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On 27 September 1938, on the eve of his departure for Munich, Neville Chamberlain contemptuously discounted the importance of Czechoslovakia in world affairs. He thought it incredible and fantastic that Britain might find itself entangled in "... a quarrel in a far-away country between people of whom we know nothing!" A year later Poland was overrun and France and Britain were at war with Germany. World War n was under way. Ten years later, the developments in Czechoslovakia once again marked a turning point in world politics. The communist coup in Prague brought a swift response in the West. Within a month's time the Western European Union came into being, and in a little more than a year the North Atlantic Treaty was signed. The movement towards the formation of a West German State and its inclusion in the western de

The Conrad centenary poses a problem for the English speaker who, like myself, does not know the Polish language. Conrad was born and raised a Pole and his Polish heritage was always important to him both in and out of his fiction. Clearly, on an occasion such as this, his Polish background should be covered, and I shall refer to it myself in a moment; but it can be properly honoured only by someone who knows at least the language, and this task I leave to Dr. Rose. This is not to say, of course, that we should look on Conrad as some sort of freak. As far as we are concerned, he stands or falls as a writer of English prose fiction; and, indeed, he is of special interest to Poles only because he made himself outstanding in English. And unequivocally in English. He did not, like such other expatriates as the Hungarian Koestler, or the Irishman Beckett, publish in more than one language, did not even attempt to translate any of his works into another language, though both Polish and French were available to him, and, as one would expect, he was invited, and urged, to write for Polish journals. It was his single-minded adoption of English, and his rapid success in itastonishing, I should say, since at the age of twenty-one he knew only a few words of the languagethat made Conrad a figure of some controversy in Poland as early as 1899, when he was cited on the one hand as proof of the services that a talented emigre can render his native country indirectly, and cited on the other hand as an instance of the emigre who betrays his country.2 But forty-five years later the controversy had been resolved. Conrad, it appears, was a moving spirit behind the Warsaw insurrection. Writing of that unhappy time just behind us, Czeslaw Milosz identifies Conrad as a main source of the gratuitous loyalty displayed by "Alpha" and many other young Polish writers. "Communism," he sums up, "was fighting Fascism; and the