In my article I present various readings and interpretations of two of Conrad’s protagonists – Lord Jim and Razumov – in order to show that their conduct cannot be properly understood if the reader does not take into account the moral and cultural codes by which Conrad’s characters are bound. Paraphrasing Conrad’s title Under Western Eyes, I discuss the interpretations of Western scholars who have lost or found the real message of Conrad’s works.

This article is an attempt to explore the feasibility of using the analytical and interpretational tools offered by postcolonial criticism in order to reassess those texts in which Joseph Conrad expressed his political views. The author’s basic aim is to present the methods which Conrad used in his political essays in order to make a critique of great power politics in Central and Eastern Europe, and in particular to draw attention to techniques and content that were specifi cally designed to deconstruct the imperial practices of Germany and Russia. The article also shows how Conrad constructed a characteristically Polish defensive national identity, thus placing his political thinking
within the context of the tradition of Romantic theories of nationalism, which found their finest expression in the writings of Adam Mickiewicz, Juliusz Słowacki and Conrad’s father Apollo Nałęcz-Korzeniowski.

In an interview with Didier Eribon, Claude Lévi-Strauss admitted that he wished he had written Joseph Conrad’s books. It seems that once he even started writing a “Conradian” novel entitled Tristes Tropiques, but the only known fragment of this novel would seem to be the description of a sunset, which has become part of another book of the same title containing reminiscences from his journeys. In what way, then, did Conrad infl uence this unusual book by Lévi-Strauss? There are certainly similarities between the works of both writers. Apart from a similarity of literary form and cultural substance, we can fi nd a unique “optical experience” (Dariusz Czaja) in their descriptions of sunsets, which I interpret as a substructure of their studies of the world, culture and human knowledge.

Circumstantial evidence counts as hard fact in the attempt to understand what infl uenced Joseph Conrad’s works. Twenty-seven years ago Allan Hunter boldly argued that Conrad’s Heart of Darkness was, owing to many similar passages and phrases, strongly infl uenced by Rider Haggard’s She. To date, Hunter’s argument has been left unevaluated. This essay highlights similarities between the two antiheroes Kurtz and Ayesha in order to add circumstantial evidence to Hunter’s stated, but relatively unexplored view. This essay does not attempt to prove a direct infl uence, but hopes to show that engaging with this specifi c question of infl uence is worthwhile.

Review of „Lord Jim” Conrada. Interpretacje (Conrad’s ‘Lord Jim’. Interpretations) by Agnieszka Adamowicz-Pośpiech, Kraków: Universitas, 2007, pp. 221