The Internationalist

This doesn't exhaust the uses of paradox in his work. Often regarded as essentially and incurably "English," he could and did write in French and learned several Asian languages. His interest in the outside world was that of a convinced internationalist, and he wrote one of his most "English" novels -- Coming Up for Air -- while living in Morocco. He said that he set 1984 in England in order to show that the English were no better than anyone else. He never had any use at all for religion but showed a deep appreciation for the prose of the Cranmer prayer book and the King James Bible. He was an egalitarian and a socialist but thought of Stalin's great "experiment" (what a revealing word) as the negation of socialism and not as a Russian version of it. In The Captive Mind, written in the early 1950s, Czeslaw Miloscz wrote that Eastern European intellectuals, reading 1984 in clandestine editions, were amazed to find that its author had never visited the Soviet Union. How then had he captured its mental and moral atmosphere? By reading its propaganda, and by paying attention, and by noticing the tactics of Stalin's agents in the Spanish Republic. Anybody could have done this, but few had the courage to risk the accusation of "giving ammunition to the enemy."

Orwell wrote easily and well about small humane pursuits, such as bird watching or gardening or cooking, and did not despise popular pleasures like pubs and vulgar seaside resorts. In many ways, his investigations into ordinary life and activity prefigure what we now call "cultural studies." His style as a writer places him in the category of the immortals, and his courage as a critic outlives the bitter battles in which he engaged. As a result, we use the word "Orwellian" in two senses. The first describes a nightmare state, a dystopia of untrammeled power. The second describes the human qualities that are always ranged in resistance to such regimes, and which may be more potent and durable than we sometimes dare to think.

Christopher Hitchens is a columnist forVanity Fair andThe Nation. His bookOrwell's Victory will be published by Perseus in the fall.