SOURCE: “Echoes from Konrad Wallenrod in Almayer's Folly and A Personal Record,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1, June, 1998, pp. 91-110.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski became Joseph Conrad upon the publication of Almayer's Folly in London on 29 April 1895. He had taken the third of his given names for a pen name, partly in deference to an English-speaking public but also, certainly, because he knew the historical significance of that name and its literary sources, two preeminent works of Polish Romanticism by Adam Mickiewicz: Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and Konrad Wallenrod. In Part Three of Dziady, written in Dresden in 1832 and published in Paris in the same year, Gustaw, a czarist prisoner, “is transformed from a man preoccupied with his personal problems into a man dedicated to the cause of his nation and of humanity. To mark it, he even changes his name to Konrad—Mickiewicz had given the name before to his Lithuanian hero” in a poetic drama published in St. Petersburg in 1828 …¹Konrad Wallenrod, a patriotic poem that acclaims the artist, also echoes Virgil's Aeneid. By taking on such a celebrated Polish name and by incorporating a reference to Konrad Wallenrod into his first novel and later into one of his autobiographies, A Personal Record (1912) (when he discusses the ending of his sea career and the beginning of his writing life), Conrad is acknowledging his Polish cultural heritage but also clarifying each of his works.

Among the first to discuss the Polish reverberations in Almayer's Folly was Ludwik Krzyżanowski, who observed that “the opening words of ch. X of Almayer's Folly … seem to point to … [Konrad Wallenrod by Adam] Mickiewicz. ‘Zaszlo na koniec, rzekł Alf do Halbana’ is paralleled by ‘It has set at last, said Nina to her mother.’”² Zdzisław Najder confirmed that “there are verbal echoes of Konrad Wallenrod in Almayer's Folly.”³ A familiarity with Polish literature and culture, combined with an awareness of intertextual principles, helps to elucidate the “verbal game”⁴ that Conrad plays with echoes in such an astute and stately manner.

As Michael Riffaterre confirms, “a literary text always carries meaning in relation to texts that it presupposes.”⁵ In “Word, Dialogue, and Novel” Julia Kristeva had earlier explained, “any text is constructed as a mosaic of quotations; any text is the absorption and transformation of another. The notion of intertextuality replaces that of intersubjectivity, and poetic language is read as at least double.”⁶ A discussion of intertextual theory and of some of the Polish doubleness in Almayer's Folly and A Personal Record will disclose how Konrad Wallenrod and The Aeneid provide for each work a “sense” of what Riffaterre describes as an “unlocking” or “uncovering … equivalent to a pattern of truth.”⁷

“The most ‘Byronic’” of Mickiewicz's works, Konrad Wallenrod … “is a tale in verse with a subject presumably taken … from old Lithuanian chronicles” (Miłosz, p. 220). With great cunning, Konrad Wallenrod, a patriotic hero whose boyhood name is Walter Alf, defeats the Teutonic knights of the Order of the Cross, whose headquarters are in Marienburg.⁸ They had invaded his country, kidnapped him, and reared him. Czesław Miłosz adds:

By dint of valor, [Konrad] has climbed to the top of the hierarchy of the Order and has been elected the Grand Master and Commander-in-Chief. But one day an old Lithuanian minstrel is permitted to entertain the Knights. His singing, in a language incomprehensible to the others, arouses the hero's awareness of his origins.

(p. 220)

After Konrad's song, Halban, the minstrel, tells a prophetic story, written in hexameter—which is very unusual in Polish but is the verse form of Virgil's Aeneid, as Mickiewicz very well knew: in 1839 he had become professor of Latin at the College of Lausanne in Switzerland. Surreptitiously, Halban imposes a responsibility onto Konrad Wallenrod, but using the name Walter Alf, which the Teutonic knights do not recognize:

[Walter] must wander the world, betray, murder and then die in shame. But in later years the name Alf will again resound in Lithuania and when the time comes his deeds will be heard from the lips of minstrels.⁹

In the banquet hall Halban continues his tale of prophecy, foreseeing how Walter will go to Aldona (his “little pigeon” [IV, l. 586],¹⁰ who has withdrawn to a convent in a foreign land to be near her beloved), relay to her his plan to defeat the Knights, order her to keep it a secret from the world, and then depart from her in great anguish.¹¹ Although the narrative is clear to Konrad, the Knights, not aware that he is Walter Alf, are perplexed. They whisper:

“And what of Walter? What are his deeds? Where? Vengeance against whom?”¹²

Konrad, after asking for the lute and demanding that the wine cups be refilled, declares that he will sing the end of the song if the minstrel is afraid to do so (IV, ll. 612-13). Having fallen asleep again from feasting, the Knights reawaken when their Master, Konrad, starts to sing a symbolic ballad, actually an affirmative response to the minstrel's charge that only the minstrel understands.

