РEЦЕПЦИЈА РОМАНЕСКНОГ СТВАРАЛАШТВА ЏОРЏА ОРВЕЛА КОД НАС

Abstract

This paper deals with the reception of George Orwell’s opus in the former Yugoslavia – first the translations of his works and their excerpts into our language, and then the critical commentaries to his novels, published in Serbo-Croat literary journals and periodicals. The research has shown that, although due to socio-political reasons his two main novels were translated with an unjustifiable delay of several decades, the reception of Orwell can be assessed as satisfactory both in terms of translations and the critical responses. It is very interesting that all of the relevant articles and reviews published in our literary magazines until the end of the analyzed period in 1992, when the former Yugoslavia fell apart, regard one of these two novels – either Animal Farm or 1984, while the rest of Orwell’s fiction did not receive any attention of our critics. Since both novels were available to the Yugoslav readership through several editions, and the corpus formed in the course of research consists of as many as thirty-three bibliographical units representing the critical responses to the opus of George Orwell, who thus ranks right after Graham Greene and William Golding, we can conclude that he was rightly recognized by Yugoslav reviewers as one of the most important British writers of the period.