«Sailing towards Poland» with Joseph Conrad

Joseph Conrad ingeniously buried images from Polish literature and culture into his works. Once recognized, these references alter the accepted meanings of the texts. In an interview that was published in Kuryer Polski (in the then Polish city of Ostrawa, now in the Czech Republic) on 26 August 1915, Conrad himself declared about the nineteenth-century Polish poets: “Krasiński, Mickiewicz and Słowacki. Their words are everything for me. I was raised and formed by them.” Yet, the Polish sources d