National History and Nostalgia in Joseph Conrad’s “Notes on Life and Letters”

Abstract

The article investigates the interface between the national history of Poland and nostalgia as featured in Joseph Conrad’s collection Notes on Life and Letters. It is suggested that Conrad’s perception of history stands at odds with contemporary postmodern criticism. Initially Conrad’s stance on Poland’s national history is investigated in his political essays, “Autocracy and War” (1905), “A Note on the Polish Problem” (1916), and “The Crime of Partition” (1919), which, in my view, feature the ”definitive history” as discussed by Jenkins and Evans. Further, the lines of intersection between history, nostalgia, and politics are delineated. It is claimed that in Conrad’s works history is still assigned the classical role of a teacher, i.e., the Ciceronian historia magistra vitae, which, as I argue, corresponds with his view on literature as part of the historical record. Next, two autobiographical essays in the collection “Poland Revisited” (1915) and “First News” (1918) are examined in order to claim a heightened mode of nostalgia, on the one hand, with a simultaneous withdrawal of the attention from state affairs, which involves a re-positioning of the focus to Conrad’s personal experiences, on the other hand. Boym’s concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia are juxtaposed and their deployment in the collection explored. I suggest that nostalgia underpins the internal integrity and interrelatedness of the essays included in Part II: “Life” of Notes on Life and Letters as regards their thematic scope and generic affiliation, the genre preconditioning the extent and intensity of the modal application of nostalgia. Finally, I contend that the mode of nostalgia largely explains the factual inconsistencies in Conrad’s autobiographical essays.