Abstract
The article is devoted to the study of the poetic work of D. Lessing, the Nobel laureate, better known for her prose. There is a small amount of research on this topic in foreign literary criticism. Such scholars as N. Bentley, C. Murray assess the author’s poetic work in close connection with her programmatic feminist novels ‘Golden Diary’, ‘Martha Quest’. Nevertheless, the issue of her early poetry and novels of the late period reveals common features and are promising for study, which determines the relevance of this article. The theme of creative nostalgia, longing for the lost home, exile, feeling of rootlessness is transparent for D. Lessing’s work and are present in many of her creations. The writer, experiencing ‘the trauma of migration’ somehow tries to recur in her works to the location of Africa, a long-forbidden territory for her. Such a creative ‘return’ for D. Lessing is a way of reconstructing memories, analyzing them, and comparing the past and the present. The author thematizes the problems of collective sin and guilt atonement as a way of self-reinterpretation both in her poetry and prose.
Highlights
The aim of the study is an analysis of two poems from the poetry collection ‘The fourteen poems’ (1959) and their correlation with the late novels ‘Mara and Dann’ (1999), ‘The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot and Snow Dog’ (2005) for finding a deep motive connection between D
The novel ‛Mara and Dann’, is an example of nostalgia for the future, where Africa becomes the center of the world and the cradle of new life (Walder, 2008: 104)
The author better known as a prose writer, reveals a common with prose thematization of important issues for all the author’s heritage
Summary
Lessing’s creative heritage testifies the writer’s preference for the prose form. Her poetic works are considered to be much inferior to prose in the matter of volume and are almost completely unknown to the general public. D. Lessing’s oeuvre comprehends about seventy prose works of various literary genres: novels, collections of short stories, journalism, autobiographical works. Lessing’s poetic work is fewer than prose: two collections of her poems ‘The fourteen poems’ (1959) and the anthology ‘The Wolf People’, co-authored with R. The aim of the study is an analysis of two poems from the poetry collection ‘The fourteen poems’ (1959) and their correlation with the late novels ‘Mara and Dann’ (1999), ‘The Story of General Dann, Mara’s Daughter, Griot and Snow Dog’ (2005) for finding a deep motive connection between D. Lessing’s assessments of the past as a “generalized record” and alternative modeling of history as ‛the past that became part of someone’s life’ (Miroshnychenko, 2012: 179)
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