Miłosz and Conrad in the Treatise on Morality
Miłosz and Conrad in the Treatise on Morality

Summary/Abstract: It would appear that Czesław Miłosz’s Treatise on Morality — one of whose aims was to “stave off despair” — was largely inspired by the writings of Joseph Conrad. That Miłosz had no wish to draw his readers’ attention to this is perfectly understandable, given Conrad’s particularly low standing in the eyes of communist State censors. This long poem, which extols human freedom and pours scorn on socialist realism (together with its ideological premises), is one of Miłosz’s best known works in his native Poland, where it was published in 1948. The Treatise on Morality may well have been inspired by three of Conrad’s essays that were banned in communist Poland: Autocracy and War, A Note on the Polish Problem and The Crime of Partition. Conrad’s writings would appear to have helped Miłosz to diagnose Poland’s political predicament from a historical perspective and to look for a way out of it without losing all hope. An analysis of the Treatise on Morality shows that only by reconstructing the Conradian atmosphere and context — alluded to in the text — can we fully grasp all the levels of the poet’s irony, which culminates in a final “punchline” alluding to Heart of Darkness. Apart from suggestive allusions to the brutal colonization of the Congo, the fate of post-war Poland is also seen through the optic of those of Conrad’s novels that deal with the subject of depraved revolutionaries: Nostromo, The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes. Conrad’s ideas for ways to fight against bad fortune and despair are suggested not only by his stories Youth and Typhoon — and by his novels The Nigger of the “Narcissus” and Lord Jim — but also and above all by his volume of memoirs entitled A Personal Record, in which he relates his yearning for freedom as the young, tragic victim of a foreign empire. In an article entitled Joseph Conrad in Polish Eyes and published in 1957 — on the hundredth anniversary of Conrad’s birth — Miłosz writes that, through his writings, Conrad fulfilled the hopes of his father (who gave him the name “Konrad”) and that although “the son did not want to assume a burden that had crushed his father, he had nevertheless become the defender of freedom against the blights of autocracy.”

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