The Slav in Conrad
Victory, by Joseph Conrad. New York: Doubleday, Page and Company.
The Slavs are not adventurous people in the Western sense of the word; for the most part an inland race spread over the great monotonous Plain, they are inclined for melancholy introspective searchings and spiritual struggles rather than for actual physical adventures. Their writers need not create for their heroes an atmosphere of dizzying stunts and elemental cataclysms; they find sufficient dramatic “plot” in the soul experiences of the restless yearning men and women who dwell not on a South Sea island but in ordinary cities and villages, fighting their human fights, wrestling with God and man, gaining their ephemeral victories, but more often suffering defeats. Yet, despite their lack of adventurousness, the stories of the Russian and Polish writers, from Dostoevsky to Kuprin and from Orzezsko to Zeromsky, have seldom caused a yawn in their reader.
The checkered life of Conrad has placed a distinct stamp upon his works, distinct from both the writers of his race and from the Western writers. We observe a dualism in his art, an eternal collision between fact and fiction, between realism and symbolism. His inborn Slavic mysticism is weighed down by the ballast of his rich experiences, and he continually wavers between the Scylla of lyric melancholy and the Charybdis of picturesque plot, preserving the equilibrium at times more and at times less skilfully. The reader thus finds in Conrad that which he is after. For my part, I am rather distracted by the over-complex plot of Victory; I should much prefer to meet Heyst and Lena in less dizzy surroundings, for then the interesting psychology of the quaint lovers would appear accentuated, like the flame of a candle, and would not be blurred by a pyrotechnic mass of startling coincidences and marvellous adventures. The atmosphere of Doom that breathes throughout the story is reduced in the end to a sensational Eugène Sue-like climax—a heap of dead bodies.
K.