Słowa kluczowe: Polish eastern borderlands, Conrad, Piłsudski, January Uprising, 1863 Uprising, Polish independence., relations between men and women in Conrad’s novels, Conrad’s male characters, Conrad’s female characters, Conrad’s traumatic childhood, Conrad’s pessimism, ambiguous feelings, fatalism, trauma, the inability to achieve mutual, Heart of Darkness, liminality, intercultural contact, anthropology of experience, Joseph Conrad, Alexander Fredro, feat of memory, feat of testimony, the comic, the tragic, existentialism, narration, symbolizations of narration, Trzy po trzy, Youth, Heart of Darkness, Wit Tarnawski, The Sisters, Conrad, translation, Kazimierz Wyka, Conrad’s political essays, Zdzisław Najder, communist censorship, communism, Wit Tarnawski, Andrzej Stypułkowski, Polonia Book Fund, Conrad’s collected works in Polish, understanding, the Self, the Other, subjectivity, communication, self-knowledge, Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, Czesław Miłosz, Joseph Conrad, Poland, Lithuania, Ruthenia, Ukraine, Russia, Apollo Korzeniowski, Adam Mickiewicz, Astolphe de Custine, Poland and Muscovy, Forefathers’ Eve, Under Western Eyes, The Secret Agent, Heart of Darkness, A Treatise on Poet