1984

Indeed, the world of Oceania in George Orwell's famous novel is routinely described as oppressive, and hopeless, and variously deemed a horror story, an elegy, a threnody, a shriek of terror, a wail of despair, a death cry. Isaac Deutscher, the biographer of both Leon Trotsky and Joseph Stalin, referred to it in 1955-in the wake of the controversial BBC broadcasts and their "e;fatal"e; consequences-as the "e;Black Millennium,"e; when George Orwell turned a segment of time forever into charcoal dust. Literary and cultural critics have described 1984-or rather Nineteen Eighty-Four, to use the British title that Orwell himself preferred-as the vengeful death wish of a cynic, the tubercular projection of a dying man, the paranoid fantasy of a writer in despair, the Schadenfreude of a neurotic adult schoolboy who sent the entire world to room 101, and a totalitarian tract devised as a desperate invalid's futile protest against the specter of totalitarianism, whether in the form of Hitler's on the right or Stalin's on the left. Nineteen Eighty-Four is none of these. Rather, it is instead an affirming flame, even an optimistic vision of a hope-filled time just over the horizon.