SHATTER-ZONE OF EMPIRES: UKRAINE AND THE POLISH-LITHUANIAN COMMONWEALTH · Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album

Small child in traditional Polish clothing and holding a riding crop. He is standing to the right of a decorative chair.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski at Age 4, in traditional Polish clothing and holding a riding crop (a symbolic attribute of the Polish nobility), taken in 1862, shortly before his family’s exile to northern Russia. Joseph Conrad Collection, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library, Yale University.

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Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski (Joseph Conrad) was born in a borderland region whose religious, social, and ethnic diversity was—and continues to be—exploited by competing colonial powers. In the late 18th-century, the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth was invaded, conquered, and erased from the map of Europe by three empires (the Russian, German, Austrian). As a result of the partitions, Imperial Russia obtained the territories and peoples of what is today the independent countries of Lithuania, Poland, Belarus, and Ukraine, where the Korzeniowskis lived.

The struggle to regain independence began amid the partitions and repeatedly assumed violent form over the next 127 years, with notable uprisings in 1794, 1830, 1863, 1905, and 1919. There were also petitions for political representation or self-rule under the empires, alliances sought with enemies of the empires, local protests in cities and churches, underground presses, patriotic literature and even clothing worn in opposition to the Russification and Germanization of the former commonwealth.

Conrad’s parents, Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski, were both active in the underground movements for independence before the January Uprising of 1863. Apollo was a poet, playwright, translator, and clandestine political activist, who hosted the secret “Committee of the Movement” in Warsaw.

A man with a long dark beard and dark hair has his left hand curled into a fist for his head to rest on.

Ewa organized patriotic masses in Zhytomyr and wore “National Mourning" (żałoba narodowa) style. She dressed Conrad in the colors of the French Revolution, with a mourning frock for church, as well as szlachta (Polish noble) clothing. Although the boy was christened after his maternal grandfather (Józef) and his paternal grandfather (Teodor), his ardently patriotic parents called him Konrad, after the heroes of two poems by the Polish national poet Adam Mickiewicz (1798-1855).

Woman in traditional Polish mourning clothes, consisting of a long black dress and black veil, poses next to an intricately detailed chair while holding a small book.

In late 1861, Russian authorities arrested Apollo on charges of illegal writings and inciting unrest. Ewa was also interrogated separately from her husband. The following spring, both Apollo and Ewa were sentenced to exile for anti-Russian activities. Multiple additional family members were later arrested, exiled or killed for supporting the 1863 January Uprising. Memories around this failed anti-colonial revolt shaped Conrad’s initial impressions of the world, not least because the four-year-old future novelist accompanied parents into exile, and witnessed their early deaths as a result.

Map showing Central and Eastern European cities related to Joseph Conrad's family exile, with arrows indicating movement between locations.

A map of Joseph Conrad's family exile and where they were during certain time periods.

This map shows the route taken by the Korzeniowskis, who were conveyed under military guard from Warsaw (Poland) to Vologda (Russia), over 1000 miles away. Later, they were allowed to move their exile south to Chernihiv (Ukraine), where Conrad’s mother died of tuberculosis in 1865. Apollo mourned her death deeply, and a few years later was released from Russian exile due to his own failing health. He moved Conrad across the border to Lviv (Ukraine), followed by Kraków (Poland), both under the Austro-Hungarian Empire at that time. Conrad’s father succumbed to his own illness in 1869.

Conrad was 11 years old when he walked the streets of Krakow in the funeral procession for his father. For six years he passed through guardianships of friends and relatives, as well as multiple tutors and schooling in Poland and Ukraine. Although supported by his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, a Polish noble landowner in Ukraine, the young man had few prospects as the son of political exiles—and likely would have been conscripted into the Russian army.

In 1874, Conrad emigrated from the Austrian empire (where he was living illegally) into a life of permanent exile from his homeland, first as a merchant seaman and then as a professional writer. But it was not until 1886, when he received his naturalization papers from the British Crown, that the Ukrainian-born Polish nobleman formally ceased to be a subject of the Russian empire.