LAVINIA ZAINEA

Fascinated by Dystopias

     Orwell’s 1984 has always fascinated me, and I always found that its strongest asset was its almost uncanny way of using the simplest, most informal tone to draw the reader into an impossibly suffocating world of oppression. The grey, dusty, and hopeless atmosphere the book projects is breathtaking. And yet it is one of the most popular books with young people who are more or less interested in literature. Everybody has heard of it, and everybody is fascinated by it.
     I grew up in the 1990s, so my memories of the Communist regime are limited to vague recollection of Party songs at the radio, mixed with lullabies and bedtime stories and sleeping in my mother’s arms at the revolution, hidden in a closet, because “There are big firecrackers outside, honey”. I heard stories, of course, from my relatives, but they were as unreal and distant to me as Winston Smith’s work at the Ministry of Truth. A friend who went to jail because he wrote on a postcard a joke that happened to be misinterpreted by the Government, another who got caught listening to a forbidden radio station, all of them seemed like heroes out of a novel, removed from my reach by the sheer human instinct that such things could not be real. As I grew older, I realized they had been a reality, one I almost lived in myself, without ever being aware of.
     When people of my age read 1984, we read it for the gripping story, out of fascination for an imagined reality (The book was published in 1949) that for some people turned into truth, but of which we only have the faintest memories.