1st Edition
George Orwell and Communist Poland Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions
Introduction
Chapter 1 Émigré Reception – Orwell a Friend and Political Ally
The Rare British Friend Speaks up for the Polish Cause
Orwell a Friend and Political Ally
Poland in Orwell’s Writing
Censorship Troubles
Orwell’s ‘Omissions’
Polish Friends Reciprocate
Polish Friends Speak up for Orwell
Polish Émigré Media and Orwell Good for All
How Appropriate for Us: Animal Farm in Polish
Animal Farm to Save the World with a Little Help from Polish Friends
Not Only Animal Farm: An Overlooked Would-Be Essay Collection in Polish
The Most Poignant Book of Our Times: Echoes of Nineteen Eighty-Four
Dead but Much Alive: Orwell’s Afterlife among the Polish Diaspora
Polish Exiles Mourn the Author’s Death
Another Paris-London Collaboration: Nineteen Eighty-Four in Polish
A Weapon in Unorthodox Cold War Offensives
Orwell Defies Détente
The Orwell Year 1984 Commemorated
Chapter 2 Official Reception – Orwell an Enemy
Orwell and the Communist Censorship System
Banned Yet Present – Smuggled, Disguised, Misread
Innocent and Anonymous
Socialist Realism Versus a Shadowy Enemy of Humankind
The 1956 Thaw Attempts to Tame the Foe
The Nemesis Frozen for Decades
But Lurking in Libraries
But Evoked in Official Culture
The 1980s and Orwell Back in Sight
Reinscribed Books
Back in the Fourth Estate under Censor’s Keeping
The Orwell Year Relief of Alliance Transmutations
Affable Anonymous Aspidistra for the Relentless Crisis
Aspidistra Is Not the Orwell; or, a Death Foretold
Chapter 3 Clandestine Reception – Orwell a Liberator
Orwell Ammunition
Before the Paper Revolution
Orwell in Diaries, Letters and Other Writing
A Homo Sovieticus Antidote
After the Paper Revolution
Top of the Charts
Orwell Published Underground
The Solidarity Carnival
Big Brother’s Return: Martial Law
The Orwell Year Looming
Life after 1984
4 Orwell Good for All
Appendix A: Orwell’s Response to Wiadomości’s Survey on Joseph Conrad (1949)
Appendix B: List of Orwell’s Polish Clandestine Book Editions (1976–1989)
Appendix C: List of Selected Polish Translations of Orwell’s Essays and Shorter Pieces by the Chronology of Their First Appearance
Selected Thematic Bibliography
Letters, Diaries and Memoirs
Letters: Orwell–Jeleńska; Giedroyc–Mieroszewski; Giedroyc–Świderska; and Giedroyc–Weintraub
Other Letters, Diaries and Memoirs
Polish Communist Records
Unpublished
Published
Polish Émigré and British Records
Interviews
Other Communication
Broadcasts
Artefacts and Transformations
Publications of Orwell’s Works
Émigré
Official
Clandestine
Non-Polish and Polish Post-1989
Polish Publications Concerning Orwell from the Period
Émigré
Official
Clandestine
Secondary Sources
Orwell Criticism and References
Translation and Reception
Censorship
Émigrés and Diaspora
Official Culture in Poland
Clandestine Printing and Second Circulation
Reference Works
Literature
Major Sources Available Online
Archives Consulted
Biography
Krystyna Wieszczek is a Marie Skłodowska-Curie Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Verona, Italy, and Columbia University, New York. She specialises in twentieth-century English literature and literary translation, reception and censorship. Her current project investigates empirical reception and the potential impact of literature on empowerment. Previously, she taught at the University of Bologna and the Ignatianum Academy in Krakow, and was a Visiting Scholar at the University of Milan. She holds a PhD in English from the University of Southampton, UK.
"A fascinating, powerful book: exhaustively researched, timely, important, and surprising at every turn. Opening up the terrain of Orwell’s posthumous reception in Poland and charting how Orwell interacted with Polish writers and activists, Wieszczek constructs a radically new angle on the man and his work."
--Nathan Waddell, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham, UK
"A fascinating and meticulously researched account of Orwell's reception by an audience for whom his two great novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, might have been expressly written."
--D.J. Taylor, author of Orwell: The New Life
"The untold history of George Orwell's reception in Poland is recounted here in fascinating detail. Despite official censorship of this ‘quasi-official enemy’ of the Soviet bloc, his works did circulate in a ‘nuanced presence’ thanks to clandestine publications and the work of Polish émigrés."
--Christopher Rundle, Associate Professor in Translation Studies, University of Bologna, Italy
"Krystyna Wieszczek’s text is a fascinating, highly original and meticulously researched examination of the reception and censorship in Poland of the work of George Orwell. Including a study of Orwell’s ‘lost’ letters to Teresa Jeleńska, the Polish translator of Animal Farm, it amounts to an important addition to the ever-growing field of Orwell Studies."
--Professor Richard Lance Keeble, University of Lincoln, UK
"Krystyna Wieszczek de Oliveira's book is a pioneering attempt to present the Polish post-war reception of George Orwell's works in three complementary approaches: official reception, i.e. subjected to supervision by institutional censorship, emigration reception and illegal reception (samizdat). Both among Polish émigré circles and in communist Poland, Orwell's works were very popular, and the subversive novels: Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four were read strictly according to an anti-communist key.
As a researcher of communist censorship, I would like to emphasize that the work George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions is very good, reliable and revealing. Moreover, it opens a new current of comparative research: on the history of editing, translation and censorship of literature of the most outstanding works of world literature, including English-language literature, in Poland of 1944 -1989."
--Kamila Budrowska, Professor in Literature, University of Bałystok, Poland
