Written in the late 1930s, Rebecca West’s Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey Through Yugoslavia (1941) is shaped on every level by the Great War. West investigates the causes of the conflict in the place from which it originated, calling urgently for a defence of the settlement of Versailles. Her project of persuasion raises general entertainment to the heights of modernist epic and contemporary myth. At the same time, the text’s critique of imperial interference shows the inconsistent global application of the principle of the ‘rights of small nations’. Using the frameworks of psychoanalysis popularized in the anglophone world during the 1920s, West identifies individual struggle with the dilemmas of history, and diagnoses the nature and limits of social change that followed in the wake of 1918.

写于 1930 年代后期，丽贝卡·韦斯特 (Rebecca West) 的《黑羊与灰猎鹰：南斯拉夫之旅》 (1941) 在各个层面都受到一战的影响。韦斯特在冲突起源地调查冲突的原因，紧急呼吁保卫凡尔赛的定居点。她的说服计划将一般娱乐提升到现代主义史诗和当代神话的高度。同时，文本对帝国干涉的批判表明“小国权利”原则在全球范围内的适用不一致。韦斯特利用 1920 年代英语世界中流行的精神分析框架，将个人斗争与历史的困境相结合，并诊断出 1918 年之后社会变革的性质和局限性。