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

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STANISEAW VINCENZ
the future." And what other source, if not the gospels, reveals to us in
one stroke a path to the future, like clear moonlight on ocean routes? Who,
if not Conrad, should have remembered and penetrated the significance
of precisely this image from sea routes and not crammed the political
enemies of his country into an eternal cage? Poles themselves would be
in a fine mess, if they believed once and for all that their own skin is of
one kind and not another and that they would never get out of it. Worse
still, if they proudly identified their best, but in the final analysis, rare
impulses with this skin, believing that they were already inherent in their
nature. This is what Dostoevsky does in relation to Russia. He correctly
perceives her capacity for a childlike faith, but he considers that everything
has already been realized in Orthodoxy and the tsardom, and that is why
he wants "to be right" always and everywhere.
B: Can the conclusion be drawn from this that, in your opinion, in
the conflict between West and East, Russia is in some way in the right?
C: I would say the result is that in the conflict and the ill-fated attempts at rapprochement, the West is guilty of indifference, as Mr. A
stressed, and, I would say more strongly, is guilty to a great extent of a
drying-up heart. For it was not the East but the West that produced Bolshevism in the East. The East belonged to the religious zone and took
everything literally, religiously. One could cite Razumov himself, but it
would have to be done alternatively, childishly or cynically. "Dictatorship
of the proletariat? A war against God?" Go on! Do it all the way! And not
as coquetry, as a whim or as a conciliation, not to disturb prosperity. The
Russians sought religion in their impulses, and the West gave them the
content of their searches. And hence the hatred toward the West is comprehensible, because Russia is a victim of the West and not a monster in
herself. Russians hate the West because they are what they are now.
B: These opinions are undoubtedly sincere and also bold, yet they
deceptively recall Dostoevsky's opinion in the famous Diary of a Writer.
And that makes me critical. In Dostoevsky, there is a monstrous contempt
for everything that hinders Russia, for he even proves that the Jews, who
are deprived of rights, "mercilessly" persecute the Russians, not to mention
the Poles in the past and the papal state of the Antichrist in Rome. Therefore, Mr. C's position as a question of whether or how much the West
is guilty concerning Russia is honest and full of self-denial, but as a statement, it is fantastic. Was the spirit of Great Russia as the seed of the empire
not already formed at the time of Ivan the Terrible? He also knew how
to triumph in defeat, because he skillfully deceived both the Jesuit father,
Posewin, and even our king, a sober humanist, Stefan Batory, with the
lure of uniting with and even converting to Catholicism despite his deep