Need to determine date of
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Brooklyn - Sean Vincent Biggins (Leo Whitefield)
- "blue ice" falls from an airplane killing a
construction worker in an out house.
10.12.05 DL Howard Dean
The Lord
of the Rings The Return of the King (2003)
IMDb Encino Man
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Mandel (I)
LLS
Sean Astin
04.09.06 Block Of Ice Fell
From The Sky In Oakland's Bushrod Park
Anagram -
Leo M. Mustonen
O no men omen lemon
summon omentum monument monuments emoluments
on mum memo melon Moslem moments mementos emolument
me olm menu lumen lemons meltons unloosen momentous
so emu neum oleum melons loments lonesome somnolent
us one mole meson solemn memento toluenes
to eon mule omens moment unloose
elm moon memos lumens moonset
moo some neums melton someone
sum lone menus molten tonemes
ems leno mouse loment toluene
Leo mums numen ensoul tunnels
son emus mount mounts omelets
tum muse monte moults
leu lune moles motels
met olms mules molest
nus mote moult neumes
sun tome motel nelson
sou slum neume loosen
nun loom moons toneme
ton nous lenos telson
not onus solen stolen
tun elms lunes solute
nut ones moose tousle
sol eons louse tunnel
out sone ousel omelet
sue noes tomes tenson
use nose smote sonnet
ten mute motes tenons
net noun looms unsent
toe none lento emotes
loo neon mutes stolon
nee molt nouns unseen
lot unto smolt tenues
let melt molts nestle
sot note nones elutes
lee tone semen lenten
eel moos mesne sennet
too loon noose
set lens smelt
see soul melts
tee tune snout
sloe notes
lose tones
Leos stone
sole onset
most seton
lues loons
slue tunes
oleo nonet
smut tenon
must emote
stum loose
moot oleos
stem moots
lent lotus
lout tolus
tolu louts
soon stole
nuns ensue
noon lutes
lute noons
tons toons
snot snoot
seem teems
tuns meets
nuts metes
stun elute
toon stool
onto tools
tens loots
sent tense
nest teens
nets tenne
oust steel
toes stele
solo sleet
suet
teem
meet
mete
lots
slot
lost
seen
slut
lust
tool
loot
lest
lets
teen
lees
seel
else
eels
soot
tees
Numbers
1942 - 2005 - 63 years
1942 + 51(cents) = 1993
The Lion
King (1994) IMDb
In 1963 LEO was
taken over by English Electric and this led to the
breaking up of the team that had inspired LEO
computers.
"1984" was published in
June 1949 and Orwell died seven months later on January
21st, 1950, at the age of 46.
Coming up for Air,
published in1939
Netcharles.com
The Chestnut tree cafe
Orwell, Tolstoy, and 'Animal Farm'
by Robert Pearce
The Review of English Studies, Feb 1998
Leo Tolstoy and George Orwell are sometimes contrasted
as two figures with totally opposite attitudes to life,
the one an other-worldly believer and the other a
this-worldly humanist. In a celebrated essay, published
in 1947,(1) Orwell defended Shakespeare's King Lear
against the Russian's intemperate attack and, moreover,
also criticized his whole outlook on life. Tolstoy, he
wrote, was an imperious and egotistical bully, and he
quoted his biographer Derrick Leon that he would
frequently 'slap the faces of those with whom he
disagreed'.(2) Orwell wrote that Tolstoy was incapable
of either tolerance or humility; and he considered that
his attack on the artistic integrity of Lear arose
partly because it was too near the knuckle. Lear's 'huge
and gratuitous act of renunciation' bore an
uncomfortably close resemblance to Tolstoy's similarly
foolish renunciation in old age of worldly wealth,
sexuality, and other ties that bind us to 'the surface
of the earth - including love, in the ordinary sense of
caring more for one human being than another'.(3) But
this, according to Orwell, was what love was all about,
and he characterized Tolstoy - and other would-be saints
like Gandhi - as forbiddingly inhuman in their
attitudes.(4) He himself cared strongly about 'the
surface of the earth' and was with Shakespeare in his
interest in the 'actual process of life'. The main aim
of the puritanical Tolstoy, Orwell believed, was 'to
narrow the range of human consciousness',(5) a process
which he himself, in Nineteen Eighty-Four and other
later writings, was struggling valiantly to counteract.
It is very easy therefore to see the two men as polar
opposites, in both their temperament and their artistic
aims.
Yet this view is quite mistaken. Orwell's criticisms
have sometimes been misunderstood; Orwell and Tolstoy
had far more in common than is generally realized; and
indeed the Russian influenced this peculiarly English
writer in several important ways, not least in that -
almost certainly - he furnished him with material for
one of the most significant episodes in Animal Farm. The
parallels between this book and Russian history are well
known, but the debt owed to Tolstoy's What I Believe has
never been acknowledged.