“Alpujarra,” Konrad's song, tells how Almanzor, the Moorish King, takes vengeance on the Spaniards who had conquered and were now plundering his land. Advocating brotherhood, Almanzor greets the Spaniards by kissing them on the lips. Then, weakening, he laughs in triumph, proclaiming that he has “deceived” them and that they are going to die as he is now dying, for he has poisoned them:

“I am returning from Granada. I brought you a plague. With my kisses I infected you with venom, which is going to devour you. Turn and look at my torment. Thus, you must die.”¹³

In this way, in the presence of the intoxicated Knights, Konrad poetically tells the old Lithuanian minstrel that he agrees to seek revenge against the Teutonic Order that Konrad directs. And so the banquet ends. … Section V, entitled “The War,” recounts how the Knights deliberately misled by Alf are defeated.

The statement from Konrad Wallenrod that Conrad incorporates into his novel and later into his autobiography occurs in Section VI, “Poizegnanie” (“Farewell”), just before Alf, realizing that his duplicity has been found out, takes poison. As the Knights approach the castle to murder Alf for betraying them, Halban states: “It [the sun] has set at last.” Halban, however, will not commit suicide; he will live to sing of Alf and “the glory of his deed.”¹⁴ It is significant that, in informing Alf of his intention, Halban echoes The Aeneid, but with a difference. In the Polish poem the poet (the singer) is given a key role. As Halban declares:

“I will travel to the Lithuanian villages, castles and towns; my song will reach the places I do not; the bard will sing to the knights in battle and the lady at home will sing that song to the children; she will sing it and at some future time from that song will arise an avenger of our bones.”¹⁵

In the Roman epic Dido curses Aeneas and his progeny; then just before ordering that a funeral pyre be built and killing herself with her lover's sword, she cries, “Arise from my ashes, unknown avenger!”¹⁶ The exiled Mickiewicz (at this time residing in Russia), in deliberately echoing a universally known patriotic poem, is affirming that he too is serving his nation—although it is not on the map of Europe.¹⁷ The hero of his poem, Konrad Wallenrod, is similarly, as Moses Hadas states of Aeneas, “a national symbol, chosen as the instrument of destiny and set apart from ordinary humanity.”¹⁸ As Miłosz affirms of Konrad Wallenrod:

the poem was supplied with a motto from Machiavelli that counseled being a fox and a lion at the same time. Although the political content was evident to every Polish reader, it was apparently not so clear to the Petersburg censorship because the work was passed. … Konrad Wallenrod exerted strong influence upon the young generation, although many in the name of Christian ethics objected to it for glorifying treason.

(pp. 220-21)

So Korzeniowski, the exiled Pole residing in England, by echoing Konrad Wallenrod in his first novel and on the first page of one of his autobiographies, is stating resolutely if indirectly that he too is serving his fatherland, even though he is writing in English. His “mission,” like that of Konrad Wallenrod, is no less “divine” than that of Aeneas.¹⁹

It is no coincidence that the epigraph to Almayer's Folly, from Henri Frédéric Amiel's Grains de Mil (Grains of Millet [1854]), in like manner sums up not only the story of Alf in Konrad Wallenrod but also that of its creator: “Qui de nous n'a eu sa terre promise, son jour d'extase et sa fin en exil?” (“Who of us has not had his promised land, his day of ecstasy, and his end in exile?”).²⁰ Alf does die in a foreign land after his triumphant victory over the invaders of his homeland, and on 26 November 1855 Mickiewicz, generally regarded as the greatest of the Polish Romantic poets, dies in Constantinople. The epigraph will also apply to Conrad; on 7 August 1924 the renowned English novelist, who never voted in an English election, will be buried in Canterbury.

In Almayer's Folly the quotation from Konrad Wallenrod is found at the beginning of chapter 10, when Nina is about to betray her father and elope with Dain:

“it has set at last!”—said Nina to her mother pointing towards the hills behind which the sun had sunk. … She interrupted herself and something like doubt dimmed for a moment the fire of suppressed exaltation that had glowed in her eyes and had illuminated the serene impassiveness of her features with a ray of eager life. … While the sun shone with that dazzling light in which her love was born and grew till it possessed her whole being she was kept firm in her unwavering resolve by the mysterious whisperings of desire which filled her heart with impatient longing for the darkness that would mean the end of danger and strife; the beginning of happiness, the fulfilling of love, the completeness of life.—It had set at last!

(p. 111; emphasis added)²¹

Conrad added the exclamation point to his quotation, as is shown in the manuscript of Almayer's Folly. …

According to intertextual theory, echoes from intertexts can be as unobtrusive as this seemingly ordinary statement. As Riffaterre states, “subtexts, texts within the text, … are neither subplots nor themes but diegetic pieces whose sole function is to be vehicles of symbolism. They offer a rereading of the plot that points to its significance in a discourse closer to poetry than to narrative.” He adds: “a suppressed truth must be deemed truer” (Fictional Truth, p. xvii).

