Letters from Vienna #57
Poland’s Ukrainian Lands
“In 1772, 1793, and 1795” Serhy Yekelchyk tells us, “Austria, Prussia and Russia carried out the so-called three partitions of Poland. The three aggressive neighbours, all rising continental powers, eliminated from the map of Europe the internally unstable Polish state with its elected king, weak central government, and all-powerful gentry. Poland’s Ukrainian lands were divided between Austria and Russia. During the first partition in 1772, Austria acquired Galicia, and in 1793-1795 the Russian Empire received the former Polish palatinates of Kiev, Podolia, and Volhynia – the lands west of the Dnipro that remained under Polish control after the Khelnytsky Rebellion and were known historically as the Right Bank…”
“…Imperial governments rearranged the administrative structure of the Ukrainian lands, but for both contemporaries and later scholars it made sense to speak of Ukraine’s historical regions, each with its traditional name and unique cultural profile. A traveler heading westward from Russia in the early nineteenth century would first pass through the Left Bank, the former territory of the Hetmanate and, since 1830, the imperial provinces of Chernihiv, Poltava, and Kharkov. There, the social elite was a native nobility descended from the Cossack officer class, and the memory of the Cossack Ukraine was preserved well into the nineteenth century. After a century and a half of Russian rule, however, most local nobles assimilated into the Russian culture. A substantial number of ethnic Russians also settled on the Left Bank, especially in large cities.”
“After crossing the Dnipro, a traveler would enter the city of Kiev on its high right bank. The golden domes of Kievian churches could be seen from miles away. The city itself was under Russian control ever since Khmelnytsky’s time, but other lands beyond the Dnipro, the so-called Right Bank (Kiev, Podolia and Volhynia provinces) had just been annexed from Poland. There, the Polish nobility remained the dominant social group, and Polish culture reigned supreme in cities.”[1]
Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad Korzeniowski
This is the world into which Joseph Conrad or more properly: Józef Teodor Nałęcz Konrad Korzeniowski was born into in December 1857.
As Zdzislaw Nadjer noted: “Joseph Conrad’s Ukrainian links are obvious: he was born there, and, for nearly two centuries, his ancestors had lived in what is today Ukraine. We have to note, however, that in the meantime the terminology has changed. In Joseph Conrad’s time “Ukraine” meant, and not just in Polish, only the Kiev province and especially its western part (the “right bank”). The terminology was anything but precise; but neither Podolia (from where the family came), nor Volhynia with its capital Zytomierz (Zhytomyr), where Conrad lived with his parents, was called “Ukraine”. The general name for today’s “Ukraine” was “Rus”, Ruthenia.”[2]
Jeffrey Meyers tells us: “Berdichev, like nearby Zhitomir, where Conrad also lived as a young child, was typical of many towns in the Polish Ukraine. It had been fortified against invasion in the sixteenth century but was later destroyed by Tartars and Cossacks. In 1630 a Polish Carmelite monastery was built and in 1739 a Roman Catholic church. The town prospered by supplying flour to Napoleon’s troops during the invasion of 1812, became a major grain and cattle market, and began to manufacture shoes and clothing. Berdichev also became a place of pilgrimage and a center for publishing, though these were suppressed by the Russian government in 1866.”
Apollo and Eva
“When (Conrad’s parents) Apollo and Eva married, Berdichev, the fourth-largest city in the Ukraine, was the second-largest Jewish community in Russia. Ever since 1790, when Jews had been allowed to open shops, the Jews represented eighty to ninety percent of the total population.”
The cultural complexity of the area was clear: “Conrad’s homeland, the Polish Ukraine...had four languages and four religions. The governing class spoke Russian and belonged to the Orthodox Church, the intellectuals, landowners and estate managers spoke Polish and were Roman Catholics; the peasants and servants spoke Ukrainian and were members of the Eastern Uniat Church; and the merchants were mainly Yiddish-speaking Jews.”
Even Conrad’s childhood was uprooted: “Conrad moved almost as frequently during his Polish childhood as he did during his years at sea, and he formed no close friendships in Poland. He lived in Berdichev, Zhitomir, Warsaw, Vologda, Chernikov, Novofastov, Kiev, Lvov, Cracow and Krynica, and took holidays abroad in Odessa, Switzerland, Austria, Germany and Italy. At the beginning of 1859 the family moved thirty miles north to Zhitomir, where Apollo wrote, translated and worked in a short-lived publishing company.”
“A. P. Coleman states that after the death of Tzar Nicholas I in 1855, Apollo became the prime mover behind a secret society called The Trinity, which opposed conciliation and urged active resistance to Russian oppression: „At first its objective was purely spiritual: to nourish resistance to the idea then insinuating itself into the class from which most of the (university) students came, that national emancipation could be achieved through political cooperation with Russia or with the Tsar. Its purpose was thus to keep alive the flame of Polish nationality and the conviction that, though the Powers considered Poland as dead, enough energy to save the nation still survived.”[3]
“In Warsaw, in the autumn of 1861, Apollo helped found a newspaper and the clandestine Committee of Action of the Red organisation, which had developed from several conspiratorial groups.”
