Polskoromantyczne widma Josepha Conrada. Prolegomena do badań nad polskim obliczem pisarza

The study, drawing from the research experience of the most prominent interpreters of intertextuality in Conrad’s prose, including Yves Hervouet, seeks to establish an interpretative zero point in the case of the study of the vague, or even subliminal influences of Polish Romanticism on Conrad’s writing. They are so ambiguous and varied that – drawing from the impressive monograph of Hervouet The French Face of Joseph Conrad – they should be described as an aspect, or even – the dominant feature of the „Polish Face of the writer”. To clarify and emphasize Polish-romantic contexts in Conrad’s texts, it would be necessary to transform the standard concept of intertextuality, crossing it with the so-called hontological methodology based on Derridian Theory of Spectres. A synthetic intertextual-comparative study of the volume Tales of Unrest from 1898 indicates that (apart from references to Flaubert or Merimée) the independent contexts of the Lithuanian (Mickiewicz) and the Ukrainian (Słowacki) Schools of Polish Romanticism should remain equally important for Conrad’s intertextuality. Therefore during the analysis – as two competing intertextual circles – they should always be separated and differentiated.