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By Root 4739 0

and subsequently naturalized as a subject of the world’s foremost imperial power, and, further, as a seaman who traveled around the world during the heyday of European imperialism, he had a diversity of viewpoints that enabled him to write illuminating fiction on this theme. Another such example is that of language. That he is one of the foremost English prose stylists is an especially remarkable achievement given that this was his third language (after Polish and French, the latter being the language of the writers he most admired) and that he did not begin to learn it until he was a young adult.

Conrad’s unique circumstances as an individual were complemented by the fact that he occupied a singularly opportune moment in the history of British literature. His period of artistic fertility occurred precisely on the cusp between a Victorianism that was rapidly becoming antiquated and a modernism that would not be fully developed until after World War I. Dramatic changes in the reading public and the publishing industry, along with technological and geopolitical developments that challenged the traditional insularity of British culture, made the era ripe for both formal and thematic literary innovations. Yet while the particulars both of Conrad’s individual life and his historical moment no doubt provided him with special opportunities and capabilities, it was a combination of raw talent and uncompromising dedication to his artistic vision that enabled him so fully to actualize their potential. It is through understanding the remarkable circumstances of his life that one may see how it paradoxically came to be the case that this Polish-born, Francophile mariner was uniquely equipped to exploit the aesthetic and ideological instabilities of his era and thereby become a vital force in the development of British literary modernism.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, who published under the Anglicized pseudonym Joseph Conrad, was born on December 3, 1857, in southeastern Russian-occupied Poland—specifically, in or near Berdichev, a Polish province in the Ukraine. His family were Catholic members of the Polish hereditary nobility, the szlachta, which Conrad unassumingly characterized as “the land-tilling gentry” in order to make clear that this group (which comprised about ten percent of the population and for whom there was no distinction between aristocracy and gentry) was not comparable to the small minority of superwealthy families that constituted the aristocracy of his adoptive country. A formidable power in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, Poland had gone into decline and then been systematically dismantled by its more powerful neighbors, Austria, Russia, and Prussia, in a series of partitions in the late eighteenth century. In 1795, in the last of these partitions, the remnants of Polish territory were taken, and the nation would not be reconstituted until after World War I. Poland’s subjugation was a profound influence on Poles of Conrad’s generation in general and for Conrad in particular, given that many members of his family were deeply committed to the cause of autonomy for their homeland. The extent to which his father, Apollo Korzeniowski, a prominent playwright, poet, and translator, embraced the nationalist cause is indicated in the title of a poem he composed that marked Conrad’s birth in relation to the first Polish partition of 1772: “To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression, a Song for the Day of His Christening.” For his political activism, Apollo was imprisoned by the Russian authorities in the fall of 1861 and then, upon his release the following spring, was exiled with his wife, Ewa, and their only child to Vologda, a cold city northeast of Moscow. The harsh circumstances of their exile took a toll on the health of both parents. Ewa died of tuberculosis in 1865, when Conrad was seven years old. In 1867 the ailing Apollo and his son were permitted to return to Poland, where Apollo died, also of tuberculosis, in 1869. His funeral procession, in Cracow, inspired a major nationalist