ABSTRACT
A spellbinding storyteller, aside from his other talents, he must have told this Polish audience his reminiscences of five years in the British merchant navy, to which his latest voyage certainly contributed by means the least startling details. The day after his return from Marienbad, on September 10, he embarked as second mate aboard the Riversdale, a fifteen-hundred-ton sailing ship registered at London, bound for Madras. The feeling of real life that pervades it derives only from the genius of the author, but also from the reliability of his memory, for the pages of The Nigger of the Narcissus are actually nothing but the realistic and lyrical record of the actual voyage of the ship. The letters to Spiridion Kliszczewski from Singapore, Calcutta from the end of September, 1885, to the beginning of January, 1886, prove how touched this lonely foreigner had been by the friendliness shown him by the watchmaker’s family “on the strength of a distant national connection.”
