‘THE GRAVEYARD’: NATIONAL MOURNING AND ANTI-COLONIAL RESISTANCE · Joseph Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “Graveyard”: Memory, Mourning, and Anti-Colonial Resistance in his 19th-Century Family Photo Album

Album photos, such as those collected in Conrad’s Polish-Ukrainian “graveyard,” are not only family relics to be treasured by victims and survivors of colonialism. They are a primary source for understanding the everyday life of people living under colonial rule. In this sense, Conrad's family photo album provides a unique visual documentation of the experience of one of the minoritized communities that inhabited the ethnically- and religiously-diverse “shatter zone” of several continental empires (Russian, German, Austrian).

The individuals depicted in the album photos include Conrad’s grandparents, uncles, cousins, guardians, tutors, and friends. Some photos preserve images of political resistance, messages of exile, last memorials, rare visits “home,” and chance meetings abroad. After Conrad married and settled down to write, these images solidified into the “graveyard” he kept separate from all new family photos taken in England.

An older woman in a black dress with a veil standing next to a chair while holding a small book.

In this posed studio portrait, Conrad’s maternal grandmother appears in “national mourning” (żałoba narodowa), a style of dress featuring black clothing, veils, and prominent crucifixes. Nineteenth-century Polish women wore this fashion as an act of public protest against Russian imperial rule, by mourning the “death” of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, as well as the protestors and insurgents who fought for its restoration.

Originating with the failure of the 1830 November Uprising, the fashion reappeared shortly before the 1863 January Uprising. Visible in numerous early photograph portraits, its popularity led to multiple bans under the Russian Empire. Regardless, national mourning jewelry of miniature chains, padlocks, scythes and funeral wreaths was passed down for generations.

Conrad’s grandmother is shown leaning on a tall chair topped with a carved, single-headed eagle, a symbol of Poland (rather than the double-headed eagle of Imperial Russia). This chair appears in many photos of dissidents taken at the Warsaw studio of photographer Karol Beyer. In addition to Teofila, eagle chair portraits of Apollo, Ewa, and Conrad Korzeniowski can be found in other archives, all promoting their Polish identity in protest.

A standing man in military clothing. He is leaning on a small table with his right hand.

The swaggering subject of this studio portrait shows off the military style worn by the participants of the January Uprising of 1863. The photo, which is inscribed "to young Conrad," appears to have come from a close relation (possibly his paternal uncle, Robert Korzeniowski) who supported that armed insurrection against Russian imperial rule. In tandem with the national mourning fashion, men were photographed in “traditional” Polish clothing such as the papakha or konfederatka hat, kontusz or kaftan with belts, or szlachta coats, to stand in cultural and political opposition to the partitioning empires.

A bearded man sitting on a chair with his arm on a table to his left, on the table there is a cross.

The inscription on this portrait from the Kyiv-based “photographic atelier” of Jos. F. Kletzer quotes a line from "A prayer while a long distance from home in unhappy circumstances." This prayer appeared in Roman Catholic prayer books published after the November Uprising of 1830, likely to commemorate those Poles who emigrated or were exiled for their anti-colonial political activity. This inscribed photo may have been given to the Korzeniowski family at the start of their own term of exile in 1862.