The study is an attempt to discuss and summarize the multidirectional and multifaceted Conradist achievements of Stefan Zabierowski. I carefully try to present the scholar’s work on many planes so as to reveal his precursorship, which is not always visible at first glance. It is Zabierowski who creates the entire background of reading and reception research in Conrad studies, starting from the monograph from 1971, entitled Conrad w Polsce. Wybrane problemy recepcji krytycznej w latach 1896-1969 [Conrad in Poland. Selected problems of critical reception in the years 1896-1969] up to Dziedzictwo Conrada w literaturze polskiej XX wieku [Conrad’s Legacy in Polish literature of the 20th century] from 1992. From the perspective of interpretive research, Zabierowski-the researcher represents the exegetical school, devoting most of his attention to one work, the analysis of which has been deepened over the years, also using modern reading theories (Umberto Eco’s concept of the open work) – Lord Jim. In the discussion on the so-called Joseph Conrad’s Polish, as well as borderland background, Zabierowski proposes a competitive metaphor to the one comparing Conrad’s writing to the cathedral in Kamieniec Podolski by Paweł Hostowiec (Jerzy Stempowski) – Conrad’s literature is the Slutsk Belt of competing currents, motifs and poetics and as such, it requires original intertextual reflection. Zabierowski initiates it by comparing the Gould marriage from Nostromo with the Niechcic marriage from Maria Dąbrowska’s Nights and Days.

Kazimierz Wierzyński (1894-1969) is now considered to be one of the greatest modern Polish poets. He was born in Drohobycz (which is now in western Ukraine) and studied literature and philosophy in Cracow and Vienna. During the interwar years he lived in Warsaw, after which for several years (1939-1941) he lived as a wartime refugee before spending more than twenty years in the United States. An émigré for the rest of his life, he finally settled in London, where he died in 1969. Wierzyński’s poetry – like the works of Joseph Conrad – exhibits a particular sensibility to nature (perceived as a living organism) and the outside world, which is full of extraordinary places, objects, people and phenomena that invite us to reflect on the deeper meaning of our existence as human beings. Both writers share a stoic response to adversity and a fidelity to conscience and to the heritage of European culture.

In his 1924 sketch entitled “Conrad’s Great Silence,” Wierzyński saw Conrad above all as a writer who yearns for the infinite, whose “maritime reflection is reproduced in his work.” Twelve years later, in a narrative poem entitled Lord Jim (forming part of his 1936 collection entitled Kurhany), Wierzyński brought the eponymous character of Conrad’s novel into the pantheon of the Polish collective imagination. The fate of Lord Jim, who is tormented by nostalgia for his native England (to which he cannot return) would seem to foreshadow that of the émigré poet whom Wierzyński himself was soon to become.

In the titular poem of Wierzyński’s wartime collection Róża wiatrów (The Wind Rose – 1942), Conrad appears as a “role model” for all Polish wartime refugees and émigrés, who, like castaways, search for their own guiding light “in the Conradian sky” – a light that could help them find a safe haven where they could live and work in their own artistic realm without the need to care about literary fashions. This poem has been translated into English (under the title The Compass Rose) by Mary Phelps (Kazimierz Wierzyński, Selected Poems, New York: Voyages Press, 1959). In the opinion of the author of the present article, this translation fails to correctly convey certain key images and allusions which enrich the meaning of the poem and which connect it with the poet’s own personal situation as an émigré writer.

Although Joseph Conrad’s dramatic work is rather limited, he is a writer whose fiction is frequently imbued with theatricality and dramatic irony. He wrote three plays altogether: the one-act One Day More (1905), the two-act Laughing Anne (1922) and a full-length play, The Secret Agent (1922). However, there are also novels of great dramatic potential, for example, Victory or Under Western Eyes, which proved most popular for adaptation. The present paper aims to show how Victory’s dramatic potential was creatively transformed into a theatrical performance by Leon Schiller (1887-1954). Schiller was one the most prominent and influential Polish theatre directors as well as theatre pedagogue and activist, composer, singer, translator, and scriptwriter. He studied philosophy at the Jagiellonian University, next he went to Paris to study at the Sorbonne. When he returned to Poland, he became a theatre critic showing himself an expert on the European theatre. He was employed as artistic director of Teatry Miejskie in Lwów [the Lviv City Theatres] and introduced and developed the idea of monumental theatre that he borrowed from Edward Craig. Victory was chosen by Schiller as the spectacle to inaugurate his new theatrical season in Lviv in 1930.

This paper demonstrates that, as in the case of other short fictions of Joseph Conrad (“Freya of the Seven Isles,” A Smile of Fortune,” and “The Planter of Malata”), also in the case of “The Tale” (1917)—the author’s most enigmatic piece—an intertextual and a denegative approach generates new perspectives. “The Tale”s intertextuality is considered here in the context of pre- and post-Conrad American writing, ranging from Nathaniel Hawthorne’s, through William Faulkner’s, to Toni Morrison’s. A denegative (asserting presence by absence, and vice versa) reconsideration of “The Tale”’s diagetic concentric narration demonstrates that it owes its epistemological haze precisely to the device of denegation, which likewise creates a strict convergence between the story’s governing themes of love and war, thereby revealing the undercurrent of idealism, ego, and suspiciousness in the commanding officer’s character, which seems to be the main factor in both his murderous operational decision and the lovers’ estrangement.

Trying to classify the cultural patterns of behaviour, modern anthropology offers the distinction between “shame cultures” (which rely on external sanctions for good behaviour) and “guilt cultures” (which internalize the conviction of sin). Correspondingly, shame and guilt create specific ethos and therefore could be treated as factors indicating cultural meaning and function of the notion of honour in different cultural contexts. The article is an attempt to analyse the role of guilt and shame phenomena in the creation of Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim.

Conrad’s attitude to lying appears to be unequivocally critical. Closer inspection reveals, however, that his approach is more complex. Writing about his life he intended to present it as coherent and ordered, with nothing left to chance and everything imbued with meaning. Thus white lies, compromises with the truth, half-truths, wishful thinking, and so on, are treated by Conrad as simply human.

In his books Conrad presents different varieties of lying, and although he does not claim that lying is always wrong he proves that people are always responsible for the consequences of their lie and must bear such consequences. Some lies are noble, harmless or redemptive, bringing good, while some are destructive and corrupting. The most dangerous is self-delusion. The consequences that man has to face in case of such a lie are unexpected and irreversible.