The echoes in Almayer's Folly from Konrad Wallenrod and (indirectly but with equal validity) from The Aeneid enable the reader to see what Riffaterre calls “the truth of the text” (Fictional Truth, p. 99). He further explains:

Because of the subtext's mnemonic function, any reference, however fragmentary it may be, to that subtext tells its whole story and activates its full symbolism. Any such reference is like a metalinguistic insert within the narrative. As a result, the reader, deciphering it and rebuilding the whole from the part actualized at any particular point, already knows … the aims of the characters.

(p. 110)

Thus Riffaterre answers the question posed by Yves Hervouet: “Indeed, why should [Conrad] have felt the need to echo the words of Mickiewicz's Konrad Wallenrod: ‘“It has set at last,” said Alf to Halban, / Pointing to the sun from the window of his crenelle’ in order to write, in Almayer's Folly, something as simple as ‘“It has set at last,” said Nina to her mother pointing towards the hills behind which the sun had sunk’?”²² That “simple” quotation signals one of the intertexts calling our attention to Konrad Wallenrod and, in turn, to The Aeneid.

Upon the completion of his first novel, Conrad stated in a 24 April 1894 letter to his aunt, Marguerite Poradowska, “I have buried a part of myself in the pages.”²³ In Polish there are two words for bury: “chować,” which also means to hide, and “grzebać,” whose etymology is “to hide a dead person in the ground.”²⁴ Conrad is stating to his Aunt Marguerite, in other words, that he had secreted part of himself, part of his Polish cultural heritage, in these pages.

This hidden treasure clarifies the meaning of the book and solves the problems that Ian Watt identifies but leaves unresolved in his introduction to the Cambridge University Press edition of the novel. Watt, who does not acknowledge the echoes from Konrad Wallenrod, declares that “although the memory of Olmeijer was vivid, and apparently urgent, his personal meaning for Conrad seems to have remained obscure.”²⁵ Intertextuality illuminates the Cimmerian opacity that Watt confronts. Because Conrad saw Almayer with his “unnatural rigidity” and “mechanical obstinacy” (Folly, pp. 143, 144) as the complete antithesis of Walter Alf (Konrad Wallenrod), he was always the object of Conrad's scorn, as the reverberations from Konrad Wallenrod suddenly make clear in the “blaze of revelation” that Riffaterre speaks of (Semiotics, p. 166). Therefore it is unnecessary to ask, as Watt does, “why the man who had impelled [Conrad] into authorship should then have become the object of his disdain” (p. lxii). Without knowledge of the “network” (Semiotics, p. 166), Watt sees what he calls a “basic irresolution.” He adds irrelevantly, “the reader may well feel inclined to shrink from committing too much of his sympathy to a hero who comes out of the past only to tell us that the present is merely epilogue” (p. lxii). Watt does not realize that Almayer was never delineated as a sympathetic character, but rather as one to be scorned. Almayer serves to admonish.

The chronicle of his “wasted life” (Folly, p. 143) may be read as a book on “how” not “to be.”²⁶ Lacking the ability to make a judicial decision and depleted by his concern for what others will think, Almayer forges his own “despair”:

“It would be too great a disgrace. I am a white man.”—He broke down completely there and went on tearfully: “I am a white man. And of good family. Very good family”—he repeated weeping bitterly. “It would be a disgrace—all over the islands—the only white man on the east coast. No it can not be—white men finding my daughter with this Malay. My daughter!”

(pp. 137-38)

While initially considering Dain a “friend” and a “perfect gentleman” (pp. 12, 16), Almayer, who idealizes a Europe marked by great splendor although he has never been there (p. 16), always views the Malay prince as an “alien.”²⁷ By the end of the novel this Dutch trader, the grandson of a “cigar dealer” in Amsterdam (p. 6), becomes the embodiment of the Western stereotype of the opium-smoking Oriental for whom he has such disdain (p. 153).

In “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record Conrad states: “Those who read me know my conviction that the world, the temporal world, rests on a few very simple ideas; so simple that they must be as old as the hills.”²⁸ He delineates Almayer undergoing self-inflicted torment because Almayer disregards one of the age-old precepts regarding forgiveness:

In the utter wreck of his affections and of all his feelings, in the chaotic disorder of his thoughts; above the confused sensation of physical pain that wrapped him up in a sting as of a whiplash curling round him from his shoulders down to his feet—only one idea remained clear and definite:—not to forgive her.

