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

Photographer stamps from the album in French, German, Polish and Russian, of exhibitions in Paris, Vienna, L’viv and Warsaw.

Early Eastern European adopters of this new technology, like Karol Beyer (1818-1877) in Warsaw, also seized on photography’s potential to promote Polish patriotism and document anti-colonial resistance.  Not only were many “national mourning” and dissident portraits taken in Beyer’s studio, but he also created composite portraits of pro-Polish delegations and the “Five Fallen” shot by the Russian army in Warsaw in 1861.  The popularity of Beyer’s prints and his participation in political meetings led to his own arrest and exile by Russian authorities, a sentence shared by some of his clients, including Apollo and Ewa Korzeniowski. 

Inscriptions in Polish from friends and family also appear on the backs of some photos in the Conrad album. Along with studio stamps, these markings help to narrow dates and contexts of the photos.  In so doing, they help to illustrate the scattered connections and unsettled nature of Conrad’s early life, thereby expanding his story beyond what appears in standard, English-language biographies.

Zhytomyr, Ukraine

In the first half of the 19th-century, many of Conrad’s relatives resided in and around Zhytomyr (Ukraine), a provincial capital under the Russian empire and a center of culture, education, publishing, and medical care.  Felix Czerkawski (fl. 1860s) was one of the early photographers in the city and, based on the photographer stamps, many photos in Conrad’s album were taken in this studio.  In the portrait above, a young girl is even holding a cartes-de-visite photo album similar to Conrad’s, as if anticipating the sharing and receiving of family photos after the sitting.

Conrad’s parents moved to Zhytomyr after failing to manage a farming estate.  Apollo turned to writing political articles and plays before joining the growing independence movement in Warsaw.  Ewa worked with Apollo’s sister to organize patriotic Catholic masses in Zhytomyr, before moving with Conrad to join her husband in 1861.Their correspondence was intercepted by the Russian government and used as evidence to sentence them to exile in Vologda.

Although little is known about Czerkawski’s Zhytomyr studio and most of his portraits in the album are unidentified, the photos appear to align with the decade of resistance and exile when the Korzeniowskis were closest to the city.  One photo is inscribed to Apollo just a few months after Ewa’s death, which must have reached him while exiled in Chernihiv (Ukraine).  His letters of the time reveal his devotion to a photo of her, as well as the desire to send memorial copies to friends, perhaps to add to their own albums.

Kraków, Poland

By 1867, Apollo was so ill that he was released from internal exile in the Russian Empire. Despite limitations on where he could travel, he crossed the border into L’viv, a diverse and cosmopolitan city then under the suzerainty of the Habsburg dynasty. Unable find satisfactory work for himself or schooling for his son, Apollo next moved to Kraków, the historic royal capital of Poland but a minor provincial capital in the Austrian empire.  Apollo’s hopes to connect with other Polish refugees and write for magazines (published outside the jurisdictional purview of Russian censors), were unrealized when he succumbed to his illness.  Photographic copies of Apollo’s portrait, painted shortly before his death, were distributed to friends and family through the same Kraków studio as the following portrait.

The studio depicted in the stamp on the back of this portrait belonged to Walery Rzewuski (1837-1888), a prominent Kraków-based photographer who documented the people and history of that city, much like Karol Beyer in Warsaw.  The subject of this photo was Stefan Buszczyński (1821-1892), a writer and participant of the 1863 January Uprising.  He was sentenced to death by the Russian authorities but managed to flee abroad. Buszczyński was a friend of the Korzeniowskis and, after Apollo’s death in May 1869, served as a guardian of their only child. His own children, Konstanty and Ofelia, became Conrad's early school friends in Kraków.

The back of this portrait bears the following inscription: “For Konrad Korzeniowski from his, his parents' and his family's friend Stefan Buszczyński,  Kraków, 15 Sept 1871” (“Konradowi Korzeniowskiemu jego i Rodziców jego i całej rodziny przyjaciel Stefan Buszczyński, Kraków, 15 Wrzes: 1871”). This photo was gifted almost a year after the guardianship had been transferred from Buszczyński to Conrad’s grandmother, Teofila Bobrowski.  While the inscription is warm and familial, Buszczyński himself was leaving in pursuit of better opportunities in self-exile.  For the rest of his life, he continued to write and advocate for the Polish cause through numerous moves between Switzerland, Kraków, and L’viv.

Radom and Lublin, Poland

Joseph Conrad began to correspond with his younger first cousins in the late 1880s, while still at sea.  Zunia, Marta, Maryla, their brothers, and "Aunt K." Bobrowski all lived in Radom (Poland) after 1886.  He sometimes enclosed photos of himself in letters, including some en route to take on a captainship in the Congo. Family correspondence reveals that Conrad's photo was brought out and displayed at his cousins’ family Christmas table in 1884.

“For my beloved brother from Maryli, May 1890” was how Conrad’s cousin Maryla Bobrowska signed the photo that Conrad received in the Congo, months later.  In a letter from September 1890, Conrad notified her that "the photograph will be in my album so that I can glance each day at my dear little sister." 

In reply, Maryla sent another portrait of herself, holding a book with the words "Album 1890," as a way of acknowledging their exchange of photographs.  This time, however, the back of the photo bore a different inscription: “To my beloved nephew Conrad Korzeniowski I offer a new gift, [your] very serious Aunt Marysia / Lublin 15th October 1890.”  The change in location (from Radom to Lublin) and in familial terms (from “sister” to “aunt”) may reflect her marriage in the interim months.  Lublin was also the childhood home to Conrad’s more distant cousins, Aniela and Karola Zagórska, who maintained correspondence with Conrad and even exchanged a few visits as adults.  In the 1920s, Aniela Zagórska went on to translate Conrad’s works into Polish.