Biography of Joseph Conrad

The unconscious peeps

3 December 1857
August 3, 1924
The novels of Joseph Conrad, considered one of the main authors in between ' 800 and ' 900, are sea stories and adventure: stories of men living on the waves, dragged and extraordinary ships draggers who face treacherous waters, endless solitude, Devourer of worlds, continuous risk prey. And indeed before a novelist, Conrad was truly a man of the sea: lost his mother and father jailed for political issues (the family was originally from a part of Poland annexed by Russia), grew up in the dream to sail the seas and far from Earth who had procured, since childhood, so much pain. Joseph Conrad, pseudonym Teodor Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, despite being born in Poland (Berdichev day December 3, 1857), is in fact considered an English writer.
His family belonged to the landed gentry of Poland, then under Russian rule. The father, Patriot and man of letters, dies in 1867, after many years of political exile (his mother had died in 1865). Under the tutelage of an uncle, the young Conrad celebrates her secondary education in Krakow. At the age of seventeen, impelled by an irresistible vocation for the sea life, he left for Marseille, where he sailed as seaman. Browse means to him know especially the nautical world that was identified even in trafficking, smuggling, men who embarked to escape some kind of guilt. Meant I mean meet worlds that were, not only geographically the Antipodes of civilized Europe. After long experience serving in the merchant marine from 1878, the British and French, where it reaches the degree of sea captain. In 1886 became a British subject. For twenty years he travels for almost all the seas, but especially in the Malay Archipelago.
The attention from her first novel Almayer's folly ", and encouragement of some writers (Galsworthy, Wells, Ford Madox Ford, Edward Gamett) cause him, left the Navy and settled in England, to devote himself entirely to literary activity. More unique than rare, Conrad becomes a master of literature writing in a language not his own, learned when he was already a man made. Its basic theme is the loneliness of the individual, at the mercy of the blind shots appropriate to where the sea is often elected as a symbol. The lone hero of Joseph Conrad is almost always a fugitive or a pariah, marked by misfortune or remorse, close relative of the fallen angel dear to the romantics, who won his identity facing with stoicism the evidence that destiny reserved. Among his many masterpieces, are "an outcast of the Islands" (1894), "the negro of narcissus" (1896), "youth" (1898), "heart of darkness" (a strong denunciation of colonialism and a novel, perhaps few people know, formed the canvas for the film by Francis Ford Coppola's "Apocalypse Now"), "Typhoon" and "Lord Jim" (1900).
In these works probe the evolutionary stages of the unconscious that Conrad sometimes seem to anticipate the technique of "stream of consciousness" that then Virginia Woolf and James Joyce become literary genre. After other various publications, gets good success with "linea d'ombra" (1917), another masterpiece, which has become the symbol of the difficulties of growing up and what this entails. One-time writer, sondatore how few of the human soul, Joseph Conrad died of a heart attack on August 3, 1924, Bishopsboume Kent (Ukraine).
Article contributed by the team of collaborators.