Conrad’s life and character were shaped by the troubled history of Poland and by the thwarted political idealism of his father. His patriotic and personal legacy was an anguished mixture of idealism, self-sacrifice, defeat, arrest, exile, bitterness and despair—leading to emigration, loneliness and guilt. Conrad’s birthplace lacked natural frontiers and was surrounded by powerful neighbors. It had been a Roman Catholic kingdom since 1024, and had frequently been attacked and invaded by Swedes, Tartars, Hungarians, Turks and Russians. In 1772—when Poland was weakened and made powerless by internal dissension—Frederick the Great of Prussia and Maria Theresa of Austria, anxious to prevent Russia from controlling all of Poland, signed a treaty with Catherine the Great in St. Petersburg that divided 80,000 square miles (about thirty percent of the nation) among themselves. Austria obtained Galicia, a large section of southwest Poland; Prussia took Pomerania, in northwest Poland; and Russia got a strip of territory in eastern Poland.
Twenty years later, when the remnant of Poland adopted a new constitution and showed signs of national regeneration, it was invaded from the east and west by Russia and Prussia. In the second partition in 1793, Catherine took an enormous section of eastern Poland, including almost all of Lithuania, and Prussia seized most of Poland west of Warsaw as well as the Baltic port of Danzig. Poland became a landlocked nation, less than one-third the size it had been before the invasion, and its remaining central section came under Russian control. After the national uprising led by Tadeusz Kosciuszko (who had fought in the American Revolution) was defeated in 1795, the remainder of Poland was divided among the Great Powers. Catherine, who formally annexed the Baltic Duchy of Courland, took sixty-two percent of the territory, Prussia took the Warsaw region and Austria got the last eighteen percent of the land.
Norman Davies attributes the partitions not to deliberate policy, but to the Russians’ brutal and blundering efforts to suppress political progress:
By obstructing even moderate reform, they repeatedly drove the reformers into rebellion; whilst, by sending their armies into Poland to crush the rebellions, they threatened to upset the whole balance of power in eastern Europe. Hence, to have a free hand in Poland, they were obliged to calm the fears of the Prussians and Austrians by agreeing to territorial compensations. Essentially, the three Partitions of Poland in 1772, 1793, and 1795 were not planned in advance. They were made necessary by the Russians’ compulsive desire to crush Reform at all costs, and they were sops to obtain the acquiescence of Berlin and Vienna.
After the third partition, Poland—transformed into the backward frontier regions of three dominant states and treated as a troublesome minority—disappeared from the map of Europe for 123 years. In 1897 the French playwright Alfred Jarry, creating an absurd scenario for an imaginary country, wrote the notorious stage direction: “En Pologne, c’est-à-dire nulle part.”1
The history of Poland in the nineteenth century was a series of disastrous attempts to regain national independence. Conrad’s family played a significant role in this history, sacrificing their fortune, liberty and life for an idealistic cause while maintaining no illusions about the possibility of success. Napoleon’s victories in Europe and the establishment in 1806 of the Duchy of Warsaw, which had its own army, seemed to foreshadow the resurrection of the old Polish state in the new liberal order of Europe. Polish divisions fought alongside Napoleon in the Moscow campaign of 1812 and remained loyal to him until the very end. Conrad’s paternal grandfather, Teodor Korzeniowski, was a cavalry lieutenant in Napoleon’s armies in 1807 and 1809, and took part in the Russian campaign under Prince Jozef Poniatowski. After Napoleon’s defeat at Waterloo in 1815, the Treaty of Vienna replaced the Duchy of Warsaw with the nominally independent Congress Kingdom of Poland, which had more extensive territory, but was unified with Russia and ruled by the Czar. The rest of Poland once again came under the complete—and apparently more final—control of the three reinstated partition powers.
