Conrad in Poland

Abstract

The lean years of Conrad's popularity in Poland during the decade of 1945-1955 have since been superseded by the fat years of publica tion and its attendant outpouring of critical writings. According to Zdzislaw Najder, the editor of Conrad's selected stories in Polish, published in 1972,1 Conrad's popularity in the land of his birth is now at its highest, if one considers the number of recent editions of the novelist's work, the scope of the printings, and their ratio to the population of the country. One can only wonder whether the reasons for the Conradian re naissance during the past two decades are similar to those which made Conrad's work and life an existential or a Romantic phenomenon in Poland in the years of World War II. Conrad's writings appealed to the Poles under Nazi occupation, because the daily existence of the popula tion was often no less dramatic and fraught with moral choices than that of many Conradian protagonists. Men and women had to make the either-or kind of decisions, and even when decisions were made in terms of a profound moral conviction, they did not prevent the conditions of isolation, nor the feelings of guilt. Like Lord Jim, Razumov, Heyst and other Conradian heroes, ordinary Poles often had to choose defeat which, nonetheless, constituted moral victory; or they could save themselves from their German oppressors at the price of moral defeat. Moreover, Conrad's fiction appeared to the reader of those war-torn years as more than literature; it was read with a spe cial kind of reverence, reserved for works revealing the true nature of surrounding reality. Conrad's portraits of isolated heroes, who knew darkness and despair and whose tragic fate is an affirmation of man's ideal values, had a familiar ring: they were recognizable depictions of men and women whose daily actions spelled self-destruction and an ironic triumph. "For us," wrote Jan Jozef Szczepanski, "Conrad was as topical as never before. His books turned into collections of practical maxims for men fighting alone and in darkness."2 Little wonder, then,