SOURCE: Pearce, Robert. “Orwell, Tolstoy, and Animal Farm.” Review of English Studies 49, no. 193 (February 1998): 64-9.

In the following essay, Pearce determines the influence of Tolstoy's What I Believe on Animal Farm.

Leo Tolstoy and George Orwell are sometimes contrasted as two figures with totally opposite attitudes to life, the one an other-worldly believer and the other a this-worldly humanist. In a celebrated essay, published in 1947,¹ Orwell defended Shakespeare's King Lear against the Russian's intemperate attack and, moreover, also criticized his whole outlook on life. Tolstoy, he wrote, was an imperious and egotistical bully, and he quoted his biographer Derrick Leon that he would frequently ‘slap the faces of those with whom he disagreed’.² Orwell wrote that Tolstoy was incapable of either tolerance or humility; and he considered that his attack on the artistic integrity of Lear arose partly because it was too near the knuckle. Lear's ‘huge and...