Lord of the Flies -William Golding

Lord of the Flies - the debut allegorical novel by the English writer, Nobel Prize in Literature (1983), William Golding, published in 1954.

In the USSR in Russian, the Lord of the Flies was first published in 1969 in five issues of the magazine Vokrug Sveta, translated by Vladimir Telnikov, which was no longer published, and the novel was published in a separate book only in 1981 in the translation of Elena Surits the novel was conceived as an ironic commentary on the "Coral Island" by RM Ballantyne (1858) - an adventure story in the genre of Robinsonade, where the optimistic imperial representations of Victorian England are sung.

The path to the light of the Lord of the Flies was difficult. The manuscript rejected twenty-one publishers before Faber & Faber agreed to release it with the condition that the author removed the first few pages describing the horrors of a nuclear war. As a consequence, the novel does not say during which war action takes place.

Immediately after the publication, the novel did not attract attention to itself (in the US, during the year 1955, fewer than three thousand copies were sold), but a few years later it became a bestseller and by the early 1960s was introduced into the program of many colleges and schools. In 2005, the magazine "Time" called the work one of the 100 best novels in English since 1923. From 1990 to 1999, the novel ranked 68th in the list of the 100 most controversial books of the 20th century, compiled by the American Library Association.

The title of the book Lord of the Flies is a literal translation from the Hebrew name of the pagan god - Baal's sound (Hebrew בעל זבוב), whose name (Beelzebub) in Christianity became associated with the devil. The name for the novel was given to Golding by TS S. Eliot.