In his biography of Tolstoy, A. N. Wilson praises
Orwell's image of Tolstoy as Lear but insists that this
unforgettable depiction of 'the reason' for the attack
on Lear is misleading because it distracts our attention
from Tolstoy's more deep-seated motivation, which Wilson
sees as an 'unconscious envy'.(6) But this is a
misreading of Orwell's essay. The likeness between
Tolstoy and Lear was, according to Orwell, only one
reason for the diatribe against Shakespeare; and towards
the end of his essay he pointed to another source of
inspiration, the rivalry which the great Russian
novelist felt towards perhaps his only rival in world
literature.(7) Elsewhere, Orwell referred directly to
Tolstoy's jealousy of Shakespeare.(8) Wilson has
therefore stolen Orwell's clothes. Indeed too often
Orwell's views on Tolstoy have been treated
superficially. In fact he felt tremendous admiration for
Tolstoy, and his 1947 attack was unrestrained only
because he had found an 'opponent' worthy of his mettle.
Hence it was, in many ways, a sign of respect. In a
broadcast in 1941, he insisted that if 'so great a man
as Tolstoy' could not destroy Shakespeare's reputation,
then surely no one else could.(9)
Orwell read War and Peace several times, first when he
was about 20. His sole quarrel with the book, despite
its three stout volumes, was that it did not go on long
enough. Its characters, he later recalled, 'were people
about whom one would gladly go on reading for ever'.(10)
He judged that Tolstoy's creations had international
appeal and that therefore one could hold imaginary
conversations with figures like Pierre Bezukhov. Such
men and women seemed to be engaged in the process of
making their souls, and therefore Tolstoy's grasp was
'so much larger than Dickens's'.(11) This was high
praise indeed, and even when criticizing Tolstoy's
attack on Shakespeare he paid a passing tribute to War
and Peace and Anna Karenina.(12) Nor was Orwell familiar
only with these classics. He also read The Cossacks,
Sebastopol, and other works, including the later short
stories, written with parable-like simplicity. Indeed,
such was his regard for Tolstoy that he went to
considerable trouble to read several of his more obscure
works. He even judged that Tolstoy would still be a
remarkable man if he had written nothing except his
polemical pamphlets, for no one could read him and still
feel quite the same about life.(13)
There is no evidence that Orwell read all of Tolstoy's
translated writings. We do not know, for instance,
whether he read a compendium of Tolstoy's religious
writings translated by Aylmer Maude and published by
Oxford University Press in 1940 as A Confession: The
Gospel in Brief and What I Believe. Certainly there was
no copy among Orwell's books at his death. Yet this is
the book which, I wish to argue, influenced Animal Farm.
It may be that Orwell came to it second-hand, by the
extracts quoted in Derrick Leon's biography of Tolstoy,
which Orwell read on publication early in 1944, referred
to in his 'As I Please' column in Tribune and reviewed
for the Observer, describing it as 'an outstanding
book'.(14) He was reading it just as he was working hard
to complete Animal Farm.
Everyone is familiar with the parallels between Russian
history and the plot of Animal Farm. Perhaps indeed we
are over-familiar with them, for the details of the book
had a wider totalitarian relevance than to any one
country, and Orwell borrowed from Italian history
('Mussolini is always right') and from German, as well
as from Russian. But there is one issue in the book for
which there seems no real-life equivalent: this is the
rewriting of the original revolutionary aims, the
principles of Animalism. Admittedly revolutionary
idealism in Russia and elsewhere was betrayed and
perverted, but there was no outward repudiation of
Marxist rhetoric. Although Stalin ignored such theory in
his actions and imposed his will by force of arms and
propaganda, he never ceased to pay lip-service to the
original ideals. Even when he was arraigning the Old
Bolsheviks in the Show Trials of the 1930s, he was at
pains to assert that it was they - not he - who had
sinned against the holy writ of Marxist-Leninist
ideology. So what inspired Orwell's brilliant and
hard-hitting reformulations?
First, we must look at the precise ways in which the
Commandments of the first chapter of Animal Farm were
perverted in the course of the book. 'No animal shall
sleep in a bed' became 'No animal shall sleep in a bed
with sheets'. 'No animal shall drink alcohol' changed
into 'No animal shall drink alcohol to excess'. 'No
animal shall kill any other animal' became 'No animal
shall kill another animal without cause'. Most famously
of all, 'All animals are equal' became 'All animals are
equal but some animals are more equal than others'. In
short, each commandment received a coda, a reservation
which effectively reversed its meaning.
