From Szlachta Culture to the 21st Century, Between East and West. New Essays on Joseph Conrad’s Polishness ed. by Wiesław Krajka (review)

This volume of essays is the twenty-second and final volume in the series Conrad: Eastern and Western Perspectives, edited by Wiesław Krajka, a collaboration between Maria Curie-Skłodowska University Press and Eastern European Monographs. The articles were presented in earlier versions at the Fifth International Joseph Conrad Conference at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland in 2011. The collection is organized into two parts. Part I, “From SzlachtaCulture to the 21st Century,” examines issues of Polish history, culture, and literature. Part II, “Between East and West,” enlarges the frame of inquiry to include the reception history of Conrad in Russia, the Ukraine, and Germany. One theme connecting the essays in this volume is a reexamination of the boundaries and components of “Polish” identity, expanding this term to look more closely at geographic areas and human communities that were historically “Polish” but have since been reclassified into other nations and national literary traditions. This collection also connects the reception history of Conrad across countries that share a 20th century literary landscape dominated by Soviet-influenced readings of Conrad and a 21st century literary landscape where Conrad’s reception is still emerging from this Soviet past.

Part I is anchored by G.W. Stephen Brodsky’s essay “The Dispossessed: Joseph Conrad as Borderland Writer.” This essay sets up the volume’s discussion of the term szlachta, defining Conrad in terms of his relationship to the borderland szlachcicculture that was Conrad’s familial legacy as a member of the minor Polish nobility Conrad’s Polonism, as well has his relationship to exile and marginality, is specific to szlachcicfrom the Eastern borderland. The szlachtaclass, once held together through their status as landowners, had in many cases become literally dispossessed of land and only a mythical, ancestral claim to aristocratic origins held them together as a group. Brodsky poses that Conrad’s constant concern over who qualifies as ’one of us’ is worth reevaluating in light of Conrad’s early exposure to the szlachcicfear of both territorial and self-definitional dispossession. Brodsky provides a detailed history of several generations of Conrad’s paternal relations in the Nałęcz-Korzeniowski line. He then examines Conrad’s fictional affinity for “all sorts of romantic working gentry equivalent in some way to the szlachta” (46). In A Personal Record, Conrad connects himself to the racially and culturally separate Castilian nobility embodied by Don Quixote. In his fiction, Conrad creates a number of other “fictional Quixotes,” characters whose reduced, marginal status connects them to szlachcicinsecurities.

Joanna Skolik’s essay “Conrad’s Mythical World of the Borderland” provides a nuanced definition of the Polish word kresy, which translates imperfectly to “borderland” in English. She examines the “myth” of the Borderland in Polish culture and Conrad’s relationship to this mythologized space. Kresyis both the Polish colloquial designation for the border area and a term referring to an outpost of Western civilization where Eastern and Western influences mix together. While there is a strong political and cultural connection between the Republic and the Borderland, there is also a sense of regional otherness about the space and its inhabitants. Conrad, born into this liminal space, is a Borderland native and, thus, “heir to Borderland literature and its mythical stylization” (152). In “Prince Roman,” Conrad writes an “anti-fairy tale” set in this Borderland space that demonstrates the qualities of “genuine aristocracy,” a term he also examines in A Personal Record; a commitment to noblesse oblige, personal excellence, and patriotic service (161, 162). Skolik argues that Conrad grounds “Prince Roman” in Polish romantic ideals while also referencing conceptions of knighthood, chivalry, and honor found in the Mediterranean epic tradition reaching back to Homer. In...