Is Conrad Anti-Russian? [Volume: 7(1988), pp. 231-249]

236
Stanislaw VINCENZ
which there is no help, for people aren't reconciled with it internally, just
as Haldin's mother isn't. And not only does Conrad not refuse his compassion but he even identifies himself with this last bastion, for as is evident
in the preface, he doesn't expect changes from the downfall of this or
that system but conditions it on a transformation in hearts. In part even
the observations of Razumov about the West, as can be seen from the
intensity with which Conrad endows them, come from the author. The
reaction to the Swiss citizen relaxing like a king, as if everything belonged
to him is this: "Elector! Eligible! Enlightened! A brute all the same." Or
further: "This commune... in the heart of democracy.... A fit heart
for it; no bigger than a parched pea and about as much value."
B: Here you're going too far! This is playing up to the emigre reader
who readily seizes upon such impulses. And after all, the observations of
Razumov are surely the result of his foreignness to the West, on which
he comments in his characteristic Russian manner. Perhaps Conrad made
up such Russian comments, or perhaps he even heard them at some time.
The value of such opinions is that they recall authentic statements of
Soviet "excursionists" (i.e. occupiers) in 1939 in Poland: for example,
an observation that "in Poland there is no order at all, because she ruled
over the lands of Galicia for so many years, and yet no one even has a
passport"; or this statement of a Soviet officer in 1945 in Paris, that something was suspicious because they didn't want to issue him a pass to travel
from Paris to Nice.
A: Foreignness? No! Conrad shows and even emphasizes it consciously
somewhere else. You, if anyone, can appreciate Conrad's irony, which is
inaccessible and at times difficult to detect and which is, as he is himself
(according to his characterization by Lord Russell), aristocratic to such
a degree that it is almost haughty. You remember how Razumov reacted
to the foreignness of Julius Laspara, to his tireless activity and his implicating others: "Cursed Jew!" Conrad purposely doesn't make clear whether
Laspara is a Jew, but he explains that this is not a story about the West,
meaning that the first reaction, the first expression of misunderstanding,
contempt and hate which presents itself to a man of the East is "Cursed
Jew." For Razumov identifies such pretensions with a mission of educating
the entire world with the Jews, that is with "foreignness" and its familiar
representatives from his own country. We know, after all, that such reactions are not at all a privilege of Russia, and we have met them even
more often in Poland due to the higher percentage of Jews there. Not
to mention how the Germans, thus not the East at all, repaid the Jews
for their conviction about the mission of the Germans and about their own
together with the Germans. The irony of Conrad toward the West, which is
supposedly free of such reactions, is only too clear; it is also prophetic.