There is no parallel to this in Russian political
history. But Leo Tolstoy had observed a very similar
perversion, in Russian religious history, as Leon
recounts in his biography. What Tolstoy considered the
essential precepts of the Sermon on the Mount had become
almost their opposites in the mouths of Russian Orthodox
clerics. The original 'Do not be angry' had become 'Do
not be angry without a cause'.(15) The phrase 'without a
cause' was, to Tolstoy, the key to an understanding of
the perversion of scripture. Of course everyone who is
angry justifies himself with a cause, however trivial or
unjust, and therefore he guessed, correctly as he soon
found, that the words were a later interpolation
designed to devalue the original injunction. Similarly
the instructions not to promise anything on oath, not to
resist evil by violence, and not to judge or go to law
had all been overturned, and had become their opposites,
when the church had sought accommodation with the civil
power.
Orwell's reading of the extracts from Tolstoy in Leon's
biography, as detailed above, may well have inspired his
rewriting of the principles of Animalism. This, of
course, is not to denigrate Orwell's achievement. It was
he who had, first, to see the appositeness to his own
work of the banal - but contextually brilliant -
'without a cause' and, then, to invent similar
reservations. But it is to insist that the provenance of
the details of Animal Farm is far wider than the painful
period of history through which Orwell lived. It is also
to contend that Tolstoy was an important influence on
Orwell.
Although this may be considered more speculative, it is
quite possible that Orwell actually read the original
Tolstoy, either before Leon's book was published or as a
result of seeing its brief extracts. We do know that
Orwell was prepared to search 'all over London' to track
down a Tolstoyan quarry;(16) and as a bibliophile he was
always well aware of new material being published, even
in the dark days of 1940. The fact that, for effect,
Orwell italicized his codas as did Tolstoy, though
Leon's quotations were all in roman script,(17) is added
evidence for this. If he did consult the original
translation by Aylmer Maude, Orwell would have found
other neat reformulations by Tolstoy which may well have
influenced his own. To say 'do not be angry without a
cause', Tolstoy decided, was like urging someone to
'Love the neighbour whom thou approvest of'.(18) He also
drew attention to the 1864 edition of the Catechism
which, after quoting each of the Ten Commandments, then
gave 'a reservation which cancelled it'. For instance,
the commandment to honour one God had an addendum to the
effect that we should also honour the angels and saints,
'besides, of course, the Mother of God and the three
persons of the Trinity'. The second commandment, not to
make idols, was perverted into an injunction to make
obeisance before icons; the third, not to take oaths,
became a demand to swear when called upon to do so by
the legal authorities. The command to honour one's
mother and father degenerated into a call to honour also
the Tsar, the ministers of the church, and all those in
authority - specified on three long pages! 'Thou shalt
not kill' was interpreted ingeniously. One should not
kill 'except in the fulfilment of one's duties'.(19)
The similarity between the methods employed in the
relevant passages of Tolstoy and Orwell is astonishing.
The most obvious way of accounting for this is by direct
influence. There are indeed other indications that
Orwell's reading and rereading of Tolstoy left its mark
on his work. May not the character of Boxer in Animal
Farm have been influenced by the long-suffering talking
horse who was carried off to the knacker at the end of
Tolstoy's short story 'Strider: The Story of a Horse'?
Orwell's concept of Doublethink may also have owed
something to a superb example from Vronsky's code of
principles, in Anna Karenina, 'that one must pay a
cardsharper, but need not pay a tailor; that one must
never tell a lie to a man, but one may to a woman; that
one must never cheat anyone, but one may a husband; that
one must never pardon an insult, but may give one, and
so on'. The arresting opening of Homage to Catalonia may
also owe a debt to Tolstoy. Orwell took an 'immediate
liking' to an unnamed, tough-looking Italian, whose face
somehow deeply moved him. This episode, whose
authenticity historians must doubt, bears a close
resemblance to the passage in War and Peace where Pierre
and Davout gaze at each other and, in so doing, see each
other's essential humanity. Similarly the execution, in
the same book, contains details resembling those Orwell
included in 'A Hanging'. Orwell's Burmese prisoner steps
aside to avoid a puddle, despite the fact that he will
soon be dead. In the same way, Tolstoy's Russian
prisoner adjusts the uncomfortable knot of his blindfold
just before the execution squad put an end to his life.
