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JOSEPH CONRAD’S LIFEJózef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, more known by his pseudonym Joseph Conrad was born in 1857 in Berdichev, Poland and died on August 3, 1924 in Bishopsbourne, UK. Joseph Conrad. British novelist of Polish origin, is considered as one of the big modern writers in English language, whose work explores the vulnerability and the moral instability of the human being. He was born in Berdichev, Poland (nowadays in Ukraine) and his father was a Polish noble with coat of arms, from whom he inherited the love to literature. When he was a child, his father, a liberal and nationalistic Polish writer, was sent to the exile to the north of Russia together with his family, for his intervention in the Polish insurrection of 1863. Orphan at the age of 12, he lived in Cracow with an uncle. Of these traumatic experiences as a child on the Russian occupation, it is possible that Joseph Conrad derived subjects against the colonialism, like in the novel The Heart of Darkness or Nostromo. |
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When he was 17 he went to Marseilles and embarked as a sailor. For four years he sailed in merchant French ships He lived an adventurous life, setting off in Marseilles and being involved in traffic of arms and political conspiracies. He travelled to South America, India, Borneo, Africa, Australia and England, where he landed for the first time in 1878 and joined the Royal Merchant Navy, becoming a merchant captain. He also fought in Spain during the Carlistas wars in don Carlos' troops and was at the edge of the suicide due to an unhappy love affair. He obtained the British nationality in 1886; after a few years he changed his Polish name, Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, because it sounded better in English. At the age of 38 he retired from the Merchant Navy and took to writing. He had inluences from important writers as Henry James, Georg Bernard Shaw, Bertrand Russell, John Galsworthy and Rudyard Kipling. |
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His experiences, specially in the Malay Archipelago and in the river Congo during 1890, appear in his works, written in English, that was his fourth language after the Pole, the Russian and the French.
His first novel was published and he married Jessie George during 1895. His novels, which narrate adventures of the marine life, captivated the English public not only for the innovation of the topic but for the mastery in the story and in the use of the language. His prominent characters are men with hero’s category who face to their condition and human limits, defying the evil or the corruption, in his search of ideal supreme.
His life is marked by the adventure and for the suffering produced by his gout, as well as the paralysis of his wife and the exiguous income that he got of his work.
He wrote 13 novels, two books of memories and 28 short stories. His novel Nostromo (1904), is considered by many critics as his masterpiece.
His writing treats of the human condition and the struggle of the individual between the good and evil. Frequently the narrator is a retired sailor - possibly the alter Conrad's ego, since some of his novels are considered to be autobiographical;
Conrad, next to the North American author Henry James has been called a pre-modernist writer, and also he can be framed within the Symbolism and the literary Impressionism. Joseph Conrad died from a heart attack in 1924 and was buried in the cemetery of Canterbury, with three errors in his name on his tomb. In his gravestone there are some verses of Edmund Spenser which say:
The dream after the effort,
after the storm the port,
the rest after the war,
the death after the life, much please
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Nałęcz coat-of-arms. In 1923, the year before his death, Conrad, who possessed this hereditary Polish coat-of-arms, declined a British knighthood. |
Conrad’s home in Warsaw |
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Glossary |
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Coat of arms: escudo de armas. Set off: zarpar Merchant: mercante Defying: desafiando |
Search: búsqueda Gout: gota (enfermedad) Income: ingresos, renta Masterpiece: obra maestra |
Authors:
Paula Avilés, Rubén Ballesteros, Inés Moya, Juan Rodríguez, Pedro Valera. 1ºBach B 2006-2007
