© George Orwell, 1949

© Adaptation. AST Publishers, the Estate of the late Sonia Brownell Orwell, 2019

© Дубиковская И.Г., адаптация, словарь, 2019

© «Издательство АСТ», 2019

Part One

Chapter 1

It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen. Winston Smith, his chin nuzzled into his breast in an effort to escape the vile wind, slipped quickly through the glass doors of Victory Mansions, though not quickly enough to prevent a swirl of dust from entering along with him.

The hallway smelt of boiled cabbage and old rag mats. At one end of it a coloured poster, too large for indoor display, had been tacked to the wall. It depicted simply an enormous face: the face of a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache. Winston made for the stairs. It was no use trying the lift. The electric current was cut off during daylight hours. It was part of the economy drive in preparation for Hate Week. The flat was seven flights up, and Winston, who was thirty-nine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face gazed from the wall. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, ran the caption beneath it.

Inside the flat a voice was reading out a list of figures which had something to do with the production of pig-iron. The voice came from an oblong metal plaque which formed part of the surface of the wall. Winston turned a switch and the voice became quieter, though the words were still distinguishable. The telescreen could be dimmed, but there was no way of shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window. His figure was small, emphasized by the blue overalls which were the uniform of the party. His hair was very fair, his face naturally sanguine, his skin roughened by coarse soap and blunt razor blades and the cold of the winter that had just ended.

Outside, the world looked cold. The sun was shining and the sky was a harsh blue colour, but there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the posters that were plastered everywhere. The face with a moustache gazed down from every corner. Down at street level one of the posters, torn at one corner, flapped in the wind, alternately covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In the far distance a helicopter hovered between the roofs. It was the police patrol, looking into people’s windows. The patrols did not matter, however. Only the Thought Police mattered.

Behind Winston’s back the voice from the telescreen was still talking about pig-iron and the overfulfilment of the Ninth Three-Year Plan. The telescreen received and transmitted simultaneously. Any sound that Winston made, above the level of a very low whisper, would be picked up by it. Moreover, so long as he remained within the field of vision of it, he could be seen as well as heard. There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment. How often the Thought Police plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork. It was even possible that they watched everybody all the time. But at any rate they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live in the assumption that every sound you made was heard, and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.

Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was safer. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his place of work, towered above the grimy landscape. This, he thought with distaste—this was London, chief city of Airstrip One, itself the third most populous of the provinces of Oceania. He tried to squeeze out some childhood memory that should tell him whether London had always been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of rotting nineteenth-century houses? And the bombed sites with heaps of rubble; and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden shelters? But it was no use, he could not remember.

The Ministry of Truth—Minitrue^[1], in Newspeak ^[2](Newspeak was the official language of Oceania)—was startlingly different from any other object in sight. It was an enormous pyramidal structure of glittering white concrete, soaring up, terrace after terrace, 300 metres into the air. From where Winston stood it was just possible to read, picked out on its white face, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE

FREEDOM IS SLAVERY

IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained three thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding ramifications below. Scattered about London there were just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. So completely did they dwarf the surrounding architecture that from the roof of Victory Mansions you could see all four of them simultaneously. They were the homes of the four Ministries between which the entire apparatus of government was divided. The Ministry of Truth, which concerned itself with news, entertainment, education, and the fine arts. The Ministry of Peace, which concerned itself with war. The Ministry of Love, which maintained law and order. And the Ministry of Plenty, which was responsible for economic affairs. Their names, in Newspeak: Minitrue, Minipax^[3], Miniluv^[4], and Miniplenty^[5].

The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never been inside, nor within half a kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except on official business, and then only by getting through a maze of barbed wire, steel doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by guards armed with truncheons.

Winston set his features into the expression of quiet optimism, which was advisable when facing the telescreen, and turned round. He crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. There, he took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave off a sickly, oily smell. Winston poured out nearly a teacupful, prepared himself for a shock, and gulped it down like a dose of medicine.

Instantly his face turned scarlet and the water ran out of his eyes. The stuff was like acid. The next moment, however, the burning in his belly died down and the world began to look more cheerful. He took a cigarette from a crumpled packet marked VICTORY CIGARETTES, went back to the living-room and sat down at a small table to the left of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick blank book.

