Homage to Catalonia
 |
|
| Author | George Orwell |
|---|---|
| Country | United Kingdom |
| Language | English |
| Genre | Non-Fiction, Political |
| Publisher | Secker and Warburg (London) |
|
Publication date
|
25 April 1938 |
| Media type | Print (hardback & paperback) |
| Pages | 368 (Paperback edition) 248 (Hardback edition) |
Homage to Catalonia is George Orwell's personal account of his experiences and observations in the Spanish Civil War. The first edition was published in the United Kingdom in 1938. The book was not published in the United States until February 1952, when it appeared with an influential preface by Lionel Trilling. The only translation published in Orwell's lifetime was into Italian, in December 1948. A French translation by Yvonne Davet—with whom Orwell corresponded, commenting on her translation and providing explanatory notes—in 1938–39, was not published until five years after Orwell's death.
Orwell served as a private, a corporal (cabo) and—when the informal command structure of the militia gave way to a conventional hierarchy in May 1937—as a lieutenant, on a provisional basis, in Catalonia and Aragon from December 1936 until June 1937. In June 1937, the leftist political party with whose militia he served (the POUM, the Workers' Party of Marxist Unification, an anti-Stalinist communist party) was declared an illegal organisation, and Orwell was consequently forced to either flee or face imprisonment.
Having arrived in Barcelona on 26 December 1936, Orwell told John McNair, the Independent Labour Party's (ILP) representative there, that he had "come to Spain to join the militia to fight against Fascism." He also told McNair that "he would like to write about the situation and endeavour to stir working class opinion in Britain and France." McNair took him to the POUM barracks, where Orwell immediately enlisted. "Orwell did not know that two months before he arrived in Spain, the [Soviet law enforcement agency] NKVD's resident in Spain, Aleksandr Orlov, had assured NKVD Headquarters, 'the Trotskyist organisation POUM can easily be liquidated'—by those, the Communists, whom Orwell took to be allies in the fight against Franco."
By his own admission, it was somewhat by chance that Orwell joined the POUM, rather than the far larger Soviet supported Communist-run International Brigades. Orwell had been told that he would not be permitted to enter Spain without some supporting documents from a British left-wing organisation, and he had first sought the assistance of the British Communist Party and put his request directly to its leader, Harry Pollitt. Pollitt "seems to have taken an immediate dislike to him ... and soon concluded that his visitor was 'politically unreliable.'" Orwell then telephoned the headquarters of the ILP, and its officials agreed to help him. The party was willing to accredit him as a correspondent for the New Leader, the ILP's weekly paper with which he was familiar, and thus provided the means for him to go legitimately to Spain. The ILP issued him a letter of introduction to their representative in Barcelona. The party was affiliated with the independent socialist group, the POUM. Orwell's experiences, culminating in his and his wife Eileen O'Shaughnessy's narrow escape from the Communist purges in Barcelona in June 1937, greatly increased his sympathy for the POUM and, while not challenging his moral and political commitment to socialism, made him a lifelong anti-Stalinist.
...
Wikipedia