Introduction to Vincenz's 'Dialogue' on Joseph Conrad [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 229-231]

230
ANDRZEJ BUSZA
by profession (between the wars he helped his father run a famous private
sanatorium in Kos6w), by avocation he was a writer, publishing fiction
as well as literary criticism. His main interests as a critic were the life and
works of Conrad. In 1955 he published in London a superb Polish translation of Under Western Eyes on which he had labored for more than five
years. The following year he began preparing a collection of Polish criticism
of Conrad (The Living Conrad) which the Union of Polish Writers Abroad
was to bring out in 1957 to celebrate the hundredth anniversary of Conrad's
birth. Tarnawski invited, among others, his friend Stanislaw Vincenz to
contribute. It was about this time that the conversation, which inspired
this dialogue, took place. While Vincenz published his text of the dialogue
(reproduced in the following pages) soon afterwards in the Paris Kultura,
Tarnawski included his own expanded version many years later in his 1972
book Conrad: Cztowiek-Pisarz-Polak ("Conrad the Man, the Writer, the
Pole"). Clearly, the conversation had continued even after two of the participants had become silent.
About halfway through the dialogue a third voice enters the discussion;
it is that of Father Bronislaw Kreuza. In the Kultura text he is identified
by his pen name Wtodzimierz Dotga, under which he had published articles
on religious topics in the Polish Catholic emigre press. Father Kreuza was
a venerable, learned, benign, if somewhat enigmatic figure. As a priest he
officiated both in the Roman and the Greek Catholic rites. However his
real name was Tadeusz Rzewuski, and he was thus descended from one of
the most powerful and colorful families of the Eastern Borderlands. Becoming prominent in the seventeenth century, the Rzewuskis played a
central and often controversial role in Polish political, social and cultural
life. They included: brilliant soldiers, patrons of the arts, notorious reactionary politicians, great patriots, outspoken supporters of the Tsarist
regime and Russian collaborators; a mistress of the poet Adam Mickiewicz;
the second wife of Balzac; and a leading nineteenth century novelist, who
receives a vivid and highly unflattering portrait in the Memoirs of Conrad's
uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski.
The participants of the dialogue, then, are three rather extraordinary
individuals, rooted in Polish culture and tradition, who bring with them
a wealth of experience and memory-personal, generational, atavistic. In
form the dialogue is unashamedly old-fashioned. The speakers set out,
develop and pursue their arguments in an unhurried, leisurely, ruminative
way. They meander. They digress. Sly, homespun anecdotes jostle with
erudite allusions; what seem to be longueurs turn unexpectedly into trenchant, thought-provoking formulations. (The reader is urged, above all,
not to be put off by the rather slow beginning.) The whole could be
characterized as a kind of Platonic dialogue couched in the discursive mode
of a traditional Polish gentry gaweda (literary yarn).