Review of Zwischen Ost und West: Joseph Conrad im europäischen Gespräch (Between East and West: Joseph Conrad in European Conversation). Edited by Elmar Schenkel, Hans-Christian Trepte

Abstract

Zwischen Ost und West is a stimulatingly unusual polyglot of articles by an international coterie of established scholars, the hardback volume’s handsome cover arresting the eye with an oriental port scene of square riggers and sampans photographed at low tide and a photo portrait of Joseph Conrad in the monocled gravitas of his latter years. Co-editor Elmar Schenkel, Chair of the Department of English Studies at the University of Leipzig and author of a recent life of Conrad written in German, Fahrt ins Geheimnis: Joseph Conrad, Eine Biographie (see review, Conradiana 41.1), is a Renaissance-style polymath who writes as easily about archery and bicycles as he does about Conrad. He is ideally complemented by his co-editor Hans-Christian Trepte of the University of Leipzig’s Department of Slavic Studies, who has written extensively on northeast European literature and the literature of east European authors in exile. The inclusion of short biographies reveals many of the contributors to be luminaries eminent in their own European domains; e.g., Christiane Bimberg (Dortmund University), author of Reise nach Moskowien [Journey to Moscow] and Frank Forster (Christian Albrechts University, Kiel), author of Die literarische Rezeption Joseph Conrads in Deutschland [Conrad’s Literary Reception in Germany] (2005). Lamentably, only a couple are commonly known beyond continental Europe; e.g., Wieslaw Krajka, (Marie Curie-Sklodowska University, Lublin), general editor of the multi-volume hardback series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, and Mario Curreli, director of the Joseph Conrad Research Centre at the University of Pisa. Ludmilla Voitkovska is in her very person paradigmatic of the editors’ cultural ideal of global unity in diversity. A Ukrainian educated at the University of Odessa, she teaches and writes in English at the University of Saskatchewan, Canada. Yearbook of Conrad Studies (Poland) Vol. VII 2012, pp. 171–173 doi:10.4467/20843941YC.12.010.0699