Conrad & Poland

ELT 49 : 3 2006 Nevertheless, readers will find some individual chapters new and stimulating . J. P. WEARING ________________ University of Arizona Conrad & Poland Wieslaw Krajka, ed. A Return to the Roots: Conrad, Poland, and EastCentral Europe. Conrad Eastern and Western Perspectives, Vol. 13. Boulder/Lublin: Distributed by Columbia University Press, 2004. viii + 308 pp. $50.00 CONRAD'S RELATIONSHIP to his cultural background is a story of unremitting complexity. Born in the Ukraine of Polish parents, he was from birth a figure at the margins. His parents' life experience in what on today's map is "Poland" was brief, as was his, growing up as he did partly in the area near Kiev, in Russian exile, then in the Austro -Hungarian city Lemberg (now in Ukraine), and leaving Eastern Europe at the age of sixteen for Marseilles and the wide world. The son of political activists, Conrad claimed that his first memory was of visiting his father, under arrest, in Warsaw's citadel. The relationship of Poland to Conrad has been no less fraught: in 1898, when he was barely scraping a living from fiction published in a couple thousand copies, a Polish novelist attacked him for writing "popular and very lucrative novels" for the English market instead of giving his talents to Polish literature. More subtle or more informed views have not always prevailed since. In the 1930s, Gustav Morf worked up a crude theory of betrayal of the fatherland on the basis oÃ- Lord Jim. On the topic of Conrad and Poland, Conrad studies continue to suffer imbalances, erasures, and blind spots. Facts to the contrary, Conrad has been claimed for Catholicism, and Zdzislaw Najder's 1983 biography not accidentally refers to Lemberg as Lvov. Coded readings are something of a mini-industry: fiction set in Southeast Asia and South America is "really" about Poland and fanciful "evidence" for this is presented ; "Amy Foster," whose protagonist dies in a ditch, is, after sufficient distortions, "about" Polish Messianism. Conferences in Poland follow in "Conrad's Polish footsteps." Those of the Joseph Conrad Society (UK) are usually held, by longstanding arrangement, at London's Polish Social and Cultural Centre. Polonitis, like the flu, is catching: the word "exile" is regularly and inappropriately evoked for a man who took up British nationality and identity by choice in his maturity, and Daniel R. Schwartz can write, at the outer margins of the fantastic, of Conrad's "life-long desire" to return to Poland. 362 BOOK REVIEWS This selection of fourteen papers from a conference held in Poland in 2001, usefully avoiding extremist positions, focuses on three main topics : Conrad's reception by several Polish writers, the short story "Amy Foster," and Conrad and Russian literature. It opens with Prime Minister Jerzy Buzek's greeting to the conference (politics and writing are still deadly serious business in Eastern Europe), followed by an overview of the volume's contents by the editor. It closes with two indices— one to nonfictional names, the other to Conrad's work. The first clutch of essays is mainly of specialist interest. Wieslaw Krajka focuses on Kapitän Conrad, a six-part Franco-Polish docudrama made in 1990, presenting Conrad and his father, the poet and dramatist Apollo Korzeniowski, as "martyrs" for the Polish nationalist cause. Much of the essay inevitably describes scenes in the film, with a running commentary on their ideological biases. Krajka concludes that the writers freely lurched from fact to fiction in pursuit of their polemical aims, bolstering (although he does not say this) an emergent and newly challenged Polish identity at the period when the rusty and creaking Iron Curtain was falling to pieces. Amar Acheraïou in "The Shadow of Poland" ranges more widely, locating a suppressed Poland in Conrad's fiction. He deftly assays an absence-is-presence theme, but could have justifiably seen "Poland" less monolithically. (There were, in effect, various Polands or constructions of a nation that was a state of mind rather than a nation-state.) Donald W. Rude uncovers a 1919 interview with a Polish journalist, published in Chicago in 1924. He is wrong in claiming that this was Conrad's second interview (another having occurred during his...