To the Editors:
I trust that I am mistaken in finding something willfully and sometimes almost maliciously “off” about Anthony Daniels’s essay [“Orwell’s ‘Catalonia’ Revisited”] in your edition of February 2007.
I began to feel this way when I read of Mr. Daniels’s encounters with some unspecified Romanian readers of clandestine copies of Nineteen Eighty-four in the waning days of the Ceausescu despotism. According to him, “several Romanians told me that they found it astonishing how an Englishman, who had never so much as set foot in a communist country, seemed to understand their own experience from the inside, as it were, and sometimes better than they understood it themselves. . . . Orwell’s book reassured the Romanians to whom I spoke that, the Iron Curtain notwithstanding, they were not alone.”
It is nice to think that clandestine editions of Czeslaw Milosz’s Captive Mind must also have been circulating in Romania (a country which under Ceausescu—himself knighted by the Queen of England for his lavish purchase of British munitions—was granted “most favored nation” status by Richard Nixon). In 1953 Milosz had written as follows about developments among the Polish intelligentsia:
A few have become acquainted with Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-four; because it is both difficult to obtain and dangerous to possess, it is known only to certain members of the Inner Party. Orwell fascinates them through his insight into details they know well, and through his use of Swiftian satire. Such a form of