For citation:
Cherepanov D. D. The concept of human being in George Orwell’s oeuvre. Izvestiya of Saratov University. Philology. Journalism, 2026, vol. 26, iss. 2, pp. 183-192. DOI: 10.18500/1817-7115-2026-26-2-183-192, EDN: RRFRE
The concept of human being in George Orwell’s oeuvre
Concentrating on the problems of the subject and the subjectivity, this article views George Orwell in the literary tradition the turn of the 19–20th centuries. The author of the article argues that Orwell's concern with the idea of human destruction under the influence of hostile forces, which are represented in Nineteen Eighty-Four by the Big Brother, the Inner Party and O'Brien, cannot be confined to the author's reaction to the catastrophic events of the 20th century and to his political views. Instead, the development of this theme is traced as one of the key ideas in Orwell's artistic worldview, whose main characteristics were formed quite early. The author analyzes a complex interrelation between Orwell's programmatic essays and the poetics of his novels, which reveal a persistent set of images that express an acute feeling of the transiency of existence and human mortality, a special experience being absorbed in time, a feeling that one has to assert one's own self against some external forces, irrational elements, as well as the ambition to "capture" in writing, to "save" the material world by the powers of art. Moreover, in Orwell's works the theme of human decay under the influence of evil is persistently recurrent; this evil is not equal to death or non-existence, but is depicted in novels as an independent, active element, that predetermines both the imagery and the composition of the works.
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