Joseph Conrad - Man and Writer in the "House of Darkness"

Joseph Conrad - Man and Writer in the "House of Darkness"
Joseph Conrad grew up in the Polish Ukraine, a large, fertile plain between Poland and Russia. It was a divided nation, with four languages, four religions, and a number of different classes. A fraction of the Polish-speaking inhabitants, including Conrad's family, belonged to the szlachta, a hereditary class below the aristocracy, which combined qualities of gentry and nobility. They had the political power, despite their impoverished state. Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, belonged to this class. He studied for six years at…