Słowa kluczowe: Rafał Marceli Blüth, Polish Conrad scholarship between the wars, Joseph Conrad’s biography, Joseph Conrad’s writing, Joseph Conrad’s novels, Heart of Darkness, refraction, simplification, adaptation, retranslation, Heart of Darkness, Aeneid, Conrad, Virgil, oracle, Sibyl, Kurtz, katabasis, death, night, Lord Jim, “under a cloud”, intertext, Homeric epic, shame culture, kleos, poetic formulas, Greek tragedy, theatrical mask, construction of identity, recognition, pessimism, tragic knowledge, interpretative situation, cognitive prejudice, community, tradition, the symbol of stranger, communication, speech, silence, moral choice, Joseph Conrad, Youth, Heart of Darkness, The End of the Tether, sea space, land space, The Secret Sharer, body, physical presence, seamanship, Almayer’s Folly, the imperial romance, Victorian realist conventions, self-made man, colonialism, Prince Roman, patriotism, Poland, Europe, sacrifice, messianism, nationalism, Polish Romanticism, Joseph Conrad, Stanisław Lem, the shadow line, first command, return from the stars, the invincible, Pirx the pilot, loneliness of the commander, responsibility of the commander, loyalty of crew, marine fiction, space voyage, Joseph Conrad, Leo Tolstoy, Beethoven, The Kreutzer Sonata, sexual desire, frustration, jealousy, violence, Heart of Darkness, A Passage to India, expansion, connection, transculturalism, grand narratives, Joseph Conrad, Charles Dickens, James M. Barrie, “The Tale”, sternness, characterization, irony, humor