Conrad owned more books on Napoleonic history, memoirs and campaigns than on any other subject. He remained a lifelong student of that era, and portrayed it in three stories and in his last two novels. The Rover (1923) takes place during Nelson’s battles with Napoleon and the unfinished Suspense (1925) concerns Napoleon’s escape from Elba. Though the Napoleonic legend lived on as part of the myth of Polish nationalism, Conrad, in his major political essay, “Autocracy and War” (1905), and in his autobiographical A Personal Record (1912), denied and dissociated himself from this myth. He condemned “the subtle and manifold influence for evil of the Napoleonic episode as a school of violence, as a sower of national hatreds, as the direct provocator of obscurantism and reaction, of political tyranny and injustice,” which were restored throughout Europe after his defeat. Conrad was horrified by the immorality of the conqueror’s ambition, expressed distaste for the character of Napoleon and blamed him for having raised in Poles “a false hope of national independence.”2
Polish Romantic literature, especially Adam Mickiewicz’s Konrad Wallenrod (1828), an exemplary tale of patriotic revenge and struggle for liberation, helped inspire the nationalist revival in 1830. His Pan Tadeusz (1834), the Polish national epic, nostalgically celebrated the glories of Polish country life and the hope of liberating the nation from the Russians with the help of Napoleon’s army. The Romantic literary tradition, in which Conrad’s father wrote, “elevated sacrifice and sorrow to sublime heights. Poland was compared to the Christ among nations, redeeming through suffering not only the Polish nation but mankind. Poland had a sacred mission to fulfill: to break the chains of absolutism and bring about universal freedom.”
Inspired in part by nationalist poetry, the Poles rose up in November 1830, established a substantial army and had some initial success. But they were inevitably crushed the following year, when the Russians re-entered Warsaw. In reprisal, the enemy eliminated the separate Polish army, closed the universities, suspended the constitution, abolished the parliament and made the Congress Kingdom an integral part of Russia.
Conrad’s paternal grandfather, a captain in the Polish army, took part in the insurrection of 1830. He formed his own cavalry squadron, was wounded twice and was decorated with a medal for valor. Prince Roman Sanguszko, a greatly esteemed friend of the family whom the young Conrad met in 1867 and later made the hero of his only Polish story, also took part in this rising. After the death of his young wife, Roman, an officer in the Russian guards, resigned his commission, enlisted as a private soldier and joined the Polish revolt. When captured and questioned by a sympathetic judge, who suggested that he was grief-stricken by his wife’s death and had joined the rebels on a reckless impulse, Roman nobly stated that he had enlisted from conviction. He was condemned for life to the Siberian mines—a sentence of deferred death. In Conrad’s story of sacrificial patriotism, Roman’s “religion of undying hope resembles the mad cult of despair, of death, of annihilation.” Conrad pessimistically suggests that Poland, “which persists in thinking, breathing, speaking, hoping, and suffering in its grave, railed in by a million of bayonets and triple-sealed with the seals of three great empires,” constantly demands such exemplary, if hopeless, martyrdom in order to keep alive the patriotic flame.
After the failure of the rising, 10,000 leaders and soldiers, the majority of the political and intellectual elite of the nation, left the country and settled mainly in Paris, which became the center of Polish revolutionary activities. Yet emigration was condemned even by those who had joined the exodus: “The images of duty abandoned, of betrayal, and above all—of desertion, had been common in Polish literature since the early nineteenth century, since the loss of Polish national independence. Adam Mickiewicz in his Pan Tadeusz wrote ‘Woe to us, who fled at the time of a plague, carrying our timorous heads abroad.’ And the other national poet-prophet, Juliusz Slowacki, was even more outspoken: ‘I have no dignity—I have fled from martyrdom.’ And they both meant voluntary exile.”3
Conrad’s homeland, the Polish Ukraine, that large fertile plain on the borders of Poland and Russia, had four languages and four religions. The governing class spoke Russian and belonged to the Orthodox Church; the intellectuals, landowners and estate managers spoke Polish and were Roman Catholics; the peasants and servants spoke Ukrainian and were members of the Eastern Uniat Church; and the merchants were mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews. This ethnically heterogeneous society gave Conrad a multi-lingual capacity and a cosmopolitan outlook that enabled him to adapt to several different countries and cultures.
About ten percent of all Polish-speaking inhabitants of the Ukraine, including Conrad’s family, belonged to the szlachta, a hereditary class, below the aristocracy, which combined the qualities of the gentry and the nobility. After Conrad had left Poland, he idealized his country and his class, praising its independence, morality and freedom, and stressing its historical connection to the philosophy and religion of the West. In a letter of May 1917 to the novelist Hugh Walpole, he glorified the Polish gentry and “those houses where, under a soul-crushing oppression, so much noble idealism, chivalrous traditions, the sanity and amenities of Western civilization were so valiantly preserved.” And after Poland had finally regained independence in 1919, he apotheosized “the Polish temperament with its tradition of self-government, its chivalrous view of moral restraints and an exaggerated respect for individual rights: not to mention the important fact that the whole Polish mentality, Western in complexion, had received its training from Italy and France and, historically, had always remained, even in religious matters, in sympathy with the most liberal currents of European thought.”
