A Small Personal Voice

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Doris Lessing. A Small Personal Voice

DORIS LESSING. A Small Personal Voice. Essays, Reviews, Interviews

CONTENTS

INTRODUCTION BY PAUL SCHLUETER

The Small Personal Voice

Preface to The Golden Notebook

Interview with Doris Lessing BY ROY NEWQUIST

Doris Lessing at Stony Brook: AN INTERVIEW BY JONAH RASKIN

A Talk with Doris Lessing BY FLORENCE HOWE

My Father

Impertinent Daughters. I

II

III

Afterword to The Story of an African Farm by Olive Schreiner

Allah Be Praised

In the World, Not of It

Vonnegut’s Responsibility

Ant’s Eye View: A Review of The Soul of the White Ant by Eugène Marais

A Deep Darkness: A Review of Out of Africa by Karen Blixen

Being Prohibited

The Fruits of Humbug

NOTE FROM THE AUTHOR

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

ALSO BY THE AUTHOR

COPYRIGHT

ABOUT THE PUBLISHER

Отрывок из книги

Edited and introduced by Paul Schlueter

Title Page

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This sums up for me, and where I feel it most deeply and personally, the point where ‘committedness’ can sell out to expediency. Once you admit that ‘art should be willing to stand aside for life,’ then the little tracts about progress, the false optimism, the dreadful lifeless products of socialist realism, become inevitable.

People who have been influenced by, or who have lived inside, the communist ethos, will understand the complicated emotions, the difficult loyalties, behind what that Soviet writer said. For me it is depressing that the younger people now have no understanding of it. This is the real gap between people of my age and, to choose a point at random, people under thirty. Rejecting ‘propaganda,’ for this is what they believe they are doing, they reject an imaginative understanding of what I am convinced is the basic conflict of our time. The mental climate created by the cold war has produced a generation of young intellectuals who totally reject everything communism stands for; they cut themselves off imaginatively from a third of mankind, and impoverish themselves by doing so.

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