknesses, and among them the feelings, without distinction. It is not always easy to see where the border runs between noble and shameful feelings. There is continuity between them all, and much depends on the context, on the gaze cast upon them, and on what is made of them in the reality of actions and human relations. Thus, envy can be a powerful engine of action and of success, just like aggressiveness, paranoid tendencies, shame, guilt, etc., on condition of making a socially accepted use of them. Is it the desire to succeed, to combat one’s feeling of inferiority, to avenge the humiliations suffered in childhood, to exercise one’s power over others, or jealousy, envy, etc., that moves the entrepreneur? Where is the limit of what is acceptable and what is not? What matters is that he be sufficiently conscious of it, that he know how to detect its effects in his acts, even when they appear to him rational, just, necessary. So too, where does the border run between what flows from his will and what flows from a process that, once set in motion, unfolds like an infernal machine to its culmination? And between the will to realize his project, at any price, for himself or for others, and that of freeing himself from the temptation of the ideal and of accepting the inevitable imperfection of human achievements?
Olesha plays with other borders: those that separate appearances and reality. And he warns us of the risk of yielding to the temptation of all-too-satisfying apparent oppositions: the good and the wicked, the victim and his oppressor, for example. He lets us glimpse that the entrepreneur needs the parasite, as a foil that reinforces the esteem he has for himself. And likewise the dreamer needs the entrepreneur for his material needs as much as to give himself a certain consistency by confronting him.
Thus, Olesha, only ten years after the seizure of power, draws the reader’s attention to certain elements of everyday life and of interpersonal relations. These appear, to be sure, quite minor in relation to the great political, economic, and military stakes of the USSR, but they seem to him to be reliable landmarks for judging the advance or the retreat, even to come, of the revolutionary process, and for detecting the passage from one period to another. Thus, has the capitalist model of productivist efficiency contaminated the revolutionary project of abolishing the exploitation of man by man? Has it induced the necessity of a type of man quite different from the one the utopian theorists of the revolution had dreamed of? But Olesha analyzes with the great tolerance of one who mistrusts overly rigid borders. He knows that everyone, whatever his appearances and his acts, can have several belongings, can play in society contradictory roles or be ambivalent in his emotions and his desires. The border can also be a limit, and Olesha wonders how far the behavior of the entrepreneur and that of the parasite can be acceptable or comprehensible, from what moment, from what intensity they change in nature and become madness for the one, contempt of the other and use of force for the other.
But the parasite does not propose another model of development, nor, for that matter, the maintenance of the old society. He asks only to have his place in the new society, as well as the least noble emotions like envy. He knows that an ideal society will never exist, that man will remain imperfect, and he senses that the desire for purification will lead to terror. A society must not trace within itself a rigid border between the beautiful and the dirty, the profitable and the gratuitous, the rational and fantasy, the conscious and the unconscious, the reasonable and utopia, excluding and persecuting some, privileging and valorizing others. And the same goes for the adult and the infantile: it is good that the mature man keep within himself the living traces of childhood and that a society not forget its origins and the dreams that engendered it.
Rigid borders can, to be sure, help each one to locate his place, but also to make himself more easily located and confined than in a society where the heterogeneous, the half-tones, the intermediate, contradictory, hybridized, evolving realities have their accepted place. Olesha likewise wonders, without bringing an answer, whether the economic place that the entrepreneur occupies and the homages rendered to him bear witness to a significant change in the nature of society and accentuate it.
Orwell casts a retrospective gaze on the evolution of the USSR and of the revolution. He traces no border between revolution and counter-revolution, between advance and regression, nor between a conscious plan to halt the revolutionary process from within and an accompaniment of a logic that, by reason of economic and material constraints, leads to the return of the old system. But he shows clearly that all the elements of the counter-revolution were present from the origin and that the process unfolded according to an imperturbable logic from the moment it was set in motion, with the desire for power, for riches, and for enjoyment, the fear of losing what has been conquered, the systematic and extensive, limitless mistrust toward everything and all those who might be an obstacle or a danger.
Olesha and Orwell thus both pose the same question: how to detect the border that separates and differentiates, behind common appearances, a revolutionary process and a counter-revolutionary process, the exploited and the exploiters. The masked borders are obviously the most dangerous (except for those who mask them). They permit demagoguery (“we all have the same interests,” “the revolution continues”), exploitation, alienation, oppression. But it is not easy for those who contributed to the seizure of power, who sincerely believed in its ideal objectives, sacrificed for them their strength and sometimes the lives of their closest companions, to accept to see the reality of the failure of their dreams and their struggles.
Olesha and Orwell, both, in their books and in their lives, struggled against totalitarianism, each in his own way. Animal Farm is a weapon, through its scenario, so easy to make coincide with historical reality. Envy is one just as much, but through its very existence (a book that does not praise a hero but a parasite) and through the gaze, naïve and innocent, on society that shows itself there throughout.
Bibliography
George Orwell. Animal Farm (La Ferme des animaux, Folio 1984); 1984 (Folio 1972); Homage to Catalonia (Hommage à la Catalogne, 10/18 1999); Burmese Days (Une histoire birmane, Ivrea 2004). Yuri Olesha. Envy (L’Envie, Points 1991); The Beggar, or The Death of Zand (Le Mendiant, ou La Mort de Zand, L’Âge d’Homme 1990, out of print); The Three Fat Men (Les Trois Gros, L’Âge d’Homme 2005); The Book of Farewells (Le Livre des Adieux, Éditions du Rocher 2006).