(Folly, p. 144)

Even though Nina has a glimmer of “hope” (p. 142) that they will be reconciled, Almayer allows his consummate irrationality—a trait attributed by Occidentals to Asians²⁹—to prevail. His self-destructive fear of the scorn of others dominates his action, as it always had. The “decaying house” (p. 5), which is a manifestation of his madness, was built not for his own enjoyment but “for the reception of Englishmen” (p. 30). Accordingly, Almayer denies himself the happiness that is within his grasp:

What if he should let the memory of his love for her weaken the sense of his dignity? … What if he should suddenly take her to his heart, forget his shame, and pain, and anger, and—follow her. What if he changed his heart if not his skin and made her life easier between the two loves that would guard her from any mischance. His heart yearned for her. What if he should say that his love for her was greater than—

(p. 144; emphasis added)

Instead, he shouts for the last time: “I will never forgive you Nina!” This flagrant disavowal of his intense desire constitutes what is unquestionably Almayer's supreme misjudgment, “the undying folly of his heart” (p. 151).³⁰

John Dozier Gordan finds it “impossible to tell why Conrad altered the name [of William Charles Olmeijer of Berouw] when he kept so many real names in the same novel.”³¹ Conrad evidently preferred a name that punned in order to help explain the disintegrating (and ultimately disintegrated) psychological state of the ailing Almayer.

The quotation from Konrad Wallenrod that is found in Almayer's Folly also appears on the first page of A Personal Record, a craftily written autobiography:

“‘It has set at last,’ said Nina to her mother, pointing to the hills behind which the sun had sunk.”

Conrad adds: “These words of Almayer's romantic daughter I remember tracing on the grey paper of a pad which rested on the blanket of my bed-place” (p. 3).

The statement “It has set at last” is repeated on the next page of A Personal Record, but here as in Almayer's Folly the echo signals not the death of the protagonist, as the line did in Konrad Wallenrod, but the beginning of the fulfillment of life. In these works (and in others) Conrad is achieving what Harold Bloom calls “intellectual revisionism” or “creative correction.”³² By overthrowing Mickiewicz …—who Miłosz claims “wrote the best literary work ever written in Polish”³³—in this instance, by turning the Polish poet's ominous words forecasting doom into signs of renewal, Conrad attains “poetic strength.”³⁴

By 1908, when Conrad had started to compose these reminiscences, much of his major work had already been done. Hence, looking back, he could describe with gaiety his intention to become a writer. Thus when “the third officer, a cheerful and casual youth,” asks Korzeniowski, “What are you always scribbling there?” (A Personal Record, pp. 3-4),³⁵ he explains in a lighthearted manner that he has made a decision to follow his “desire”:

I could not have told him he had put to flight the psychology of Nina Almayer, her opening speech of the tenth chapter and the words of Mrs. Almayer's wisdom which were to follow in the ominous oncoming of a tropical night. I could not have told him that Nina had said: “It has set at last.” He would have been extremely surprised and perhaps have dropped his precious banjo. Neither could I have told him that the sun of my sea-going was setting too, even as I wrote the words expressing the impatience of passionate youth bent on its desire.

(p. 4; emphasis added)

Conrad, aware of the “verbal associations”³⁶ that he was deliberately creating, identifies Konrad Korzeniowski as very like Nina Almayer. The author had earlier used the word “desire” to describe Nina's zeal regarding her forthcoming elopement (Folly, p. 111), and now he has the “scribbling mate” use the same word to express his feelings about his approaching writing life. In contrast to Almayer, who is characterized by his wife as having “no courage and no wisdom” (Folly, p. 112), Nina and Konrad risk confronting the “menacing voices calling upon [them] to rush headlong into the unknown” in order “to be true to [their] own impulses” (Folly, p. 111).

There is a sense, too, that Nina's “mission” is “divine,” for she does become the mother of a future ruler, a Malay prince; Mrs. Almayer is “mad with joy” when the birth is announced (p. 154). Hence Nina will also grandly serve a nation, as Korzeniowski will serve his fatherland (if with the name Joseph Conrad),³⁷ by producing books—his patriotic children, suffused with a variety of characteristics but demonstrably embracing many aspects of Polish culture.³⁸

In dedicating Almayer's Folly to “T. B.,” his maternal uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who is the complete antithesis of Almayer, Conrad reinforces the view that Konrad Wallenrod highlights about one of the themes of Almayer's Folly: not interfering in someone else's life, the way that the Knights interfered in Alf's life. Nina asks Almayer during their last meeting, “Can I not live my own life as you have lived yours?” (p. 143). Almayer tries to control her—unlike Bobrowski, who did not try to dominate his nephew: the uncle allowed the young Konrad to pursue his career at sea despite family resistance. With great affection, Conrad proclaims of Bobrowski in A Personal Record:

Practically, after several exhaustive conversations, he concluded that he would not have me later on reproach him for having spoiled my life by an unconditional opposition.