The reality, in fact, was quite different. In Poland, only the szlachta had political power and this proud but backward class was primarily responsible for the anarchy, weakness and degeneration of the country that had led to the partitions of the late eighteenth century. Though their ideals had been discredited, the noble ethos survived to inspire the hopeless rebellions of the nineteenth century. Davies observes:
Of all the products of Polish life before the Partitions, the Polish nobility—the szlachta and all their works—might seem to have been the most discredited. The szlachta’s knightly code had not helped them to fight and repel the Republic’s enemies. Their peacock pride in a supposedly exclusive ancestry was grotesquely unsuited to their miserable decline. Their social ideals of brotherly love and equality ill fitted their continuing support for serfdom. The political philosophy of their “Golden Freedom” resulted in common anarchy. . . . The szlachta were the laughing-stock of Europe, the butt which every radical wit from Defoe to Cobden could mock. If, in Carlyle’s cruel words, their noble Republic was “a beautifully phosphorescent rot-heap,” then they were the parasites who swarmed upon it. One might have supposed that the ideals of the szlachta were supremely redundant, and would have been quietly forgotten at the first opportunity. In fact, though the legal status of the szlachta was annulled in 1795 by the partitioning powers, its ideals lived on. The kultura szlachecka (the noble ethos) has become one of the central features of the modern Polish outlook.4
Conrad’s father, Apollo Korzeniowski (the name derives from the word korzen, or root), belonged to this impoverished landed gentry in the gubernia of Kiev, in the southeastern frontier of the Polish Ukraine. He was born into a family of Polish patriots in 1820 and educated at the local gymnasium at Zhitomir. At the age of twenty he entered St. Petersburg University, where he studied Oriental languages, literature and law. After six years, he seems to have learned very little Arabic and left without taking a degree. Physically unattractive, Apollo had an oversized head and a shrunken body, blunt features and thick hair, combed straight back from a wide Slavic forehead.
His brother-in-law Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had known Apollo since their schooldays, described his appearance and personality as well as the extremes of bitterness and kindness in his character:
In our part of the country he had the reputation of being very ugly and sarcastic. In fact he was not beautiful, nor even handsome, but his eyes had a very kind expression and his sarcasm was only verbal, of the drawing-room type; for I have never detected any in his feeling or in his actions. Open-hearted and passionate, he had a sincere love of people. In his deeds he was impractical, often even helpless. Uncompromising in speech and writing, he was frequently over-tolerant in everyday life. . . . He also had two sets of measures: one for the weak and ignorant, the other for the mighty of this world.
Apollo’s lack of social and political conformity, and his innate violence, were expressed in his writings as well as in his life. He had a fiery temperament and a powerful undercurrent of pessimism, tempered by “a special regard for the rights of the underprivileged of this earth.”5
Conrad’s mother, Eva Bobrowska, was, like Apollo, born on a country estate about 125 miles southwest of Kiev. Thirteen years younger than Apollo, she was the only surviving and much adored daughter in a family of six sons. Though Najder writes that she was “known for her beauty,”6 contemporary photographs reveal that she was actually quite homely, with a low forehead, long nose, widely spaced eyes and mousy expression. In 1847, through his friend Tadeusz, Apollo met the adolescent Eva, who was immediately attracted to his poetic temperament, his passionate patriotism and his sympathy for the underdog. He, in turn, was drawn to her lively imagination and her warm heart.
Unlike the Korzeniowskis, the Bobrowskis had increased their wealth by remaining aloof from political rebellions. For both personal and political reasons, Eva’s parents strongly disapproved of the courtship. Apollo had no occupation, owned nothing, seemed irresponsible and lazy. He was supported by his father, whose estate had been confiscated by the Russian authorities after the rising of 1830. Eva’s father even tried to marry Apollo to someone else, but he resisted the rich young ladies and remained faithful to Eva, who also discouraged all other suitors. After her father’s death, Eva, in poor health, was torn between his wishes and her love for Apollo. Finally, realizing that the strong-willed woman would never marry if she could not have the man she loved, the family acceded to her wishes, and they were married on May 4, 1856. Apollo spent the first years of his marriage administering country estates. By 1860 he had lost all of his own money and some of his wife’s dowry of nine thousand silver rubles.
