The Life and the Art

The Life and the Art: A Study of Conrad's Under Western Eyes has a twofold origin. Over the past ten years, as an associate editor of the prospective Cambridge Edition of Under Western Eyes, the author, Keith Carabine, has worked on the genesis and composition of the novel in its several versions and on its literary, ideological, social, and historical contexts. At the same time during these years he has taught seminar courses on Conrad for undergraduates and on Conrad and Dostoevsky for postgraduates. This interpenetration of teaching and research constantly reminded the author that his many hours devoted to textual minutiae and manuscript variations or to a study of Conrad's Polish background should result not only in a scholarly edition of the novel in a book that will demonstrate the ways in which Conrad's life and his protracted, uncertain composition of the Under Western Eyes enrich his art; and the title of this book deliberately invokes Conrad's belief in the inseparability of the art and the life. This study's six chapters concentrate in different ways and with differing emphases on the complex inter-relations between the art and the life, on the intersections between Conrad's personal preoccupations, fictional aesthetic, and working practices with regard to what he described as without doubt ... the most deeply meditated novel that came from under my pen.