It’s a little known fact-ual inaccuracy that Josef Stalin once wrote George Orwell a disgruntled letter outlining the notorious dictator’s discontent with the liberties Orwell took in creating Animal Farm. Regular Feathertale contributor Iain E. Marlow has managed to unearth that letter and we’re proud to publish it here for the first-time ever.
Dear Eric (can I call you that?),
You ass! Your new book tears the lid off my whole communism thing. I’ll admit the latest 5-year-plan has been a doozy. But other than that, I would be the first to admit if my bit was veering off the rails. Of course, I would then kill who ever listened. Or censor them and murder someone they love. I would also sleep with their wife like a revolution, but the point remains the same.
And on that note: This whole venture has had the same goals since the beginning. Yes, I may have pushed ol’ Vlad L. out of his wheelchair once or twice “by accident,” but that doesn’t mean I didn’t kill his offspring and sleep with his wife. Wait. Where’s the backspace. Never mind. You get the point. All this rival pig nonsense, with the hounds and things, is out of wack. Unless of course, by hounds you mean the righteous proletariat, which Lenin harnessed, and I inherited. But I doubt that’s what you mean.
You’re too simple. In fact, you’re just simple enough. Your writing was perfect when it didn’t have a point. When you were hanging out with homeless people, and writing for a literary elite which did not care for your politics or your whereabouts, I could actually read you.
But now this whole Animal Farm business is just too much. Who are you to pronounce on anything? Why don’t you just go back to shooting elephants or being shot in the throat? (Would I ever like to thank THAT man, what a revolutionary!) Your old English teacher – Aldous Huxley, you know, the guy who wrote 1984 first – is getting high in California because he knows that novels are for washed up hacks.
The good stuff is in the memoirs! I’m currently using forced labour to write the last 19 volumes of mine. I collectivized the workload (which I think is codename for “kill people with”). ‘Tis an epic work! It spans events that never happened 14 years before my birth to things in the future I want to happen, and assume will.
In time, it will be made into our national history along with my other works: 11 books of literary non-fiction, including Stalin by the Fireside, Joe does Siberia, and my countless ghostwritten novels, such as the Troika Slides For Thou, and Romance on the (Collectivized) Ranch: a Manual: a Novel.
Which brings me to my next point: I am doing my best (through spies) to ensure that Animal Farm never sees the light of day in my country – or yours!
But be warned. If it ever ends up as required childhood reading, like Stalin’s Memoirs Vol.’s 1-19 (although I assume avoiding yours will not be punishable by deportation to the salt mines), be prepared to accept that you have become what you hate – a propagandist for a cause.
Beware, Georgie, the clarion call of democracy. It sounds sweeter than mine, but it’s just as sickly.
Tootles,
Stalz
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