Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album 

‘THE GRAVEYARD’: MOURNING AND COMMEMORATION

The 19th-century photograph album that Conrad described as “the graveyard” was designed to hold 52 small cartes-de-visite prints. Each page hosts two slots to allow for cards to be inserted or removed, facilitating exchange of images among consumers of this early form of social media. Most of the photographs are studio portraits of Conrad’s paternal (Korzeniowski) and maternal (Bobrowski) family and friends, taken primarily in Russian-controlled Poland and Ukraine between 1857 and 1895. Inscriptions on the cartes-de-visite show that they were gifted at departures and mailed between friends and family, even while in exile. Surviving correspondence reveals these photographic prints were used as playful tokens, and to stand-in for lost or distant family members at holidays like Christmas.   

Conrad’s parents carried a photo album with them into political exile in northern Russia, which became one of the few possessions that Conrad inherited from his parents after their premature deaths. The album was also among the few personal items that the orphaned survivor of Russian imperialism brought with him when he went into permanent exile abroad.  The contents of the album reveal that Conrad added photos over time, as with the photos of his cousin Maryla Bobrowska Tyszkowa, which were sent to him in 1890, while he was serving as captain of a Belgian steamer in colonial Africa.  

Torn cover of a magazine with ornate borders and a central portrait of a man framed by leave.

Conrad brought the portable Polish-Ukrainian "graveyard" on his trip to the Congo, during its colonization by Belgium. This African locale was the setting of his most famous novel, The Heart of Darkness (1899), which was serialized in a British monthly called Blackwood's Magazine. The complexity of Conrad's position -- as a victim of one colonial empire (Russian), a citizen of another (British), and an agent of a third (Belgian) -- helps to explain why his writing on Africa is, simultaneously, a profound (if sexist) meditation on the horrors of man's inhumanity to man and a powerful (if racist) indictment of European colonialism. 

Conrad referred to his photo album as a “graveyard,” at least in part, because it actually contained images of deceased family members.  Of particular significance are the photos connected with the death of his mother, Ewa, who was buried in Chernihiv (Ukraine) in April 1865.  Conrad’s widow, who inherited her husband’s Polish-Ukrainian photo album, recalled having in her possession “a faded photograph of his mother's lonely grave."

Grave adjacent to birch tree made to look like a cross. The grave is surrounded by grass and other trees behind it.

In an 1865 letter, Apollo Korzeniowski stated that he was enclosing a photo of Ewa’s grave with an inscription of the plaque placed in the church where she was buried.  Although that inscription and photo remain unknown, there is reason to believe that the image of the birch-tree graveside memorial included in Conrad’s album was a copy of the photo mentioned by Apollo and Jessie Conrad. The fact that this graveside photo was printed on similar stock as the following album photo of the 19th-century Catholic church in Chernihiv, suggests that the two images commemorated the same event (viz., Ewa’s death in exile).    

Roman catholic church surrounded by a fence. The two-story church has two columns in the front and a cross on the roof.
A Google street view of the a 19th century church. The facade of the church is bare and white.

The Roman Catholic church in which Ewa’s funeral mass was once celebrated was later shuttered and its cemetery destroyed in the period following the 1917 Russian Revolution. Even the name of the Chernihiv church is uncertain, due to conflicts in surviving documentation and the decimation of Ukraine’s Polish community during the revolutions, wars, and population movements that swept through the eastern European “bloodlands.” This public building was repurposed for secular uses, including as a regional archival depository, and has never been reconsecrated. Its fate after Russia’s full-scale military invasion of Ukraine (2022) is currently unknown.   

The fact that Russian missiles continue to deliberately target civilian infrastructure—including schools and cultural heritage institutions such as libraries, museums, and archives—does not bode well for the immediate future of this building in Chernihiv.  However, it does demonstrate a historical continuity between Imperial, Soviet, and post-Soviet policies vis-à-vis the minoritized communities that reside in the borderlands to Russia’s west. And it reveals the strategic importance assigned to institutions that collect and preserve the stories told by colonial subjects—stories that imperial powers actively seek to discredit, censor, and erase. 

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