Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album
INTRODUCTION
This digital exhibit commemorates not only the centenary of Joseph Conrad's death (1924), but also the tenth anniversary of the start of Russia's war against Ukraine (2014), the place of his birth. The centerpiece of this exhibit is the nineteenth-century photo album that the Polish-English author of The Heart of Darkness once described as “the graveyard.”
This family heirloom was one of the few personal items that the Ukrainian-born Polish orphan carried with him when he emigrated from the Russian Empire in 1874. In addition to photos of relatives dressed in Polish “national mourning,” the album includes a commemorative portrait of Conrad’s dying father, who was exiled (along with his wife and son) for anti-imperial political activity; an exterior photo of the Roman Catholic church in Chernihiv (Ukraine) where Conrad’s exiled mother was buried; as well as a snapshot of a birch-tree cross over an as-yet-unidentified grave (possibly his mother’s final resting place).
By focusing on Conrad’s portable memorial to the land and people he was forced to leave behind, this library exhibit seeks to:
- Educate visitors about his Polish-Ukrainian roots and his family’s experience of Russian colonialism
- Explore the role of early East European photography in commemorating anti-colonial resistance and mourning personal/collective loss
- Provide historical perspective for understanding the present-day military conflict in Ukraine
This unique piece of Conradiana was purchased by Duke University Libraries in 1968, on the recommendation of Dale B. J. Randall (1929-2016), a professor in the Department of English, who had just published a monograph on Conrad’s friendship with Francis Warrington Dawson II, a writer from South Carolina. When the album first came to Duke, it was primarily of “biographical” interest, as attested by the only two publications about it: a 1968 research note on “some new Conrad biographical sources” by Randall and a 1972 article by Virginia R. Gray and Zofia Grzybowska, the two Duke librarians who first worked on identifying and describing the photos of “young Josef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski’s” antecedents.
But now that the Black Lives Matter movement and Russia’s neo-imperialist war on Ukraine have brought anti-racism and decolonization to the fore of scholars’ research agenda, the Polish-Ukrainian context in which Conrad’s photo “grave-yard” was produced has acquired a new importance. This necessitated a new round of archival research, analysis, and description, begun in the summer of 2022. In early 2024, the entire photo album was digitized by Duke University Libraries’ Digital Production Center to make it made freely available as a new digital collection entitled Joseph Conrad photograph album of his Polish relatives.
Between October 8, 2024 and April 5, 2025, Conrad's photo album served as the cornerstone of an exhibit in the Michael and Karen Stone Family Gallery of Duke University’s David M. Rubenstein Rare Book and Manuscript Library. The exhibit was curated by Ernest Zitser, Librarian for Slavic, Eurasian and East European Studies at Duke University, and Kimberly Kresica, Records Description Archivist, State Archives of North Carolina. Meg Brown, Yoon Kim, and Grace Zayobi prepared and designed both the in-person and online versions of the exhibit, Michael Daul created the album viewer, Aaron Welborn edited the text, and Janelle Hutchinson created the graphics. This exhibition was supported in part by the E. Rhodes and Leona B. Carpenter Foundation, the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Endowment Fund, and Duke University's Department of Slavic and Eurasian Studies.
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