Animal Farm (originally Animal Farm: A Fairy Story) is a satirical allegorical dystopian novella, in the form of a beast fable, by George Orwell, first published in England on 17 August 1945. It follows the mistreated anthropomorphic farm animals of Manor Farm as they rebel against their human master, and are hoping to create a society where all animals can be equal, free, and happy away from human vices and interventions. However, the rebellion is hijacked and betrayed, and under the dictatorship of the pigs, the farm ends up in a dystopian state nearly identical to what it was before.
According to Orwell, Animal Farm reflects events leading up to the Russian Revolution of 1917 and then on into the Stalinist era of the Soviet Union, a period when Russia lived under the Marxist–Leninist ideology of Joseph Stalin. Orwell, a democratic socialist, was a critic of Stalin and hostile to Moscow-directed Stalinism, an attitude that was critically shaped by his experiences during the Barcelona May Days conflicts between the POUM and Stalinist forces, during the Spanish Civil War. In a letter to Yvonne Davet (a French writer), Orwell described Animal Farm as a satirical tale against Stalin ("un conte satirique contre Staline"), and in his essay "Why I Write" (1946) wrote: "Animal Farm was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose into one whole."