For some reason the telescreen in the living-room was in an unusual position. Instead of being placed, as was normal, in the end wall, where it could command the whole room, it was in the longer wall, opposite the window. To one side of it there was a shallow alcove in which Winston was now sitting. When the flats were built, it had probably been intended to hold bookshelves. Here he was able to remain outside the range of the telescreen. He could be heard, of course, but he could not be seen.

The book he had just taken out of the drawer was a peculiarly beautiful book. Its smooth creamy paper, a little yellowed by age, was of a kind that had not been manufactured for at least forty years past. He had seen it lying in the window of a junk-shop and had been stricken immediately by an overwhelming desire to possess it. Party members were not supposed to go into ordinary shops (“dealing on the free market”, it was called), but the rule was not strictly kept, because there were various things, such as shoelaces and razor blades, which it was impossible to get hold of in any other way. He bought the book for two dollars fifty. At the time he did not want it for any particular purpose. He had carried it guiltily home in his briefcase. Even with nothing written in it, it was a compromising possession.

The thing that he was about to do was to open a diary. This was not illegal (nothing was illegal, since there were no longer any laws), but if detected it probably would’ve been punished by death, or at least by twenty-five years in a forced-labour camp. Winston took the pen. It was an archaic instrument, seldom used even for signatures, and he had gotten one simply because of a feeling that the beautiful creamy paper deserved to be written on with a pen instead of being scratched with an ink-pencil. He was not used to writing by hand. Apart from very short notes, it was usual to dictate everything into the speak-write. He dipped the pen into the ink and then stopped for just a second. To mark the paper was the decisive act. In small clumsy letters he wrote:

April 4th, 1984.

He sat back. A sense of complete helplessness had descended upon him. To begin with, he did not know with any certainty that this was 1984. He was fairly sure that his age was thirty-nine, and he believed that he had been born in 1944 or 1945; but it was never possible nowadays to pin down any date within a year or two.

For whom was he writing this diary? For the future, for the unborn. His thought about the doubtful date on the page, and then about the Newspeak word DOUBLETHINK^[6]. For the first time the magnitude of what he had undertaken came home to him^[7]. How could you communicate with the future? It seemed impossible. Either the future would resemble the present, in which case it would not listen to him: or it would be different from it, and this would be meaningless.

For some time he sat gazing stupidly at the paper. The telescreen had changed over to military music. He seemed to have forgotten what it was that he had originally intended to say. For weeks he had been preparing for this moment, and it had never crossed his mind that anything would be needed except courage. The actual writing would be easy. All he had to do was to transfer the restless monologue that had been running inside his head for years to paper. At this moment, however, even the monologue had dried up.

Suddenly he began writing in sheer panic, only imperfectly aware of what he was setting down. His small handwriting straggled up and down the page, shedding first its capital letters and finally even its full stops:

April 4th, 1984. Last night to the flicks. All war films. One very good one of a ship full of refugees being bombed somewhere in the Mediterranean. Audience much amused by shots of a great huge fat man trying to swim away with a helicopter after him, first you saw him wallowing along in the water like a porpoise, then you saw him through the helicopters gunsights, then he was full of holes and the sea round him turned pink and he sank as suddenly as though the holes had let in the water, audience shouting with laughter when he sank. then you saw a lifeboat full of children with a helicopter hovering over it. there was a middle-aged woman might have been a jewess sitting up in the bow with a little boy about three years old in her arms. little boy screaming with fright and hiding his head between her breasts as if he was trying to burrow right into her and the woman putting her arms round him and comforting him although she was blue with fright herself, all the time covering him up as much as possible as if she thought her arms could keep the bullets off him. then the helicopter planted a 20 kilo bomb in among them terrific flash and the boat went all to matchwood. then there was a wonderful shot of a child’s arm going up up up right up into the air a helicopter with a camera in its nose must have followed it up and there was a lot of applause from the party seats but a woman down in the prole part of the house suddenly started kicking up a fuss and shouting they didnt oughter of showed it not in front of kids they didnt it aint right not in front of kids it aint until the police turned her turned her out i dont suppose anything happened to her nobody cares what the proles say typical prole reaction they never—