The English writer, critic, publicist and journalist George Orwell (real name Eric Arthur Blair) entered the history of literature primarily thanks to his last novel, 1984 (1948, published 1949), which, along with We by E. Zamyatin and Brave New World by A. Huxley, became one of the main dystopian books of the twentieth century.

This collection includes the famous fairy tale-parable Animal Farm (1945), which in a parodic and satirical form depicts the course and further development of the Russian revolution (according to Orwell, this is a tragic, bitter story of betrayed revolutionary gains), and the novel Long Live the Ficus! (1936), an ironic and sad story about how the failed poet John Comstock declared war on the Business God, refusing to live for money, decent social status and other philistine values ​​(symbolized by the ficus plant on his windowsill), and about what this led to.