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eighteenth century Poland was, in the words of Frederick of Prussia, ‘like an artichoke, ready to be eaten leaf by leaf. Shorn of two-thirds of its territory in the Partitions of 1773 and 1793, the Commonwealth finally collapsed for good in 1795. The eastern half of the old Commonwealth lands fell to Russia, the remainder to Prussia and Austria. Like Kievan Rus, Poland had fallen off the map. Like the Ukrainians, the Poles were now a nation without a state.
    Shared misfortune did not turn them into friends. During the Polish rising of 1863, Ukrainian peasants rounded up insurgents and turned them over to the Russian authorities. At the end of the First World War Polish and Ukrainian partisans fought over Galicia, left vacant by the collapsed Austro-Hungarian empire. Between the wars Ukrainian nationalists in Polish-ruled western Ukraine mounted an assassination campaign against Polish government officials, and the two partisan armies fought again at the end of the Second World War, as the Germans retreated west before the Red Army. The bickering continued right up to 1945, when a wholesale population exchange brought about a crude but effective divorce.
    The reason for conflict was simple. Ukrainians regarded Ukraine as Ukrainian. Nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Poles regarded it – along with the rest of the old eastern borderlands – as immutably Polish. The borderlands, in fact, were even more Polish than Poland proper, because the provincial nobility, unlike the sophisticates of Warsaw, had stuck to old-fashioned szlachta ways. The fact that the actual population of those borderlands was mostly of a different nationality was immaterial. Hence Adam Mickiewicz, Poland’s national poet and a man who never visited Warsaw in his life, was able to open his patriotic epic Pan Tadeusz with the words ‘Oh Lithuania’.
    The other great example of the borderland mentality is Joseph Conrad. Born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, he grew up in Terehovye, a small village eighty miles south-west of Kiev. His family were crazily, pathologically, patriotic. Jozef’s father Apollo celebrated his birth in 1857 with a poem entitled ‘To My Son, born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression’. With baptism came another poem: Tell yourself that you are without land, without love, without Fatherland, without humanity – as long as Poland, our Mother, is enslaved.’ Conrad’s own earliest surviving work is a note to his grandmother, thanking her for sending cakes to Apollo, by then in gaol for anti-Russian agitation in a Warsaw coffee-shop. The six-year-old solemnly signs himself ‘grandson, Pole, Catholic, nobleman’. Later, his most vivid childhood memories were of his mother wearing black in mourning for Poland’s demise, and of a great-uncle’s tales of eating roast dog on the retreat from Moscow with Napoleon. When Conrad set off, aged sixteen, to join the French merchant navy, a family friend saw him on to the train with the words ‘Remember, wherever you sail you are sailing towards Poland!’. Surfeited with Polishness, Conrad only ever went back home once, ending his days in the undemanding county of Kent. His Canterbury tombstone muddles up his English and Polish names, rechristening him ‘Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski’.
    The Korzeniowskis’ house is still there in Terehovye, used now as the village school. Though not very big, one can see that it once belonged to gentry. The doors are thick and panelled, the walls have cornicing round them, and plaster rosettes show where chandeliers once hung. The drawing room has been turned into the school gymnasium – lines painted on to the parquet, basketball hoops screwed to the walls, and a portrait of Lenin propped up behind a pile of hockey-sticks in a boarded-up bay window. Outside a line of lime trees marks the edge of what was once a terraced garden.
    The village is a tiny place, silent save for a chained dog, and smelling of melting snow and horse