"Cliff Notes - Heart of Darkness" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

JOSEPH CONRAD: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

Joseph Conrad didn't set out to become one of the great English
novelists. He didn't set out to be a novelist at all, but a
sailor, and besides, he wasn't English. English was his third
language and he didn't begin learning it until after he was 20
years old!

He was born Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski in 1857, in an area
of Poland that was part of Russia and is now part of the Soviet
Union. The Poles were fighting for independence from Russia,
and both parents were fiercely engaged in the struggle.
Conrad's father was arrested in 1861 for revolutionary activity,
and the family was exiled to the remote Russian city of Vologda.
On the journey there, four-year-old Conrad caught pneumonia. He
remained a sickly child, and he suffered from ill health for the
rest of his life.

Conditions in Vologda were grueling. They were too much for
Conrad's mother, and although the family was eventually allowed
to move to a milder climate, she died of tuberculosis when
Conrad was only seven years old. His father's spirit was
broken, and so was his health. The Czarist government finally
let him return with Conrad to the Polish city of Cracow, but he
died there after a year, when Conrad was eleven.

For the next several years Conrad was raised by his maternal
grandmother. A stern but devoted uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, saw
to his education. Bobrowski had a lot to put up with. Conrad
wasn't much of a student. (Surprisingly, he didn't show any
particular talent for languages; even his Polish could have
stood improvement.) What was worse, at the age of 14 the boy got
the unheard-of notion--unheard-of in land-locked Poland, that
is--that he wanted to become a sailor. Bobrowski packed him off
for Europe with a tutor who was supposed to talk sense into him,
but the tutor ended up pronouncing Conrad "hopeless" and giving
up the struggle. In 1874, at the age of 16, Conrad traveled to
Marseilles to learn the seaman's trade.

During his four years in the French merchant marine, Conrad
sailed to the West Indies and possibly along the coast of
Venezuela, and he had an adventure smuggling guns into Spain.
He participated fully in the cultural life of Marseilles, and a
little too fully in the social life. He got himself into a
spectacular mess. Deeply in debt, he invited a creditor to tea
one evening and shot himself while the man was on his way over.
His uncle received an urgent telegram: "Conrad wounded, send
money--come." He did, and he was relieved to find young Conrad
in good shape (except for his finances)--handsome, robust, well