(p. 42)

In other words, the guardian uncle respected the views of his nephew concerning his adolescent career choice. Conrad delineates Bobrowski's behavior as charitable, decent, and civilized, reflecting democratic ideals that sanction individual freedom and responsibility.

In discussing the bond between Bobrowski and Konrad as presented in A Personal Record and in the Bobrowski letters,³⁹ John Hicks explains that “the themes of Almayer's Folly, apart from sentiment alone, would give Conrad strong reason for wanting to dedicate the novel to his uncle”:

the intimate relation … had involved … a strong parental fidelity equal to resolving hard and tricky problems: that, for example, of not permitting family or personal prejudice to override the nephew's right to order his own life.⁴⁰

Completely unlike Bobrowski is Tom Lingard, a trader who is a central figure in Almayer's Folly. Recognized by the Dutch merchants as the “King” of “English pedlars” (pp. 8, 7), he arranges Mrs. Almayer's marriage, in which “there never was any love,” only “weariness and hatred—and mutual contempt” (p. 143). Konrad Wallenrod haunts her narrative also, for although Mrs. Almayer was kidnapped and educated by foreigners, just as Alf was, she also never forgot her origins.

Evidence that Conrad was deliberately altering his source material (to suit his intertextual purposes) as he delineated Mrs. Almayer is supplied by Gordan:

Conrad provided Mrs. Almayer with a background of violence for which no similarity in fact can be discovered, and the manuscript of the novel reveals changes in details made as he worked out the characterization.

(p. 43)

As Riffaterre maintains, the ultimate understanding of the text comes from the intertext (or intertexts). Thus the future Mrs. Almayer is to be viewed compassionately as a victim of barbarous European forces. According to Gordan:

[Conrad] referred first to “the romantic story of some child—a girl—rescued from a piratical prau.” Probably the implication that the girl was held against her will prompted him to correct it in the manuscript to “the romantic tale of some child—a girl—found in a piratical prau.” She was called the granddaughter of the Sultan of Sulu, and in the manuscript had originally been the daughter of the captain of a Sulu piratical prau, though in the final reading her exact paternity was canceled.⁴¹ As a young girl she sailed with Sulu pirates on their raids, until Lingard exterminated them. He adopted her, had her educated in a convent in Java, and then married her to Almayer.

(p. 43)

Although his contemporaries would have regarded Lingard's behavior as admirable and most likely would have concurred with his view that “he had done his duty by the girl” (Folly, p. 20),⁴² Conrad regarded Lingard's actions as a travesty of human dignity, as may be discerned from the author's descriptions of the “old sea-dog” with his “rough hands” (p. 19), and most emphatically from the intertextual echoes. Not unlike the Teutonic Knights in their behavior toward Alf in Konrad Wallenrod, Lingard denies the young woman her cultural heritage, decides for her that his own is superior, and imposes it upon her, with calamitous results.

In his introduction, Watt further asks of Conrad: “Why that abiding reverence for people in his past merely because they had left traces in his memory?” (p. lxii). But as Riffaterre states, the special function of “the sign” is “to stand for memory” (Fictional Truth, p. 100). Memory “carv[es] out an intertext and generat[es] a textual derivation as a consequence of intertextual input. Since this memory is the original one, it is also an unconscious one, and … the ultimate authority” (Fictional Truth, p. 99). Riffatterre adds:

symbolic truth needs a reference outside the narrative. Nothing is more essential to the narrative than temporality; therefore, its truth must transcend time. … Like the unconscious described by Freud, the unconscious of fiction and, therefore, its truth, stands outside the realm of time and is impervious to its ravages.

(Fictional Truth, p. 111)

Conrad himself states in A Personal Record that “there was a good deal of retrospective writing” (p. 17) in Almayer's Folly. This remark can, of course, refer to the method of writing that exists in the novel—which is the way that Watt reads the statement (p. lviii). But Conrad may also be affirming that in writing this book he is also surveying his past, which includes his knowledge of Polish culture. With artistic acumen, he is disclosing that he put nuggets from Polish literature into this novel.

