Conrad’s Reception in Poland for the Last Sixty Years

Abstract

On 14 October 1874, Conrad left Poland as a youth of not yet seventeen. When he returned for a visit forty years later, in 1914, he was an established English novelist, with his major artistic achievement behind him. As early as 1896, the year in which his first novel was published, two articles about his work had appeared in Kraj (Homeland, No. 41, St Petersburg) and in Przeglqd Literacki (Literary Review, No. 11, Cracow). Other articles that followed bore ample testimony to the fact that Conrad was not a stranger to the Polish public. If anything, a few of the early critical pieces had turned him into a rather controversial figure in his native land, for example Wincenty Lutoslawski’s ‘Emigracja,Zdolności’ (‘The Emigration of Talent’, Kraj, No. 12, 14, Petersburg, 1899), Kazimierz Waliszewski’s ‘Polski powieściopisarz w angielskiej literaturze’ (‘A Polish Novelist in English Literature’, Ibid, 1904), and T. Ż. Skarszewski’s and Eliza Orzeszkowa’s denunciatory articles in Kraj (1899).