Nineteen Eighty-Four, A 2022 Interpretation

One of the beauties of spin - the act of manipulating opinion by consciously misreading it - is that it can take forms that can be wonderfully convoluted, or even the opposite of the original opinion's intent. Take Maria Zakharova, spokesperson for Russia's foreign ministry. On Saturday, she declared with a face straighter than a Gazprom pipeline that Nineteen Eighty-Four, Bihar-born George Orwell's 1949 dystopian classic, is not about totalitarianism but about the 'end of liberalism'. But then, Orwell is no longer here to clarify. In any case, as critic Roland Barthes exposed in his 1967 essay, 'The Death of the Author' - which could well be called 'Anything Goes' - the author does not have the final word on her own text. So, there you go, as Orwell puts it in the book, 'War is peace. Freedom is slavery. Ignorance is strength.'

Decontextualising and appropriating content - whether current affairs news or literary texts - is the latest contact sport across the world. Zakharova may have raised eyebrows when she said, '[Orwell] depicted how liberalism would lead humanity to a dead end... [he] did not write about the USSR.' But hinting that 'untruths' and 'doublespeak' in the novel - alt truths in our real world - are not limited to Stalinist Russia (or Hitlerian Germany) is a fair point coming out of Russia's spin machine.