More significant, in 1923 Conrad, then the acclaimed literary lion and artistic fox, while touring the northeastern United States is reported to have said as he discussed his life's work that he wrote “in retrospect of what he saw and learned during the first 35 years of his life.”⁴³ Hence he is again admitting in a clandestine way (but now looking back on an ample literary career) that his earlier life, including his Polish cultural heritage, provided material for his craft. As Frederick R. Karl states, “we must never minimize the heavy overlay of … Polish literature resting on [Conrad's] language and thought.”⁴⁴

Watt concludes his introduction by stating that “the case of Almayer's Folly is by no means closed” (p. lxiv). Unearthing the cache of Polish references that Conrad buried in this book helps, if not to close the case, certainly to enhance our aesthetic and intellectual appreciation of his first novel and of A Personal Record.⁴⁵

If one is to understand Conrad and obtain the most that is to be had from his writings, one must have an understanding and an appreciation of Polish literature and culture. Even such otherwise distinguished critics as Watt and Hervouet make implausible statements because they do not concern themselves with intertextual theory and do not recognize the Polish references.⁴⁶ These signs recall literary and artistic works as well as aspects of social behavior, as Kristeva and Riffaterre have explained, that do affect the meanings of the texts; Bloom provides additional insight regarding the writer's struggle to supersede his predecessors. That Conrad was an artist of sagacity continues to be recognized and applauded, but that he deliberately wove images from Polish literature and culture into his work—ultimately for his own artistic purpose—must also be given generous consideration. He never forgot his fatherland, nor should the discriminating reader.

Notes

1. Czesław Miłosz, The History of Polish Literature, 2d ed. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: Univ. of California Press, 1983), p. 222. Further references to this work appear in the text.

2. Ludwik Krzyżanowski, “Joseph Conrad's ‘Prince Roman’: Fact and Fiction,” in Joseph Conrad: Centennial Essays, ed. Krzyżanowski (New York: The Polish Institute of Arts and Sciences in America, 1960), p. 55.

3. Introduction to Conrad's Polish Background: Letters to and from Polish Friends, ed. Najder, trans. Halina Carroll (London: Oxford Univ. Press, 1964), p. 30.

4. See Michael Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry (Bloomington: Indiana Univ. Press, 1978), p. 138.

5. Text Production, trans. Terese Lyons (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1983), p. 281.

6. “Word, Dialogue, and Novel,” in her Desire in Language: A Semiotic Approach to Literature and Art, ed. Leon S. Roudiez, trans. Thomas Gora, Alice Jardine, and Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1980), p. 66.

7. Fictional Truth (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Univ. Press, 1990), p. 110.

8. Today known as Malbork Castle accommodating a museum and located 56 km from Gdańsk, it is the largest existing feudal complex in Europe, the residence of the Grand Masters from 1308 to 1457.

9. Adam Mickiewicz, Konrad Wallenrod, in Powieści poetyckie (Poetic Novels), ed. Wladyslaw Floryan (1828; Warsaw: Czytelnik Warszawa, 1982). The Polish text reads: “[Walter] bląkać się musi po świecie, / Zdradzać, mordować i potem ginąć śmiercią haniebną. / Ale po latach ubiegłych imię Alfa na nowo / Zabrzmi w Litwie i kiedyś z ust wajdelotów posłyszysz / Czyny jego” (IV, ll. 564-68). (All translations from the Polish in this essay are mine unless otherwise stated.) Many of the details about Konrad Wallenrod presented here were gleaned from a seminar on Konrad Wallenrod conducted in the fall of 1989 by Julian Maślanka at the Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Poland.

10. She is described as “like a little pigeon blown by the wind to the center of the deep sea, [where she] lights onto the forlorn masts of an unknown ship.” The Polish text reads: “Jak goląbek, porwany wiatrem śród morskiej topieli, / Pada na maszty samotne nieznajomego okrętu” (IV, ll. 586-87).

11. The Polish text reads: “Walter … / Opowiedział swój zamiar, taić przed światem nakazał / I u bramy—niestety! straszne to było rozstanie” (IV, ll. 588-90).

12. The Polish text reads: “‘I cóż ów Walter? jakie jego czyny? / Gdzie? nad kim zemsta?’” (IV, ll. 597-98).

13. The Polish text reads: “‘[w]racam z Grenady, / Ja wam zarazę przyniosłem. / Pocałowaniem wszczepiłem w duszę / Jad, co was będzie pożerać, / Pójdźcie i patrzcie na me katusze: / Wy tak musicie umierać!’” (IV, ll. 700-705).

14. The italicized words in the Polish quotations are cited in the text in translation: “‘Zaszło na koniec’—rzekł Alf do Halbana, / Wskazując słonce z okna swej strzelnicy, / W której zamknięty od samego rana / Siedział patrzając w okno pustelnicy.—” (VI, ll. 192-95). “‘Chcę jeszcze zostać, zamknąć, twe powieki, / I żyć—ażebym sławę twego czynu / Zachował światu, rozgłosił na wieki’” (VI, ll. 229-31).

15. Emphasis added. The Polish text reads: “‘Obiegę Litwy wsi, zamki i miasta, / Gdzie nie dobiegę, pieśń moja doleci, / Bard dla rycerzy w bitwach, a niewiasta / Będzie ją w domu śpiewać dla swych dzieci; / Będzie ją śpiewać, i kiedyś w przyszłości / Z tej pieśni wstanie mściciel naszych kości!’” (VI, ll. 232-37).

