Covert Confessions: Under Western Eyes

Abstract

From December 1907 to January 1910, Conrad worked on what he described as his ‘most deeply meditated novel’ (CL5, 695), Under Western Eyes. This was his only large-scale fictional engagement with Eastern Europe, with the world of his childhood, and the strain of this encounter is suggested by the psychological breakdown which followed his completion of the manuscript.2 In his ‘Author’s Note’ to Under Western Eyes, Conrad observes that his greatest anxiety in writing the novel was ‘to strike and sustain the note of scrupulous impartiality’, and that this was imposed upon him ‘historically and hereditarily’ by ‘the peculiar experience of race and family’ (UWE, viii). Conrad had to find a way to distance himself from this story about Russian revolutionaries because of its closeness to his own national and family background. To begin with, there was the eighteenth-century partition of Poland by Austria, Prussia and Russia, and the resulting Polish struggle against Russian occupation and domination, which is what Conrad means by the word ‘historically’. In addition, there was Conrad’s parents’ active resistance to tsarist oppression that ended in their exile and early deaths, which is what ‘hereditarily’ points to. By using the English teacher of languages as the narrator, as he suggests in his ‘Author’s Note’, Conrad aimed to achieve ‘detachment from all passions, prejudices and even from personal memories’ (UWE, viii).