"A fascinating, powerful book: exhaustively researched, timely, important, and surprising at every turn. Opening up the terrain of Orwells posthumous reception in Poland and charting how Orwell interacted with Polish writers and activists, Wieszczek constructs a radically new angle on the man and his work."
--Nathan Waddell, Associate Professor in Twentieth-Century Literature, University of Birmingham, UK
"A fascinating and meticulously researched account of Orwell's reception by an audience for whom his two great novels, Animal Farm and Nineteen Eighty-Four, might have been expressly written."
--D.J. Taylor, author of Orwell: The New Life
"The untold history of George Orwell's reception in Poland is recounted here in fascinating detail. Despite official censorship of this quasi-official enemy of the Soviet bloc, his works did circulate in a nuanced presence thanks to clandestine publications and the work of Polish émigrés."
--Christopher Rundle, Associate Professor in Translation Studies, University of Bologna, Italy
"Krystyna Wieszczeks text is a fascinating, highly original and meticulously researched examination of the reception and censorship in Poland of the work of George Orwell. Including a study of Orwells lost letters to Teresa Jeleska, the Polish translator of Animal Farm, it amounts to an important addition to the ever-growing field of Orwell Studies."
--Professor Richard Lance Keeble, University of Lincoln, UK
"Krystyna Wieszczek de Oliveira's book is a pioneering attempt to present the Polish post-war reception of George Orwell's works in three complementary approaches: official reception, i.e. subjected to supervision by institutional censorship, emigration reception and illegal reception (samizdat). Both among Polish émigré circles and in communist Poland, Orwell's works were very popular, and the subversive novels: Animal Farm or Nineteen Eighty-Four were read strictly according to an anti-communist key.
As a researcher of communist censorship, I would like to emphasize that the work George Orwell and Communist Poland: Émigré, Official and Clandestine Receptions is very good, reliable and revealing. Moreover, it opens a new current of comparative research: on the history of editing, translation and censorship of literature of the most outstanding works of world literature, including English-language literature, in Poland of 1944 -1989."
--Kamila Budrowska, Professor in Literature, University of Baystok, Poland
