National cultural identity by Joseph Conrad under his first critics eyes

Abstract

The article is devoted to the study of the issue of national cultural identity of Joseph Conrad’s prose in the first English-language critique reviews. The awareness of the "polishness" of the writer’s artistic world who was influenced by the English mentality in the British society did not happen immediately, gradually passing evolution, beginning with the awareness of "alien" and transforming in the plane of "Сontinentalism" and "Slavonism", and only after that – "polishness". The debate about the Polish culture of Joseph Conrad continues to our day, although in the early critical reviews devoted to his works, the search for national and cultural identity began as the basis of his peculiar poetic world in the realization of all its constituent categories – geography, history, religion and the spiritual structure. The relevance of the topic is determined by the scientific interest in the problem of multiculturalism, which has intensified over the last decade in the literary criticism and at the same time the lack of literary comprehension of national and cultural identity, through which the aesthetic, philosophical and poetic sense of the artistic heritage of Joseph Conrad is revealed, in addition to the need to highlight the methodological significance of multicultural typological-critical receptions in foreign scientific works. The purpose of the paper is to reveal the meaning of the Polish component of the multicultural identity of Joseph Conrad. Theoretical and methodological basis of the study consists of critical English-language reviews, anthropology of culture, philosophy of culture as the basis of multiculturalism. The study of the formation of national-cultural identity notion was based on the achievements of the theorists of multiculturalism. In the process of writing such research methods as multicultural-typological and cultural-historical were used.