English — Animal Farm Background (1/3): Orwell's Wound

Animal Farm Background — Part 1 of 3. A short English-language episode for high school students reading Orwell’s Animal Farm in school. No plot spoilers.

Before he wrote Animal Farm, George Orwell lived an extraordinary life — and one event changed him forever: the Spanish Civil War. In this episode we follow Eric Blair (Orwell’s real name) from his colonial childhood and his five years as a police officer in British Burma, through years of voluntary poverty in Paris and London, all the way to the trenches near Huesca in 1937, where a sniper’s bullet passed through his throat. But the deeper wound was political: in May 1937, Orwell watched Stalinist communists turn against their own anti-fascist allies in Barcelona, and the worldwide press repeated lies about events he had seen with his own eyes. That betrayal is the seed from which Animal Farm eventually grew.

You’ll hear about:

• Why Eric Blair became “George Orwell”
• Burma 1922–1927: how empire broke his faith (“Shooting an Elephant”)
• Paris and London 1928–1933: writing from the bottom of society
• Spain 1936–1937: joining the POUM militia
• The throat wound near Huesca, 20 May 1937
• The Barcelona May Days and the NKVD purge
• Why Orwell wrote: “Every line of serious work that I have written since 1936 has been written, directly or indirectly, against totalitarianism.”

Coming next:

• Part 2 — What Was Stalinism? A Crash Course in Totalitarianism
• Part 3 — Reading the Fable: Who’s Hidden Behind Each Animal

Level: B2 English. Length: ~6 minutes.