Naughty Mr Orwell

[kev67]

This article (http://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2009/jun/08/george-orwell-1984-zamyatin-we) says that George Orwell pinched the plot, characters and ending of a previous book, We, by Yevgeny Zamyatin for 1984. According to the writer of the article, 1984 is a better book, but still it seems unethical, akin to plagiarism possibly. Should Orwell have credited Zamyatin?

It is not the only time that Orwell seems not to have been entirely straight about the sources of his stories. There is no record of Orwell having shot an elephant in Burma while he was serving in the colonial police there. Possibly it never happened or it happened to someone else, but the story was presented as an essay, not a piece of fiction. Others have questioned whether Orwell could have stayed in the French hospital as long as he implied in his essay, How The Poor Die, or whether the punishments he received at school described in his essay, Such, Such Were the Joys were in fact inflicted on someone else.

[TheFifthElement]

I believe Orwell was relatively transparent about having been inspired by We, which was not generally available to the Western audience in those days. If you read it (We, in my view, is the better book) some of the details are uncannily similar. It does take the gloss off 1984, but then many writers are 'inspired' by other works and arguably any retelling or re-imagining a story could be accused of the same thing.

[kev67]

Cool. I noticed in the newspaper article that Zamyatin's protagonist was worried about the square root of -1, while Orwell's protagonist being worried about 2+2=5. That immediately made me think that 1984 was the smarter book because as every mathematician knows, the square root of -1 is i (or j if you are an electrical or electronics engineer). The telescreen idea seems better than buildings simply made of glass. Still, if you think We is better, I can't argue. It sounds like it was more original.

[The Atheist]

Oh, to have Bazarov here - this is a discussion we had many times.

You could make an argument that they're both derivative of De Republica.

Shakespeare seems to lose no points for plagiarising most of his works, and in the case of Orwell, his novel gave a far wider readership to the concept of totalitarian futures than We ever could have.