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Orwell's novel is set in an imagined future where totalitarian rulers deprive citizens of all agency to maintain support for senseless wars.
English novelist George Orwell's dystopian novel ''1984''has topped electronic bestsellers in Russia. The novel is set in an imagined future where totalitarian rulers deprive citizens of all agency to maintain support for senseless wars. State news agency Tass reported on Tuesday that ''1984'' is the most popular fiction download of this year on LitRes. a Russian online bookseller.
As the name suggests, the novel is set in the year 1984 in Oceania, which is governed by the all-controlling Party, according to Britannica. The Party has brainwashed the citizens into unthinking obedience to its leader Big Brother. The Party has come up with Newspeak, a propagandistic language that has been designed to limit free thought and promote its doctrines.
Orwell's ''1984'' was published in 1949 as a warning against totalitarianism and it was banned in the Soviet Union until 1988, a report by news agency Reuters said. Orwell said that he used Joseph Stalin's (the former premier of the Soviet Union) dictatorship for the personality cult of Big Brother, whose ''Thought Police''force citizens to engage in doublethink (the acceptance of contrary opinions at the same time) to believe that "War is peace, freedom is slavery."
But some people see contemporary echoes in the rule of Russian President Vladimir Putin, who eradicated political opposition and critical media from the public, the Reuters report said.
Putin's war on Ukraine, which he calls a ''special military operation''will soon enter the eleventh month, prompted new laws that made it a crime to publish any information about the war which was at variants with statements given by the government.
(With inputs from agencies)
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