Under censorship
The discussion about Conrad, a moral authority for the Home Army generation, was terminated by a ban on his books. After 1956 the ban was lifted, with the exclusion, however, of those very works, who at that time attracted the strongest attention of readers and critics on the West, namely political novels, such as The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Those books were still banned in Poland, as were Conrad’s political opinions on revolution and on Russia. Conrad regained, and maybe even increased his popularity in Poland, but this was the popularity of a classic artist, whose works hardly resonate with the current feelings of the readers and the surrounding reality. The life of Lord Jim (which used to be included in a canon of high-school literature) was as distant to them as the life of Jacek Soplica.
However, the tradition of the ethos of chivalry, so strongly present in Conrad’s work, was recalled quite loudly and powerfully in the middle of the communist period. It was the very tradition which was the basis for Zbigniew Herbert’s The Envoy of Mr. Cogito (1974), with his hard, tragic, proud and challenging message. The message cited very often but so unwillingly applied in everyday life. The subsequent conflict in the 1990s of Herbert with the Warsaw intellectual circles which used to extol him, was a clear signal that anti-pragmatic ethics followed by Conrad is exposed to relativism, i.e. to nullification in its contemporary Polish reception. If one had drawn a continuous line from 1945 to 1989 – above the time of forced compromises and eager adjustment, loud falsifications and mute resistance, overt falsehood and quiet faithfulness – this would have resulted in a requirement for moral settlement with the period of the communist regime. And as such a settlement had not been made, Conrad had to remain unheard.
Thus, today we are confronted with a paradox: Joseph Conrad, an artist-countryman, once a moral authority, later a forbidden writer, still later a writer with record circulation – has a very little small in Poland, in bookshops and among intellectuals, compared to his presence in France, the UK, Canada or Italy. Because in Poland we have not rejected the old stereotypical framework of his reception, which is incapable of including all that which attracts the biggest attention to Conrad abroad (attention which doesn’t always amount to understanding!). It is striking that Nostromo – the work which has for years been regarded almost universally as Conrad’s greatest work – has not been available in Polish bookshops for so many years despite the fact that the new 1984 translation by Jan Józef Szczepański belongs among the masterpieces of the Polish art of translation!