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

IS CONRAD ANTI-RUSSIAN?
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There is no doubt that the supposed Western position of Conrad is sometimes a trap.
B: It seems that there is a certain contradiction in your statements.
On the one hand, you see Conrad as a "European man," condensed over
the expanse of centuries, but then you show his concealed irony toward
the West. Perhaps you also attribute an internal contradiction to Conrad
himself?.
A: I don't see any contradiction in this, when you realize that the
"West" has for the last hundred years, and now to an even greater extent,
imagined that it alone is Europe. Such a claim (expressed as a possession
of the only true faith) was not too odd at the time of the Crusades. The
Crusaders first damaged and, as a result, weakened the Byzantine empire.
They disturbed a certain equilibrium of tolerance which had already been
established in Asia Minor, and then dropped it all for their own local
affairs. What's worse, the "West," i.e. the merchant republics of Italy,
provided weapons to Turkey. Without either condemning or approving
the Crusaders, it is indeed possible to excuse the West of those times as
being unenlightened and provincial, despite its enormous resilience. But
today, for the last half a century at least, ending Europe at the East
German border, and currently even at the border of the American occupation, is a little too much to digest, and it is also much too little to maintain
Europe. Obviously, Conrad didn't concern himself with the study of
Byzantium or with its significance for the survival of the ancient tradition.
But he possessed an almost seismographic spiritual apparatus, and this
is why he condemned in nuce the Western scorn for the East more strongly
than any historian, such as Jacob Burkhardt in his study of Byzantium,
or Grousset in his Bilan de l'histoire. This is probably mainly due to his
family and Polish tradition, since one can well say that in Poland (as the
translator stated in the preface) the East not only collided with the West,
but also, as the union of nations of the Polish Respublica and above all
the Greek Catholic Uniate testify, entered into a bond with the West.
For our conversation it is important not just that Conrad did
not narrowly take the side of the West. Most of all, it is important that
in the heart of the novel, the observer, as the only non-Russian, grasped
the real stream of conscience, which, though deeply hidden and covered
up in many layers, was so compressed to necessarily explode destructively.
B: What do you call the heart of the novel, and what is this so-called
stream of conscience?
A: Ruzumov's internal upheaval and outburst.