Abstract. Joseph Conrad died 100 years ago, the same year as Kafka. The two could even have met at Berlin’s Anhalter Bahnhof on a specific day in 1914. Though they are worlds apart, one can still find parallels: emotional ones like guilt and fear, a seismographic sense of the future, intuitions about the emergence of totalitarianism and the largely unmanageable world of today – even if Conrad sets his characters in a more global context than Kafka, between Asia, Europe, Africa and America. To mark the 100th anniversary of his death on 3 August 2024, we are publishing an essay written by Elmar Schenkel commemorating on the 150th anniversary of his birth in 2007. It becomes clear how clairvoyantly Conrad anticipated themes that are of endless concern to us today: (post)colonialism, globalisation and Russia’s relationship with the West.

Key words: Joseph Conrad; biography; Poland / Ukraine / Russia; postcolonialism; exile; bilingual writing

Schenkel E (2024) Shadow lines into the present: Joseph Conrad then and now. Creativity 7(1): 185–197. doi:10.22381/C7120243