The animals of Manor Farm rise up against their drunken master one midsummer evening, and for a brief season the barn is full of hymns and hope. George Orwell published this fable in 1945, and beneath its barnyard surface lies the whole arc of the Russian Revolution from liberating dream to totalitarian nightmare. The pigs learn to walk on two legs by degrees so gradual that each step seems reasonable until the last is grotesque. Orwell's genius is structural: the commandments on the barn wall are revised so quietly that the animals cannot remember what they originally said. It is a story about the corruption of language as the precondition for every other corruption, small enough for a child's hand and vast enough to indict a century.