SOURCE: Grofman, Bernard. “Pig and Proletariat: Animal Farm as History.” San Jose Studies 16, no. 2 (spring 1990): 5-39.

In the following essay, Grofman examines aspects of Animal Farm, including its literary roots, its place in didactic literature, and its critical reception.

This essay has a very simple aim: to rescue Animal Farm from the often repeated claim that it is merely a children's story and to demonstrate how closely its events are tied to the events of Soviet political history.¹ In the process I hope to demonstrate that Animal Farm works at several levels, as a charming story about “humanized” animals, as an allegory about the human condition, and, most importantly, as a thinly disguised and biting political satire about Soviet totalitarianism. No reader can fully enjoy the book without knowing, for example, that the pig Snowball represents Trotsky and the pig Napoleon represents Stalin.

I. Literary Roots

The work...