BIOGRAFIA

	BIOGRAPHY
	Eric Arthur Blair was born in India in 1903 of an Anglo-Indian colonial official, he was sent in England to study at St. Cyprian’s in Eastbourne, and later at Eton. Usually he could be associated to Kipling because of their Indian origins and English education. While he was young and attending the schools he felt not very good because of the physical discomforts, the loneliness, the lack of privacy, the humiliating punishment and the pressure to conform to the values of English public school tradition; so he expressed his discontent in an essay: Such, such were the joys. Later, after graduating, he passed the Indian Office examinations for the Indian Imperial Police, opting to serve in Burma, where he remained from 1922 to 1927. This experience was a bad one so that he came back to England an started having an anti-imperialistic attitude. When he came back to London he decided to explore and understand the conditions of poor people and of the lower class, he went to Paris where he became a dishwasher but his physical illness caused him to return to London again. He adopted the name of George Orwell (George was chosen in order to seem more English and because there had been six kings with that name, Orwell was inspired by the name of a river he liked). He started teaching and then worked in a bookshop while continuing writing his novels. He had been also a reporter, in fact he was commissioned to investigate conditions among the miners; he went to Catalonia to report on the Spanish Civil War. During the period of World War II he worked for the BBC but then became an editor of a socialist weekly. He died in 1950 of tuberculosis. He wrote many works inspired by his experiences: BURMESE DAYS: (NOVEL INSPIRED BY HIS COLONIAL EXPERIENCE) MANY ESSAYS: SUCH, SUCH WERE THE JOYS; SHOOTING AN ELEPHANT; A HANGING; DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON (DESCRIBED HIS EXPERIENCE AS A DISHWASHER); A CLERGYMAN’S DAUGHTER (A NOVEL INSPIRED BY HIS TEACHING IN LONDON) MANY REPORTS: (REPORTAGES): THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER, HOMAGE TO CATALONIA. ANIMAL FARM. NINETEEN EIGHTY-FOUR. (HIS MASTERPIECE)
	ORWELL’S PESSIMISM
	While analysing Orwell as a writer, we can notice the particular aspect of his poetry: the pessimism. The work which best expresses this pessimism is the book "Nineteen eighty-four", his masterpiece. The work is a sort of denounce of men’s behaviour, in fact Orwell’ s aim was to warn about the future by scaring the world with a fantastic-pessimistic vision of an upcoming future in which any human will be deprived of his freedom by a development of a extremely totalitarian government. Orwell's idea was to emphasise the negative prevision he had had by introducing a new kind of novel: the anti-utopian novel. The nightmarish world described in the work is only the development of the actual mind of the governors and this is the pessimism which characterised his way of writing. The strong image given in the book underlines the mind-controlling and the subordination created by the wrong ideologies born in the period when Orwell lived, it seems that he got disillusioned by the administrations of that period and he expressed his disagree with the situation through the use, as a mean, of the protagonist Winston Smith. In fact Winston Smith is the writer’s ego and a sort of superior man because he couldn’t tolerate being brain-washed by the System. Winston is the main example of what could happen even to the stronger men if things would have continued going like that. The Two World Wars deeply impressed the writer (he was only 11 years old when the First World War broke out and 36 at the starting of the Second) who lived those periods and also experienced the Spanish Civil War which turned his mind to the development of a fear and distrust of all totalitarianisms and making him denounce it all in a more and more pessimistic way.
	ORWELL’S PHILOSOPHY
	Much of his works seems to be a reaction against the "imperial" background of his family and the limitations of middle-class mentality as he experienced in the society he lived in. He denounced the hypocrisy of Kipling’s "The White Man’s Burden" in India and showed how it was all a hoax to exploit the colonies. While living as a vagabond and being a dishwasher, he experienced the tragic life of the poors, identifying himself to them rather than to bourgeois people, so that he later denounced the venality , the hypocrisy and the emptiness of that class.
	ORWELL’S POLITICAL IDEAS
	Orwell’s political ideas are strictly linked to his philosophy and his aim so that we can say even they are the same. In all his works he revealed to be a socialist against the totalitarianism and the imperialism. He sustained the lower class, the working one, maybe because he felt a sense of guilt about his background and insisted on tolerance, justice, decency and fraternity, which were originated by the real Socialism he followed, not the one manipulated by the propaganda of the regimes and that fanaticism who led to the World Wars and to the massacres connected to them.
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