In His Essay “Poland Revisited,” Conrad tries to explain why in the last weeks before the outbreak of the First World War he remained unmindful of what was happening in international affairs. He accounts for his unawareness by saying that he was fully absorbed at the time by his personal problems—finishing and correcting Victory and Borys’s entrance exams for Sheffield University—and also by the desire that “possessed” him to go to Poland: “My eyes were turned to the past, not to the future.”

The invitation to visit Poland came from the Retingers, formally from Mrs. Emilia Zubrzycka, Otolia Retinger’s mother. She owned a small country estate, Goszcza, near Cracow but on the Russian side of the boundary between the partitioned Polish territories. The psychological ground for the visit had been prepared by Conrad’s increasingly lively contacts with Poles. In the spring of 1914, he quite often met Józef Retinger, who managed the Polish Bureau in Granville House in Arundel Street, London, near The Strand. Retinger also arranged for the only interview Conrad gave in Polish and for a Polish periodical. The interviewer, Marian Da_browski was evidently a little awed by the great writer, and in places his report does not sound quite reliable, although the text was apparently authorized by Conrad. According to Da_browski, Conrad spoke good Polish, without a trace of an accent. Asked about his views on Poland’s “immortality,” he answered: