My forthcoming book Orwell in Paris – Down & Out with the Russian Captain, reveals the real people and places in George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London. These identities and establishments, hidden at the request of his publisher in 1933 through fear of libel, were never subsequently divulged. Despite much speculation, not even Orwell’s multiple biographers have been able to uncover the truth.
The book will first be published in French: Orwell à Paris – Dans la dèche avec le capitaine russe.
By EXILS éditions, Paris on the 24/04/2024
When the idea came to me I was about as far away from Paris as it was possible to be; working in Australian kitchens that unfortunately recalled Orwell’s experiences almost a century earlier. Walking the streets of Paris in search of the truth behind Orwell’s Parisian tale wasn’t immediately possible so I obsessively read and re-read the book adding copious notes until it became spine-damaged, food stained and fat with post-it notes. Upon returning to Paris (where I’ve lived for 25 years) encounters with eminent Russian historians, a French Colonel, Orwell scholars and a 94-year-old White Russian émigré led to a five-year journey and the hitherto unpublished discoveries revealed in Orwell in Paris.
The story behind the book that would launch Orwell’s career begins with the young writer’s journey from London to Paris in the spring of 1928. We follow over his shoulder as he makes his way to the French capital and settles into a new life. His walks across the city in search of work are recreated and we meet the people he lived with and worked for in Paris at the end of the 1920s.
Orwell in Paris is also the story of the journey that took me all the way across France, into Belgium, the UK and as far as Ukrainian archives in search of the true identity and back-story of Orwell’s companion from his Paris period: the enigmatic ex-Russian captain, Boris. His tale and his brigade’s epic journey from the Volga to the western front in 1916 is one that begins with a Tsar’s promise and ends with revolution, abandonment and exile. The book duly navigates between Boris’s WWI past, Orwell’s memorably sordid kitchen experiences in 1929 and my own literary detective work in modern-day Paris.
Duncan Roberts – Paris Autumn 2023