PROSE-WRITER’S POETRY: A CORRELATION BETWEEN D. LESSING’S EARLY POETIC WORK AND LATE PERIOD NOVELS

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.