In a quiet corner of the University of Notre Dame’s main library stands a bust of Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, better known by his pen name Joseph Conrad. On the base of the bust is an inscription both curt and strangely ambiguous: “Thought in Polish, wrote in English.”
Some might take the statement literally. Even H.L. Mencken, one of Conrad’s most ardent contemporary champions, admitted that it sometimes seemed as though the trilingual foreign-born master of English prose “finds a French phrase, or even a Polish phrase, and that it loses something by being done into English.”
But what the inscriber more likely had in mind related to Conrad’s sensibility and outlook. From the metaphysical abyss reflected in the sea to the spiritual implications of betrayal to the redemptive power of suffering for the sake of honor, Conrad’s obsessions recall more the Slavic literary tradition, specifically the Russian, than the English.
It’s impossible to understand Conrad’s life and art fully without understanding his relationship to Russia. Conrad’s father, Apollo, was a radical intellectual who studied law at St. Petersburg University and dreamed of a Poland free from the czarist yoke. Conrad and his mother, Ewa, would pay for his father’s views when the whole family was exiled to Russia following a crackdown on Polish independence activists. The harsh climate that met the Korzeniowskis on their arrival contributed to the early deaths of both parents from tuberculosis, a tragedy that forever colored Conrad’s views of his forced adopted childhood home. His experiences as a victim of the Russian empire would also give him unique insights into imperialism, allowing him to write about that system’s ugly aspects in a way that his contemporary Rudyard Kipling never could or would.
For Conrad, Russia was a civilization so rooted in autocracy and barbarism that it was literally irredeemable. In his essay Autocracy and War, composed as Russian armies were losing to the Japanese in Manchuria and the Revolution of 1905 was sweeping through the empire, he wrote that “it is impossible to initiate a rational scheme of reform upon a phase of blind absolutism; and in Russia there has never been anything else.” What made Russian autocracy so insidious was not just the harshness and severity of the state but how its perversity corrupted otherwise great minds. “Some of the best intellects of Russia, after struggling in vain against the spell, ended by throwing themselves at the feet of that hopeless despotism as a giddy man leaps into an abyss,” Conrad wrote.
Conrad likely had one intellect in mind more than any other when he wrote those words. If he loathed Russia in general, he detested the novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky in particular, taking grave exception whenever a friend or acquaintance would compare him to his Russian predecessor. Dostoevsky’s utopian, mystical Russian nationalism repulsed Conrad, whose own pessimistic politics fell largely within the Burkean conservative tradition of ordered liberty. Still, the author of the Brothers Karamazov, a novel that Conrad called “terrifically bad and impressive and exasperating,” clearly influenced the younger man, and Conrad’s diatribes against Dostoevsky often smack of protesting too much. Many have noted the similarities in plot and theme between Conrad’s Under Western Eyes and Crime and Punishment, both of which involve a St. Petersburg student committing a despicable act and spending the remainder of the narrative seeking redemption.
Less discussed is how much The Secret Agent, Conrad’s masterpiece about an anarchist cell in London, also owes to Dostoevsky. When asked what differentiates him from the police, one of the novel’s crazed bomb-carrying anarchists replies, “They depend on life, which, in this connection is a historical fact surrounded by all sorts of restraints … whereas I depend on death, which knows no restraint and cannot be attacked.” The response recalls the enthusiastic nihilism voiced by leftist revolutionaries in Dostoevsky’s works, particularly in Demons.
Moreover, there are a few moments in which Conrad seems to hint that the Russian outlook contains possibilities that the English one lacks. When the English narrator of Under Western Eyes expresses his bafflement at Russia and its revolutionaries, a Russian native responds, “You belong to a people which has made a bargain with Fate and wouldn’t like to be rude to it. But we have made no bargain. It was never offered to us — so much liberty for so much cash.” The reader senses that Conrad is not without sympathy for the point.
Some aspects of Conrad’s relationship with Russia have been covered quite thoroughly in existing biographies and studies. But aside from some niche academic work decades ago, his engagement with Russian literature in general and Dostoevsky, in particular, remains an underexplored topic. I bring this up because, considering the excellent works on Conrad already available, among them Zdzislaw Najder’s definitive biographies and Maya Jasanoff’s fascinating The Dawn Watch, it’s not clear what value writing a new and short general study of Conrad’s life would add unless it explored some such understudied issue. Bearing that in mind, Robert Hampson’s new Conrad biography is a mixed bag.
The book has its strong points. It devotes a good amount of pages to examining not only Conrad’s father’s political views, which are well known, but his mother’s as well. It also covers in depth the creation of Almayer’s Folly, Conrad’s first novel, and does justice to that work’s artful narrative complexities. Still, in writing a biography less than 200 pages in length, Hampson has made some curious choices about what topics to focus on and how to structure the work. He devotes the better part of a chapter to the state of the publishing industry and literary world as Conrad was coming into his own as a writer, with little payoff. And a chapter on Conrad and France seems out of joint at the book’s end, at which point the greater narrative starts to feel strangely rudderless.
Then there’s the prose, which is heavy on academic jargon and shows an indulgence of contemporary trends that signals the book will not age well. When one reads that Conrad’s relationship with his literary agent J.B. Pinker “played out the apparent contradictions between the aesthetic development of an autonomous modernist fiction and an engagement with the professionalization of literary production” or that Conrad’s wife, Jessie, “suffered classist microaggressions at the hands of [Ford Madox] Ford,” it’s hard not to picture the author’s subject turning in his grave.
Still, the book, for all its flaws, is a testament to the interest and passion Conrad continues to generate among readers. At the beginning of Under Western Eyes, the narrator warns his audience that “words, as is well known, are the great foes of reality.” There’s no better evidence to combat that notion than the body of work Conrad leaves behind.
Nat Brown is a former deputy web editor of Foreign Affairs and a former deputy managing editor of National Review Online.
