Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook: A Critique of Socialism or the Stalinisation of Socialism?

Even though it is a well-accepted fact that most socialists have been opposed to the one-man rule of the Stalinist regime, described as “a whole river of blood” by Trotsky (1937), the name of Stalin is deliberately manipulated andlinked with socialism in order to implicitly charge Marxism with inherent despotic inclinations. In this context, the aim of this study is to unearth the fossilised hierarchal structure of the Stalinist bureaucracy, to investigate the impacts of the ideological hegemony of the Stalinist dogma on the revolutionary practices of socialist activists and to reveal that Stalinism, above all, victimised and tyrannised socialist activists, through a close reading of Anna’s critical attitude towards the Communist Party in Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. This study will also focus on the role of the left-wing writer in a mid-fifties communist milieu and examine the dogmatisation of Marxism and the widening gap between theory and practice in left-wing politics during the Stalin era. This will provide a framework to discuss whether the novel is actually intended or functions more as a critique of socialism or specifically of Stalinism. Over the course of the study, some short excerpts from Lessing’s interviews and autobiographical work, Walking in The Shade: Volume Two of My Autobiography, 1949-1962, will be used.