Apollo’s soldier-father had written and privately printed a five-act tragedy in verse, so extremely boring that no one had ever been able to read it to the end. And Apollo—poet, dramatist, translator and revolutionary—also devoted himself to literary and political activities (which brought in very little money) rather than to his ostensible occupation: the management of agricultural estates. He published political, social and literary articles; two volumes of poetry, including the patriotic-religious Purgatorial Songs; and two plays, A Comedy (1854) and For the Love of Money (1859), and wrote four other plays, including No Hope (1866), whose title expressed his pessimistic philosophy.
A gifted linguist, Apollo had studied Russian, and translated German, French and English works into Polish: Heine’s poetry; Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton (1857); Victor Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea, La Légende des siècles (1860), Hernani (1862) and Marion Delorme (1863); Shakespeare’s early comedies, Much Ado About Nothing, The Two Gentlemen of Verona and The Comedy of Errors (of which only the latter was published, in 1866); and Dickens’ novel of social oppression in the coal mines, Hard Times (1866). He also planned, but never wrote, “a great Polish novel” about Muscovy’s corrupting and cynical influence on every aspect of Polish life.
Apollo’s sharp social satire, A Comedy, shows the conflict between an old and dishonest landowner and a poor but sympathetic proletarian, who asks for the hand of his ward in marriage. For the Love of Money attacks the nouveau riche and portrays a revolutionary idealist who has turned into a cynic. Vigny’s Chatterton dramatizes society’s indifference, even hostility, to poets; and Apollo’s preface condemns the “time when spiritual values are sacrificed to ‘the circus of material interests.’ ” Apollo had a caustic sense of humor and launched hysterical attacks on the complacent, self-serving rich. A contemporary critic compared him to a rabid animal: “His wit bites to the bone, his irony kills. His laughter is a kind of snarl, followed by a deep bite.” Modern Polish critics feel “his verses often appear too exalted, too pathetic. There is a discrepancy between the fairly simple ideas and the inflated form.”7 He was sceptical about human nature and “obsessed by a somber vision of threatening [Russian] forces which he saw rising up from a state of primeval chaos to overshadow and overthrow civilized man.” His poem “Before the Thunderstorm,” written after the failure of the Polish revolution of 1846 and the European revolutions of 1848, expresses his characteristic despair and patriotic grief:
So many days and so many years
have we groaned with the voice of orphans
on this our mother’s grave,
accompanied by the music of thunder;
on our own soil—yet dispossessed,
in our own homes—yet homeless!
This once proud domain of our fathers
is now but a cemetery and a ruin.
Our fame and greatness have melted away
in a stream of blood and tears;
and our sole patrimony
is the dust and bones of our ancestors.8
Conrad was significantly influenced by his father’s works. His translations first aroused Conrad’s interest in French and English culture: in Hugo’s Toilers of the Sea (written in political exile), which helped inspire Conrad’s maritime career; in Shakespeare’s plays, which he carried with him aboard ships and alluded to dozens of times in his fiction; and in Dickens’ Bleak House, which affected his grim portrayal of London in The Secret Agent. Conrad’s story “Because of the Dollars” (1914) echoed the title of Apollo’s play. A proverbial phrase from Apollo’s essay on Shakespeare: “Man fires, but God carries the bullet” is repeated in “Gaspar Ruiz”: “Man discharges the piece, but God carries the bullet.” The sacrifice of moral values to material interests, discussed in the Preface to Chatterton, is a dominant theme in Nostromo; the condemnation of the corrupting and cynical influence of Russia, in the unwritten novel, recurs powerfully in Under Western Eyes. Conrad certainly adopted his father’s scepticism and pessimism, and he repeated the arguments of Apollo’s polemic “Poland and Muscovy” in his own essay “Autocracy and War.” Though Apollo died when Conrad was only eleven years old, they established an intense, even harrowing relationship, and the father had the profoundest impact on the son.