A Czech Winston Smith

Abstract

A dissident writer on his country's real-life experience of 1984 George Orwell's famous novel about the horrendous future in store for all of us appeared just too late to achieve publication in Czechoslovakia: that country was being converted to a one-party totalitarian state when 1984 came out in England, and not surprisingly it has remained on ‘the index’ or black list of Prague's rulers ever since. Very appropriately it is to make its belated appearance in Prague this year, in a samizdat typescript translation. This is accompanied by a long introductory essay by one of Czechoslovakia's best-known and most interesting dissident writers, Milan Šimečka, who explains how he discovered staggering similarities between George Orwell's fiction and his own life experience. 1984 thus finds quite a different resonance among Czech readers than it could ever hope to do in its author's own country. For in Prague, many of Orwell's fantastic-sounding flights of the imagination have been everyday reality for the past 35 years. Here is a brief extract from the first part of Šimečka's graphic account of ‘Czechoslovakia, 1984’.