Found in Translation: George Orwell's Animal Farm in Ukrainian

George Orwell’s Animal Farm faced many obstacles in its publication. While Western leftists believed in Stalin’s USSR, Orwell rejected such naïveté and produced one of the most poignant allegories for Stalinism ever written. However, as the West allied with the Soviet Union against Hitler, Orwell’s novel was rejected for almost a year by both conservative and liberal publishers alike for its audacious criticism of England’s Soviet ally. Simultaneously, Ukrainian refugees in the Displaced Persons camps in Germany bordered between two systems: the West, which could forcefully repatriate them to the USSR, and the Soviet Union itself, which would imprison them. By 1946, Animal Farm reached Ihor Ševčenko, a Ukrainian seeking to help his countrymen, whom Orwell permitted to translate the book. The translation, Kolhosp tvaryn [Collective Farm of the Animals] published by Prometei [Prometheus], offered hope to Ukrainian DPs as it acknowledged the truth about Stalinism and, in the publisher’s own words, threw a bridge “between the progressive Ukrainian world and the dynamic contemporary social, political, and cultural Western European processes and phenomena.” This capstone thesis examines the contraband nature of Kolhosp tvaryn and asks why half of the 1947 print run was confiscated, subsequently leading to its destruction by the Soviets. It likewise positions the translation against the novel’s later Cold War appropriation to argue that Orwell's original intentions were preserved through the Ukrainian translation.