1984

English writer, critic, essayist, and journalist George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) went down in literary history primarily thanks to his last novel, "Nineteen Eighty-Four" (1948, published 1949), which, alongside Yevgeny Zamyatin's "We" and Aldous Huxley's "Brave New World," became one of the key dystopian books of the 20th century. The future society depicted by the author is based on the usurpation of power by a single party, a single true ideology, absurd propaganda, total control over public and private life, and the violent suppression of any dissent; the setting of the novel is the fictional country of Oceania in 1984, yet the realities of the Soviet system of the 1930s-1940s and other dictatorial regimes are easily recognizable in the guise of this state—for, in Orwell's view, all dictatorships are equally bad...