1984

УДК 
372.8
ББК 
81.2 Англ-93
 
О63

ISBN 978-5-9925-1234-2

Оруэлл, Джордж.
О63 
1984 : книга для чтения на английском языке. — 
СПб. : КАРО, 2018. — 384 с. — (Modern Prose).

ISBN 978-5-9925-1234-2.

Предлагаем вниманию читателей знаменитый романантиутопию английского писателя Джорджа Оруэлла «1984», 
в котором он изобразил возможное будущее человечества как 
тоталитарный иерархический строй, основанный на изощренном 
физическом и духовном порабощении, пронизанный всеобщим 
страхом и ненавистью.
Полный неадаптированный текст романа снабжен комментариями и словарем. Для студентов языковых вузов и всех 
любителей современной английской литературы.

УДК 372.8 
ББК 81.2 Англ-93

© The Estate of George Orwell 
(first English edition 1949)
© КАРО, 2018
Все права защищены

Об авторе

Эрик Артур Блэр (1903–1950) писал под простоватым 
псевдонимом Джордж Оруэлл. Такое имя подходит, скорее, какому-нибудь английскому рабочему, нежели человеку, занятому литературным трудом.
Он родился на самой периферии Британской империи, 
цивилизации вообще и литературного мира в частности, 
в индийской деревушке Мотихари где-то на границе с 
Непалом. Родители будущего писателя не были богатыми, 
и когда Эрику исполнилось восемь лет, его не без труда 
устроили в частную подготовительную школу в графстве 
Суссекс. Спустя несколько лет, проявив недюжинные 
способности в учебе, мальчик на конкурсной основе получил стипендию для дальнейшего обучения в Итоне, 
самой привилегированной частной школе Великобритании, 
открывавшей путь в Оксфорд или Кембридж. Но позже 
он навсегда покинул это учебное заведение, чтобы работать 
простым полицейским в Индии, а потом в Бирме. Там, пожалуй, и сформировался писатель Джордж Оруэлл.
Дух авантюризма открыл ему низы английского общества. В 1936 году эта же склонность к приключениям привела его в Испанию, где полыхала гражданская война. Будучи 
военным корреспондентом BBC, Джордж Оруэлл вступил 
в революционную борьбу против фашистов, был серьезно 
ранен, вернулся в Англию и начал писать. Появляются его 

Об автОре

лучшие книги, среди которых, конечно же, «Скотный двор» 
и «1984». Помимо них писатель во множестве публикует 
романы, статьи, газетные заметки, рецензии.
Роман «1984», без сомнения, является вершиной творчества писателя. В нем показана жизнь страны, в которой 
люди четко разделены на классы: верхний, привилегированный, партийная верхушка, которая вкусно ест, красиво 
живет, изящно развлекается и прелюбодействует; средний, 
не имеющий права ни на что, круглые сутки находящийся 
под постоянным прицелом телекамер и подслушивающих 
устройств, лишенный общения и эмоций, делающий механическую работу по регулярному переписыванию истории, 
обделенный во всем (даже супружеский секс — и тот на 
благо партии, т. е. для продолжения рода); низший — как 
бы пролетариат.
В этом обществе искореняется любая мысль; человек 
живет в страхе наказания, которое неизбежно последует 
за любую провинность, будь то неравнодушное выражение лица или протест против начальства. Такое общество 
уничтожает в человеке все человеческое. Чтобы человек 
меньше думал, примитивизируется язык, переписываются 
книги и газеты, поощряется доносительство, предательство — даже своих близких. Не остается ничего святого и, 
соответственно, ничего, для чего хотелось бы жить. Этот 
роман — захватывающее, но страшное повествование о 
том, что могло бы произойти и в СССР времен Сталина, 
если бы история повернулась иначе.

Part I

I

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 gritty 
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, more than a metre wide: the face of 
a man of about forty-five, with a heavy black moustache 
and ruggedly handsome features. Winston made for the 
stairs1. It was no use trying the lift. Even at the best of 
times it was seldom working, and at present 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 thirtynine and had a varicose ulcer above his right ankle, went 

