George Orwell and Poland: Émigré, official and clandestine receptions

Abstract

This thesis offers the first major account of Orwell’s Polish reception and his relationships with the Polish diaspora after the Second World War. Blending personal and political perspectives and drawing on original materials such as Polish censorship files, Orwell’s letters to a Polish translator thought lost or intellectuals’ diaries and correspondence, it brings to the fore Orwell’s oft overlooked Polish social contacts, his interest in and support for Poland much at odds with the pro-Russian sentiment of the latter part of the war and, in particular, the fact of a thriving, complex and emotionally charged reception by peoples of a country under the Soviet regime that held him a quasi-official enemy. The thesis perceives Orwell’s Polish reception as tri-partite: émigré, official and clandestine, separate, yet at times converging and influencing one another. It follows émigré responses and efforts to popularise him in the Polish language, also behind the Iron Curtain, early clandestine responses recorded in diaries and letters as well as later publishing efforts and responses recorded in the clandestine press, among others. It also shows how even an author perceived as the system’s arch-enemy did peer through gaps in its regulatory censorship that widened and contracted according to the changing political climate, and argues that Orwell, though censored, did enjoy a form of ‘official’ reception too, if in diverse facets and ‘disguises’. The pictured commitment of Polish émigré and clandestine activists, and at times actors in the official media too, to promote Orwell and of the communist regime to suppress points to the importance ascribed to this British author’s works and myth in those specific historical circumstances. The work argues thus that that Orwell’s figure, ideas and works had a special place in the Polish culture and were keenly received by Polish anti-communist activists in Poland and abroad as offering values supportive of the greatest Polish struggle of the latter 20th century: regaining independence from the Soviet occupation. The work makes an original contribution to Orwell studies, casting a new light on his life and legacy.

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