Heart Of Darkness

27 Pages 6726 Words

got and we not find (i.e., "if I succeed, you shall fail").
The detailed biographies by Frederick Karl (1979) and Zdislaw Najder (1983) demonstrate how the facts pertaining to Conrad's unimaginable childhood are (as always) involved in illusion retrospectively created by the interpretation which cites (and sites) them. But whether his father was a noble democrat or a hopeless romantic and however his mother felt about her husband's political activities, one cannot doubt the searing impress of early experience on their only child, Józef Teodor Konrad Nalecz Korzeniowski. Two days after Conrad's birth (3 Dec. 1857), his father, Apollo, commemorated the occasion and his own patriotic preoccupation with a poem "To My Son Born in the 85th Year of Muscovite Oppression, A Song," which urged: "Baby son, tell yourself / You are without land, without love, / Without country, without people, / While Poland--your Mother is entombed" (Najder 11-12). When his son was almost four, the father, active in clandestine resistance to Poland's Russian occupiers, was arrested, and the small family was condemned to join a tiny, desolate community of exiles in northern Russia. Konrad evidently spent most of his early youth without playmates. A few months after he turned seven, his long-declining mother died of tuberculosis, and he was left with an increasingly melancholy and ailing father who eked out small funds translating and writing. Finally, returned to Poland with his ten-year-old, Apollo published his Studies on the Dramatic Element in the Works of Shakespeare just in time to serve as a kind of testament for the the son who shortly saw "entombed" Poland receive his father's body to the accompaniment of a demonstration by Cracow university students. So Konrad passed to the practical care of his mother's brother, Tadeusz Brobowski.
Little wonder, then, that when not yet seventeen, Konrad sheered off from the landlocked scene of all that woe and patern...