1 made for the stairs — (разг.) направился к лестнице

NiNeteeN eighty-four

6

slowly, resting several times on the way. On each landing, 
opposite the lift-shaft, the poster with the enormous face 
gazed from the wall. It was one of those pictures which 
are so contrived that the eyes follow you about when you 
move. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the caption 
beneath it ran.
Inside the flat a fruity 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 
like a dulled mirror which formed part of the surface of 
the right-hand wall. Winston turned a switch and the 
voice sank somewhat, though the words were still 
distinguishable. The instrument (the telescreen, it was 
called) could be dimmed, but there was no way of 
shutting it off completely. He moved over to the window: 
a smallish, frail figure, the meagreness of his body merely 
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, even through the shut window-pane, the 
world looked cold. Down in the street little eddies of 
wind were whirling dust and torn paper into spirals, and 
though the sun was shining and the sky a harsh blue, 
there seemed to be no colour in anything, except the 
posters that were plastered everywhere. The blackmoustachio’d face gazed down from every commanding 
corner. There was one on the house-front immediately 
opposite. BIG BROTHER IS WATCHING YOU, the 
caption said, while the dark eyes looked deep into 
Winston’s own. Down at street level another poster, torn 

Part i

7

at one corner, flapped fitfully in the wind, alternately 
covering and uncovering the single word INGSOC. In 
the far distance a helicopter skimmed down between the 
roofs, hovered for an instant like a bluebottle, and darted 
away again with a curving flight. It was the police patrol, 
snooping 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 babbling away 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 which the metal plaque 
commanded, 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, or on what 
system, the Thought Police plugged in on any individual 
wire was guesswork. It was even conceivable 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 — did live, from habit that became instinct — in the 
assumption that every sound you made was overheard, 
and, except in darkness, every movement scrutinized.
Winston kept his back turned to the telescreen. It was 
safer, though, as he well knew, even a back can be 
revealing. A kilometre away the Ministry of Truth, his 
place of work, towered vast and white above the grimy 
landscape. This, he thought with a sort of vague 
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 

NiNeteeN eighty-four

8

memory that should tell him whether London had always 
been quite like this. Were there always these vistas of 
rotting nineteenth-century houses, their sides shored up 
with baulks of timber, their windows patched with 
cardboard and their roofs with corrugated iron, their 
crazy garden walls sagging in all directions? And the 
bombed sites where the plaster dust swirled in the air 
and the willow-herb straggled over the heaps of rubble; 
and the places where the bombs had cleared a larger 
patch and there had sprung up sordid colonies of wooden 
dwellings like chicken-houses? But it was no use, he 
could not remember: nothing remained of his childhood 
except a series of bright-lit tableaux occurring against 
no background and mostly unintelligible.
The Ministry of Truth — Minitrue, in Newspeak1 — 
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 in elegant 
lettering, the three slogans of the Party:

WAR IS PEACE
FREEDOM IS SLAVERY
IGNORANCE IS STRENGTH

The Ministry of Truth contained, it was said, three 
thousand rooms above ground level, and corresponding 
ramifications below. Scattered about London there were 
just three other buildings of similar appearance and size. 

1 Newspeak was the official language of Oceania. For an 
account of its structure and etymology see Appendix. (прим. 
авт.)

Part i

9

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, Miniluv, and Miniplenty.
The Ministry of Love was the really frightening one. 
There were no windows in it at all. Winston had never 
been inside the Ministry of Love, nor within half a 
kilometre of it. It was a place impossible to enter except 
on official business, and then only by penetrating 
through a maze of barbed-wire entanglements, steel 
doors, and hidden machine-gun nests. Even the streets 
leading up to its outer barriers were roamed by gorillafaced guards in black uniforms, armed with jointed 
truncheons.
Winston turned round abruptly. He had set his 
features into the expression of quiet optimism which it 
was advisable to wear when facing the telescreen. He 
crossed the room into the tiny kitchen. By leaving the 
Ministry at this time of day he had sacrificed his lunch 
in the canteen, and he was aware that there was no food 
in the kitchen except a hunk of dark-coloured bread 
which had got to be saved for tomorrow’s breakfast. He 
took down from the shelf a bottle of colourless liquid 
with a plain white label marked VICTORY GIN. It gave 

NiNeteeN eighty-four

10

off a sickly, oily smell, as of Chinese rice-spirit1. Winston 
poured out nearly a teacupful, nerved 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 nitric acid, and moreover, 
in swallowing it one had the sensation of being hit on 
the back of the head with a rubber club. 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 and incautiously held it upright, 
whereupon the tobacco fell out on to the floor. With the 
next he was more successful. He went back to the livingroom and sat down at a small table that stood to the left 
of the telescreen. From the table drawer he took out a 
penholder, a bottle of ink, and a thick, quarto-sized blank 
book with a red back and a marbled cover.
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, and which, when the 
flats were built, had probably been intended to hold 
bookshelves. By sitting in the alcove, and keeping well 
back, Winston was able to remain outside the range of 
the telescreen, so far as sight went. He could be heard, 
of course, but so long as he stayed in his present position 
he could not be seen. It was partly the unusual geography 

1 Chinese rice-spirit — (разг.) китайская рисовая водка