<img class="alignleft" title="1984" src="http://orwell.ru/library/novels/1984/gallery/imgs/002_lx.jpg" alt="" width="250" height="400" />This week I assigned essays on George Orwell's book 1984 and sitting at my desk trying to figure out what next week has in store for me I was struck by the thought: I am teaching 1984.

I am teaching the novel 1984 in a post-communist country.  I am teaching 1984 in a post-communist country to students born after the changes in Bulgaria.  I am teaching 1984 in Bulgaria to students who have no memories of their own of communism.  I am an American teaching a novel in which one of the main ideas running through the pages is: Big Brother is watching you.   I am teaching 1984 and it's not something I ever really imaged I'd do--to teach this novel under these circumstances.

Come November it will 20 years since the Berlin Wall fell and here I am.  I'm in Sofia teaching Bulgarian students a novel imagined and created during the Cold War by a Brit about a world not so far removed from either Stalinist Russia or modern-day America.  <!--more-->A world in which fear functions like a currency--something to trade, barter and influence others with. A world in which we are watching and being watched all the time--be it today with web 2.0 technology, the Patriot Act or even our debit and credit cards.  A world that creates and revises history and the past with ease.

So here I am teaching a novel that I might not think twice about in the States and wondering what makes me qualified to teach this novel to these students? But that's the thing--it's just a novel.  I am qualified to teach novels.  It's the context, the history, the politics, the allusions in the novel that seem more difficult, more complex, heavier, weightier and more important now that I am here.

And it's the look in these students' faces--they recognize me as an authority. They write down everything I put on the board, they get frustrated with me when I don't write a word clearly enough and on top of all of this they are hungry to know more. And somehow I am the one teaching them 1984.  Sure they know the basics and I know more--it's just that there something so strange and rather odd feeling about being an "expert" on a book like 1984 in a country like Bulgaria.

By chance this week I had dinner with an older Bulgarian friend and brought up the fact that I was teaching 1984.  She told me about her experience reading the book as a twenty-something in communist Bulgaria.  She'd studied at the Plovdiv English Language School and ended up reading the book at age 24 or 25 when a friend who had been living in Japan brought an English copy back to Bulgaria. She told me that the book passed through the hands of all of their friends--everyone wanted to read it.  There is something really sad and lovely about that at the same time.

My students today, I am sure, don't feel the same way.  The book is a book.  They have to write an essay on it (which they'll write in pursuit of a 6--the highest mark in the Bulgarian school system), they'll turn their book in next week and my guess is that for most of them they wont look back.  It is after all just a book.

And today, sitting at my desk at work looking out on a dreary rainy pre-winter afternoon, there is something incredibly bittersweet about that--about the book, about the value of the book, about this novel that we read and about the stories that we tell (or once told). Is there magic left in 1984? I think so.  It's just different from what it used to be.  The warnings from this anti-utopian novel still ring true--only this time, we, as Americans, may just be the ones who need to revisit the warnings.