The article focusses on a multi-aspect comparative analysis of J. Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and H. B. Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Taking into account the obvious differences between the works, the author analyses the hell of slavery and exploitation of Africa by the colonial states that built systems that created criminals such as Kurtz and Legree. The author presents the genealogy of Conrad’s image of tortured Africa, the prefiguration of which is found in Polish romantic messianism. The article also presents a similar reception of both works. First, they gained recognition, then in the postwar period, they were criticized for the forms of racism hidden in them, and finally, in recent decades, they have been rehabilitated by new readings. The perspective presented here shows how women’s popular prose covertly influenced Conrad’s intertextual tendency, both his poetics and the worldview of his prose.

Anastasia Tsvetayeva was a Russian writer, poet and memoirist. She started to write earlier than her younger sister Marina Tsvetayeva. Although Anastasia Tsvetaeva published several stories in the 1910s, she was not a representative of any leading literary association or group. She worked as a teacher of English, and a librarian in the Moscow Museum of Fine Arts. She also translated literary and philosophical works from French, English and German. Living in Moscow, Tsvetaeva was not fundamentally involved in politics, giving time and energy to creative work. However, the religious nature of her works made her unreliable in the eyes of the official authorities. She was arrested twice. During the second arrest in 1937, all her writings were confiscated and destroyed by NKVD. On the far-fetched charge Tsvetaeva was sent to Siberia. While in the camp, at the age of forty-one, Tsvetaeva started writing poems, first in English, and then in Russian. Her only book of poetry Moi edinstvenny sbornik (My Only Collection) was published posthumously in 1995. Tsvetaeva wrote about twelve poems in English. Seven of them – “Maturity,” “Twins,” “My Fate,” “A Dream,” “To Raya,” “A portrait attempt” and “To Thomas Caryle” – are included in her collection of poems.

Tsvetaeva’s four-page poem “Twins,” which was also translated by the author into Russian, praises Joseph Conrad’s novella Typhoon (1902) and Aleksandr Grin’s adventure novel Scarlet Sails (Алые паруса 1923). Except the fact that both writers had Polish ancestors, they were fascinated by the beauty and mightiness of the ocean. Life at sea, perceived as the embodiment of freedom, is something both Conrad and Grin longed for. The sea also occupies a central place in Typhoon and Scarlet Sails. The characters in both stories also struggle with adversities of fate and water – one of the most powerful elements of nature.

The aim of this paper is a thorough analysis of two philosophical sources of Joseph Conrad’s ethical outlook: the philosophies of Jean Marie Guyau and of Émile Boutroux. The first one, according to Maria Dąbrowska, had a strong influence on numerous aspects of Conrad’s ethics. However, the analysis of A Sketch of Morality Independent of Obligation or Sanction proves that, after all, Guyau – among other things, with his biological-vitalistic understanding of the doctrine of duty defined as a “mild obsession” – has created a philosophical-ethical system that is in stark contrast with Conrad’s views. Boutroux is a different case entirely. In his comprehension of modern life sciences and philosophy of nature, the most important issue is (this view is formed by Boutroux after Auguste Comte) to perpetuate “the laws of arbitrariness and free activity in nature.” Conrad’s references to his lectures on Natural Law in Science and Modern Philosophy might then be revealed directly: within such sea novels as Typhoon and The Shadow-Line, as well as indirectly, through portraying – in Boutroux’s language – an aspect of chance within the human “social nature” in such novels as Nostromo.

The article investigates the interface between the national history of Poland and nostalgia as featured in Joseph Conrad’s collection Notes on Life and Letters. It is suggested that Conrad’s perception of history stands at odds with contemporary postmodern criticism. Initially Conrad’s stance on Poland’s national history is investigated in his political essays, “Autocracy and War” (1905), “A Note on the Polish Problem” (1916), and “The Crime of Partition” (1919), which, in my view, feature the ”definitive history” as discussed by Jenkins and Evans. Further, the lines of intersection between history, nostalgia, and politics are delineated. It is claimed that in Conrad’s works history is still assigned the classical role of a teacher, i.e., the Ciceronian historia magistra vitae, which, as I argue, corresponds with his view on literature as part of the historical record. Next, two autobiographical essays in the collection “Poland Revisited” (1915) and “First News” (1918) are examined in order to claim a heightened mode of nostalgia, on the one hand, with a simultaneous withdrawal of the attention from state affairs, which involves a re-positioning of the focus to Conrad’s personal experiences, on the other hand. Boym’s concepts of restorative and reflective nostalgia are juxtaposed and their deployment in the collection explored. I suggest that nostalgia underpins the internal integrity and interrelatedness of the essays included in Part II: “Life” of Notes on Life and Letters as regards their thematic scope and generic affiliation, the genre preconditioning the extent and intensity of the modal application of nostalgia. Finally, I contend that the mode of nostalgia largely explains the factual inconsistencies in Conrad’s autobiographical essays.