Finally, Tolstoy is undoubtedly relevant to the
nightmare world of Nineteen Eighty-Four. The Russian
wondered when the priests would understand 'that even in
the face of death, two and two still make four';(20)
Orwell knew that some priests would never admit any such
thing and that, after Room 101, even Winston Smith might
accept that '2 + 2 = 5'.(21)
Of course it may be merely a coincidence - or a series
of coincidences - that Orwell's rewriting of the Seven
Commandments bears such a strong resemblance to
Tolstoy's exposure of the perversion of the Ten
Commandments, and that there are, in addition, other
parallels in their writings which seem best explained by
direct, if perhaps unconscious, influence. But if so,
then this is good evidence that the two men had far more
in common than anyone has ever pointed out. Certainly
their self-presentations were similar. Tolstoy once
called himself 'a quite enfeebled, good-for-nothing
parasite, who can only exist under the most exceptional
conditions found only when thousands of people labour to
support a life that is of no value to anyone'.(22)
Orwell did not go quite as far as that; but he was the
British equivalent. 'I am a degenerate modern
semi-intellectual who would die if I did not get my
early morning cup of tea and my New Statesman every
Friday.'(23) On the surface, the two men seem so
different, but the fact is that there were many
similarities between them.(24) (Who realizes, without
looking up the dates, that their deaths were separated
by only forty years?) Orwell may have castigated Tolstoy
as other-worldly, but both men seemed essentially
puritanical to others. Whereas the one insisted on
making his own shoes, the other would try to make his
own furniture, and both went to considerable pains to
grow their own food. Each was an enemy of the machine
age. Both were dedicated writers, both moralists and
humanitarians, and both polemicists. After writing
discursive books early in their careers, each of them
was an 'engaged' writer later in life. They needed a
mission, or purpose, in life and shared the opinion that
man could not live by hedonism alone. In addition, they
berated mere intellectuals. Neither would passively
accept what he was told: each had to work ideas out for
himself, displaying great intellectual self-confidence -
and considerable unorthodoxy - in the process. Should we
compare them as religious thinkers? Certainly there are
religious aspects to Orwell's thought.(25) Should we, as
George Woodcock argues, even compare Orwell's
repudiation of his education and his quitting of his
career in the imperial civil service with Tolstoy's
renunciations,(26) or his migration to Jura with
Tolstoy's flight from Yasnaya Polyana to Astapovo? If
so, then Orwell's criticisms of Tolstoy in 1947 were
similar to Tolstoy's of Shakespeare in 1906, in that
both were motivated by 'a half-recognized
similarity'.(27) Obviously such comparisons may be
pushed too far. What does seem clear, however, is that
the connections between these two figures are worth
recognizing, and also worth further study.
ROBERT PEARCE University College of St Martin, Lancaster
1 The Collected Essays, Journalism and Letters of George
Orwell (hereafter CEJL) (Harmondsworth, 1970), iv.
331-48: 'Lear, Tolstoy and the Fool'.
2 Ibid. 339.
3 Ibid. 339, 344.
4 Ibid. 527.
5 Ibid. 338; ibid. i. 28.
6 A. N. Wilson, Tolstoy (London, 1988), 480.
7 CEJL iv. 347: 'The more pleasure people took in
Shakespeare, the less they would listen to Tolstoy.'
8 Ibid. ii. 154.
9 Ibid. 157.
10 Ibid. iii. 129.
11 Ibid. i. 500.
12 Ibid. iv. 348.
13 CEJL ii. 156, 223; Observer, 26 Mar. 1944.
14 Ibid. iii. 129; Observer, 26 Mar. 1944; I am grateful
to Professor Peter Davison for providing me with a
photocopy of Orwell's review.
15 D. Leon, Tolstoy: His Life and Work (London, 1944),
200.
16 CEJL ii. 156.
17 Leon, Tolstoy, 199-200; Leo Tolstoy, A Confession:
The Gospel in Brief and What I Believe (Oxford, 1940),
372.
18 Tolstoy, Confession, 373.
19 Tolstoy, Confession, 496-7.
20 For these and other parallels, see my editions of The
Sayings of George Orwell (London, 1994) and The Sayings
of Leo Tolstoy (London, 1995).
21 P. Davison, George Orwell, A Literary Life (London,
1996), 134.
22 Leo Tolstoy, What Then Must We Do?, trans. A. Maude
(Oxford, 1935), p. xvi.
23 George Orwell, The Road to Wigan Pier (Harmondsworth,
1962), 184.
24 R. Rees, George Orwell: Fugitive from the Camp of
Victory (London, 1961), 114: 'It seems to me that Orwell
was a good deal nearer to the other-worldly Tolstoy and
Gandhi and a good deal further from the average
humanistic progressive than he himself was prepared to
recognise.'
25 For interesting comments on this issue, see S. Ingle,
George Orwell: A Political Life (Manchester, 1993),
21-35, 108-11.
26 G. Woodcock, The Crystal Spirit (London, 1967), 242.
27 Ibid.
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