16. Virgil, The Aeneid, in Virgil, rev. ed., trans. H. Rushton Fairclough, 2 vols. (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1986), I, 439. The Latin text reads: “exoriare, aliquis nostris ex ossibus ultor” (Book IV, l. 625). The “avenger” will be Hannibal.

17. During the period of the Partitions, from 1772 to 1918, Poland was divided and ruled by three powers: Austria, Russia, and Prussia. Also, sounding very much like Halban, the poet in the Epilogue to Pan Tadeusz hopes that his verses will be sung by everyone, including the peasant women sitting at their spinning wheels (ll. 107-16).

18. Moses Hadas, A History of Latin Literature (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1952), p. 154.

19. Moses Hadas, The Story of Virgil's “Aeneid”: Introduction and Readings in Latin and English, Folkways, FP97-3, 1955.

20. See Joseph Conrad, Almayer's Folly: A Story of an Eastern River, ed. Floyd Eugene Eddleman and David Leon Higdon (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1994), pp. 1 and 250n. Further references to this work are to this edition and appear in the text.

21. The small-capital letters at the beginning of the quotation are not Conrad's but those of the page designer at Cambridge Univ. Press; they are found at the beginning of every chapter in this edition. I thank Bruce Harkness of Kent State University, Chairman of the Board of General Editors of the Cambridge Conrad Edition, for this information.

22. Yves Hervouet, The French Face of Joseph Conrad (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990), p. 223.

23. Joseph Conrad, The Collected Letters of Joseph Conrad, ed. Frederick R. Karl and Laurence Davies, 5 vols. to date (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1983-), I, 153-54.

24. See Franciszek Sławski, Słownik Etymologiczny Języka Polskiego (Etymological Dictionary of the Polish Language), 5 vols. to date (Cracow: Towarzystwa Miłośników Języka Polskiego, 1952-), I, 367; emphasis added. The Polish text reads: “Chować w ziemię zmarłego.”

25. Ian Watt, introduction to Almayer's Folly, p. lxi.

26. See Joseph Conrad, Lord Jim: A Tale (1900; London: J. M. Dent, 1931), pp. 213-14. In the conclusion to her discussion of Almayer's Folly (“Almayer and Willems—‘How Not to Be,’” Conradiana, 11 [1979]), based on a study of patterns of imagery, Juliet McLauchlan states: “it is folly and death to trust to ‘material interests’” (p. 122). But this is only one aspect of Conrad's criticism of Almayer.

27. See Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Pantheon, 1978), p. 71.

28. “A Familiar Preface” to A Personal Record, in The Mirror of the Sea: Memories and Impressions; and A Personal Record: Some Reminiscences (London: J. M. Dent, 1946), p. xix. All further references to A Personal Record are to this edition and are included in the text.

29. See Said, p. 57.

30. In Polish, as in French, “folly” translates as “madness.”

31. Joseph Conrad: The Making of a Novelist (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard Univ. Press, 1940), p. 36.

32. See The Anxiety of Influence: A Theory of Poetry (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1973), pp. 28, 29. Earlier, Mickiewicz had done so with Virgil.

33. Czeslaw Miłosz, “Mickiewicz and Modern Poetry,” in Adam Mickiewicz: Poet of Poland, ed. Manfred Kridl (New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1951), p. 63.

34. See Harold Bloom, A Map of Misreading (New York: Oxford Univ. Press, 1975), p. 9. The text and the marginalia in the manuscript of “A Familiar Preface” also disclose that Conrad wishes to surpass Mickiewicz. See my essay “The Manuscript of Conrad's ‘A Familiar Preface’: An Encoded Proclamation of Triumph,” Conradiana, 27 (1995), 165-88.

35. Dr. Gustav Morf reports that on the Torrens, where Conrad was first mate on two voyages, he had the nickname “the scribbling mate.” Morf adds in a note: “This detail I have from Dr. I. Griffith, Chatham, Ontario, who had practised medicine in London, before emigrating to Canada. One of his English patients was an old sailor who had served under Conrad on the Torrens and who remembered that this was the nickname the crew had bestowed upon him. The sailors had no idea what he was writing” (The Polish Shades and Ghosts of Joseph Conrad [New York: Astra Books, 1976], pp. 114 and 317, n. 77). Conrad sailed on the Torrens from 16 November 1891 to 2 September 1892, and from 25 October 1892 to 26 July 1893 (see Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Chronicle, trans. Halina Carroll-Najder [New Brunswick, N.J.: Rutgers Univ. Press, 1983], pp. 153-58). Frederick R. Karl surmises that “since Conrad's correspondence with his uncle was little more than one letter a month and his circle of friends quite small … we can assume that he was keeping a diary or journal (as he was to do in the Congo) or else already working on Almayer. It is even possible he was attempting stories, essays, or novels which he later destroyed” (Joseph Conrad: The Three Lives: A Biography [New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1979], p. 248).

