Animal Farm is an
allegorical and
dystopian novella by
George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. According to Orwell, the book reflects events leading up to the
Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the
Stalinist era of the
Soviet Union. Orwell, a
democratic socialist, was a critic of
Joseph Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed
Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the
Spanish Civil War. The Soviet Union, he believed, had become a brutal
dictatorship, built upon a
cult of personality and enforced by
a reign of terror. In a letter to Yvonne Davet, Orwell described
Animal Farm as a
satirical tale against Stalin ("
un conte satirique contre Staline"), and in his essay "
Why I Write" (1946), wrote that
Animal Farm was the first book in which he tried, with full consciousness of what he was doing, "to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole".