Apollo Korzeniowski

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Apollo Korzeniowski (21 February 1820 – 23 May 1869) was a Polish poet, playwright, translator, and political activist. He was the father of the English-language novelist Joseph Conrad.

He was born in Honoratka, then part of the Russian Empire and now in Ukraine, to Teodor Korzeniowski, an impoverished nobleman and army captain, and Julia Dyakiewicz. He studied law and Oriental studies at the University of St. Petersburg and later returned to Ukraine to work as an estate manager in Łuczyniec.

During the Crimean War, he helped plan a Polish uprising in Ukraine in 1854, which ultimately failed. In 1856 he married Ewa Bobrowska, and they leased the village of Derebczynka. Their son Józef (Joseph Conrad) was born on 3 December 1857. The family moved to Zhytomyr in 1859, where Apollo worked with a Polish bookselling and publishing group and was involved in the local theatre.

Korzeniowski’s literary work flourished in these years. He wrote Purgatorial Songs (1849–54), a cycle of religious-patriotic poems influenced by Zygmunt Krasiński but ending with revolutionary undertones. In 1854 he wrote the drama Komedia (Comedy), which critiqued the Polish nobility in Ukraine; it was published in 1855 together with Stray Strophes. He published another drama, For a Pretty Penny, in 1858. He also translated works by Alfred de Vigny and Victor Hugo and wrote letters to Warsaw newspapers.

In the early 1860s he became actively involved in politics. He helped organize radical literary and political activities, planned a biweekly, and participated in demonstrations. He helped form the Municipal Committee, the main body of the “Red” conspiracy. He was arrested in October 1861, and in 1862 was exiled to Vologda, later moved to Chernihiv.

In exile he continued writing: a memoir “Polska i Moskwa” (1864), a fragment of a play No Rescue, and a study of Shakespeare’s drama. He also translated Dickens’s Hard Times and Shakespeare’s Comedy of Errors. His wife Ewa died in 1865.

Korzeniowski was released in 1867 due to poor health and moved with his son to Lviv and then Kraków in Austrian Poland, where he wrote for the democratic daily Kraj (Homeland). He died in Kraków on 23 May 1869 and was buried at Rakowicki Cemetery, where a monument by Walery Gadomski marks his grave. He had burned many of his manuscripts before his death, though some letters and later manuscripts survived.

For a long time he was mainly known as Joseph Conrad’s father, but in 1952 his own drama Komedia won renewed attention when it was staged in Wrocław, highlighting his important role as a writer and activist.