36. See Riffaterre, Semiotics of Poetry, p. 166.

37. Conrad felt a loyalty to his Polish cultural heritage throughout his life. He was known by his Polish name on his passport until January 1921 (see Najder, A Chronicle, p. 458). Further, when he brands the manuscript of “A Familiar Preface” with K's, he seems to be saying that “his quintessential self is Polish, that he is a Korzeniowski” (Szczypien, “Manuscript,” p. 166). K's also appear in the manuscript of Nostromo. See my essay “Twirling Moustaches and Equestrian Statuary: Polish Semiotics in Conrad's Nostromo,” Mosiac, 28, no. 3 (1995), 31-56; and David R. Smith's “The Hidden Narrative: The K in Conrad,” in Joseph Conrad's “Under Western Eyes”: Beginnings, Revisions, Final Forms: Five Essays, ed. Smith (Hamden, Conn.: Archon Books, 1991), pp. 39-81. Moreover, in a 7 March 1923 letter to his cousin Aniela Zagórska, Conrad asked for “a drawing of the Nałecz coat of arms,” the coat of arms of his family, for he wished “to emboss the crest on the cover of the latest edition of [his] works” (Najder, Conrad's Polish Background, p. 288).

38. See Andrzej Busza, “Conrad's Polish Literary Background and Some Illustrations of the Influence of Polish Literature on His Work,” Antemurale, 10 (1966), 109-255; see also Morf; and Szczypien, “Manuscript,” and “Twirling Moustaches.”

39. They are to be found in English translation in Najder's Conrad's Polish Background.

40. John Hicks, “Conrad's Almayer's Folly: Structure, Theme, and Critics,” Nineteenth-Century Fiction, 19 (1964), 31, 30.

41. In the novel, reference is made just to “her maternal ancestors—the Sulu pirates” (p. 15).

42. Nineteenth-century attitudes exemplified in the 1895 reviews of Almayer's Folly disclose that the choice word to describe a non-European is “savage”; other denigrating words are also used. Thus, in the Daily News of 25 April 1895 Nina is described as having an “old savage instinct” and in a notice by Arthur Waugh in the Critic on 11 May 1895 as being “half-savage,” while her mother is described in the Daily Chronicle of 11 May 1895 as having “savage hatred” (Conrad: The Critical Heritage, ed. Norman Sherry [London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1973], pp. 47, 51, 49). In the 25 May 1895 review in the Athenaeum, Dain is a “wild Malay suitor,” and the nature of Nina, the “semi-savage daughter,” is “half-tamed” (quoted in Critical Heritage, p. 52). H. G. Wells in the Saturday Review of 15 June 1895 refers to her lapse “to a barbaric life,” whereas the reviewer in the 19 October 1895 Spectator has Nina “sinking back into Malaydom” (quoted in Critical Heritage, pp. 53, 61). Reflecting the zeitgeist, Conrad also uses the word “savage” in the novel, but this is not his aim in the delineation of Mrs. Almayer, Dain, and Nina, as this intertextual study discloses. The history of Mrs. Almayer is closely identified with that of Konrad Wallenrod, and in A Personal Record Conrad clearly associates his own impulses with those of Nina.

43. “Americans Kind, So Why Lecture? Remarks Joseph Conrad on Visit,” The Christian Science Monitor, 19 May 1923, p. 2.

44. “General Editor's Introduction,” Collected Letters, I, xxxiv.

45. Echoes from other works of Polish literature are found in Almayer's Folly. For example, in Pan Tadeusz reference is made to the geese that saved the city of Rome from the Gauls (VIII, ll. 772-74). When Almayer's geese leave (p. 152), the echo from the Polish poem confirms that the Dutch trader no longer has a means of salvation. In recalling a jovial world, very unlike Almayer's, Conrad also gives greater poignancy to Almayer's sad plight. See Pan Tadeusz: czyli ostatni zajazd na Litwie: historia szlachecka z roku 1811 i 1812 we dwunastu księgach wierszem (Pan Tadeusz: or, The Last Foray in Lithuania: A History of the Nobility in the Years 1811 and 1812 in Twelve Books of Verse), op. Stanislaw Pigoń, aneks op. Julian Maślanka. 10te. w. (1834; 1925; Wrocław: Zakład Narodowy Imienia Ossolińskich, 1994).

46. F. R. Leavis and Robert Penn Warren also misread aspects of Nostromo because they do not recognize the Polish signs in that novel. See Szczypien, “Twirling Moustaches,” p. 54.