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Soviet readers get '19B4’

NZPA-AFP Moscow

A Soviet monthly magazine has started publishing excerpts from George Orwell’s novel of totalitarian horror, “1984,” which was banned in the Soviet Union for 40 years. The monthly “Novy Mir,” or “New World," which has a circulation of 1.5 million, devoted 40 pages of its latest issue to an excerpt from the British writer’s best-known

work, first published in 1949. It said further excerpts would follow. The Soviet press mentioned the novel for the first time in 1983, claiming that Orwell’s model for the repressive totalitarian State depicted in the book was not the Soviet Union, as many Western readers assumed, but the United States. Two weeks before that report appeared, a nationalist in the Baltic state of

Latvia was jailed for 12 years for possessing “1984” and other banned books. The novel’s hero, Winston Smith, is an employee of the Ministry of Truth, whose mission is to rewrite history to please Big Brother — the allpowerful leader of a nightmare State where even sex is banned and every move the citizens make is watched by television cameras.

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Permanent link to this item

https://paperspast.natlib.govt.nz/newspapers/CHP19890301.2.138

Bibliographic details

Press, 1 March 1989, Page 47

Word Count
183

Soviet readers get '19B4’ Press, 1 March 1989, Page 47

Soviet readers get '19B4’ Press, 1 March 1989, Page 47