Is O'brien Molotov?

On 5 juin, 00:18, Walter Traprock <wetrapr....RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
> I read Molotov Remembers, and Molotov comes across a lot like
> O'brien in 1984. So is the Orwellian character O'brien modeled
> after Molotov?
>
> I see that the author of Molotov Remembers also did a Kaganovich
> book at about the same time in the early 1990s, but, like the full
> original version of Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, has been published
> relatively recently in Russian but never translated. Also, the first
> chapter of Gorky's Belomor has never been translated.
>
> Us armchair sovietologists and Russo-philes have a problem not knowing
> Russian.

Would these details about Molotov's personality be known before 1949?
Orwell does mention him several times, but not in a way to confirm
your idea. Here is one example:

"A Russian friend tells me that the Russian language is richer than
English in terms of abuse, so that Russian invective cannot always be
accurately translated. Thus when Molotov referred to the Germans as
"cannibals", he was perhaps using some word which sounded natural in
Russian, but to which "cannibal" was only a rough approximation. But
our local Communists have taken over, from the defunct Inprecor and
similar sources, a whole series of these crudely translated phrases,
and from force of habit have come to think of them as actual English
expressions."

B.
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"Walter Traprock" <wetraprock DeleteThis @hotmail.com> wrote in message
news:wetraprock-597040.23181004062007@newsgroups.comcast.net...

> I read Molotov Remembers, and Molotov comes across a lot like
> O'brien in 1984. So is the Orwellian character O'brien modeled
> after Molotov?

If there were any specific model, Molotov appears
the likeliest. He was prosecuting attorney in some
of the notorious show trials of the 1930s which were
filmed and shown in cinemas (e.g. Old Bolsheviks
like Bukharin confessing that they had been lifelong
British secret agents etc.) These films also suggested
Arthur Koestler's character Rubashov (accused, not
prosecutor.)

--
Don Phillipson
Carlsbad Springs
(Ottawa, Canada)
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On Jun 5, 5:09 pm, "Don Phillipson" <d.phillipsonSPAMBL....TakeThisOut@ncf.ca>
wrote:
> "Walter Traprock" <wetrapr....TakeThisOut@hotmail.com> wrote in message
>
> news:wetraprock-597040.23181004062007@newsgroups.comcast.net...
>
> > I read Molotov Remembers, and Molotov comes across a lot like
> > O'brien in 1984. So is the Orwellian character O'brien modeled
> > after Molotov?
>
> If there were any specific model, Molotov appears
> the likeliest. He was prosecuting attorney in some
> of the notorious show trials of the 1930s ...

No, he wasn't. From 1930 to 1941 Molotov (Skryabin) was Chairman of
the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR. He made speeches to
the Central Committee in which he denounced Bukharin and others, but
he was not the prosecutor.

Andrei Vyshinsky was Procurator of the USSR from 1935 to 1939 and
acted as prosecutor at the major show trials, including Bukharin's.

See Robert Conquest's --The Great Terror: A Reassessment--.

J. Del Col
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jadel wrote:
> On Jun 5, 2:18 am, Walter Traprock <wetrapr....RemoveThis@hotmail.com> wrote:
>> I read Molotov Remembers, and Molotov comes across a lot like
>> O'brien in 1984.
>
> O'brien was a self-serving whiner and toady?
>
>
> So is the Orwellian character O'brien modeled
>> after Molotov?
>>
>> I see that the author of Molotov Remembers also did a Kaganovich
>> book at about the same time in the early 1990s, but, like the full
>> original version of Solzhenitsyn's First Circle, has been published
>> relatively recently in Russian but never translated. Also, the first
>> chapter of Gorky's Belomor has never been translated.
>>
>> Us armchair sovietologists and Russo-philes have a problem not knowing
>> Russian.
>
> "Us" have a problem? It isn't confined to not knowing Russian,
> either.
>
> Whether Ironass was the model for O'Brien is anybody's guess.
>
>
> J. Del Col
>
>


"Kamenny zad." = "Stone bottom." More descriptive than "ironass" really
-- it implies something cold and immobile, not an implement but a mass.


/M
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