“When the elections to the town and rural councils began in Warsaw on September 23, 1861, Apollo urged the electorate not to cast their votes. His leaflet “The Mandate of the People” insisted that the electoral law was an attack on Polish national unity, both in the sense that the franchise was too narrow and that Lithuania and Russian Ruthenia (the Ukraine) were denied constitutional freedoms. Despite his extremely precarious position, Apollo was reckless about his own safety, and deliberately provoked the authorities by his outlandish dress and his public pronouncements: “An honourable but too ardent patriot (he) went about Warsaw dressed in peasant fashion, in a peasant smock, frightful cap and knee-boots, attracting universal attention and exerting quite an influence on the youths gathered around him, by his intelligence, education, talent as a writer, and by his eloquence.””[4]
Arrested by the Police
“Shortly after midnight on October 20, 1861, while he was writing and Eva reading in their flat on Nowy Swiat, a main street in the centre of Warsaw, the doorbell suddenly rang. Apollo was arrested by the Russian police and was taken away in a matter of minutes. He spent seven months locked up in the Warsaw Citadel, suffering from rheumatism and scurvy, and waiting for the charges to be drawn up against him.”
“Under the “wide-browed, silent, protecting presence” of his mother, who was dressed in the black of national mourning in defiance of ferocious police regulations, the three-year-old Conrad remembered standing in the large prison courtyard and looking at his father’s face staring at them through a barred window.”[5]
“Heightening the drama of his trial, Apollo later wrote that the Russian authorities were well aware that he “was not only a participant in but (also) the principal leader of the entire rebellious movement and the demonstrations designed to overthrow the government of our most gracious tzar.” In fact, he was merely suspected of complicity in plotting the rebellion. If anything had been proved against him, he would either have been shot or sentenced to Siberia, where death would have been almost certain.”
“Since Apollo pleaded not guilty and no witnesses could be found to testify against him, the Russians, suspecting he was guilty, accused him of less serious charges: 1. that he had formed a committee which opposed elections to the Warsaw City Council, 2. that he had been the chief instigator of brawls in a confectionary shop, 3. that he had advocated an illegal union between Lithuania and Poland (a union that existed from 1569 to 1795), and 4. that he had organised communal prayers for political martyrs. The court stated that “indirect evidence of his activities and his alien way of thinking was found in the letters from his wife”, foolishly written before she had joined him in Warsaw, which warned “him against returning to (Zhitomir) where he may be arrested.”
“Though Zdzislaw Najder speaks of Eva’s “unshakable decision to participate in all his activities,” she was actually forced into exile. Her letters had incriminated Apollo, and on May 9, 1862, she was convicted with him. Both were sentenced to indefinite exile in (as Apollo requested) the town of Perm. Sixteen years after leaving St. Petersburg, he was forced to return to the country where he had received his university education. His place of exile was changed, however, at the insistence of the Governor of Perm, who had once been a friend of Apollo in St. Petersburg. After traveling east for several weeks, the family was diverted to the more severe Vologda, 250 northeast of Moscow. Like many Polish patriots who remained faithful to their political principles and moral convictions, Apollo and Eva were thrown into the wilderness of penury and prison.”
Exile
“Conrad’s friend and collaborator Ford Madox Ford later recorded an incident that took place in May 1862: “The oldest – the first – memory of his life was being in a prison yard on the road to the Russian exile station of the Wologda. “The Cossacks of the escort,” these are Conrad’s exact words, repeated over and over again, “were riding slowly up and down under the snowflakes that fell on women in furs and women in rags. The Russians had put the men into barracks the windows of which were tallowed. They fed them on red herrings and gave them no water to drink. My father was among them.””[6]
“The family soon had to suffer far worse than cold and thirst, for both Conrad and Eva became seriously sick en route. When Conrad fell ill with pneumonia, near Moscow, the guards refused permission to break the journey. While protesting parents refused to move, a sympathetic traveler sent a doctor from the city, who arrived in time to save the child. Apollo related that after the doctor had applied leeches and calomel (a purgative) and Conrad began to feel better, the guards started to harness the horses: “Naturally I protest against leaving,” Apollo wrote “particularly as the doctor says openly that the child may die if we do so. My passive resistance postpones the departure but causes my guard to refer to the local authorities. The civilised oracle, after hearing the report, pronounces that we have to go at once – as children are born to die.””
“They were still traveling east toward Perm when Eva became ill at Nizhni Novgorod. The family asked permission to stay there until she recovered; though the request was refused, they gained a few days before turning north to Vologda. After a five-week journey, they arrived on June 16.”[7]
“In January 1863, the year of the fatal rising, Apollo was granted permission, on grounds of poor health, to move farther south to a less extreme climate. The family resettled in Chernikhov, eighty miles north of Kiev, where he remained for the next five years. In an atmosphere extremely hostile to Poles, Apollo continued to work on his translations. Despite the improved conditions, his wife’s health began to deteriorate. In the summer of that year Eva’s brother, who had served in the Russian guards, used his influence to arrange a three-month “leave of absence” so that she and Conrad could get medical treatment and visit the family estate in Novofastov, between Berdichev and Kiev.”
The Death of Eva
“When the leave expired and Eva was too ill to return to exile, the provincial governor threatened to send her under escort to the prison hospital at Kiev. As they rode off in an open trap, harnessed with three horses, the tearful French governess who had taught him to read and speak his first foreign language, cried out: “N’oublie pas ton français, mon chéri.””
“On April 18, 1865, Eva died of tuberculosis in Chernikhov at the age of thirty-two. The seven-year-old Conrad, who witnessed her agonising decline, was devastated by the loss. Apollo was also tormented by the guilty feeling that his arrest and exile had been largely responsible for Eva’s death.”
“The death of his mother, the second great turning-point (after exile) in Conrad’s childhood, weakened his own frail health and threw him into morbid conjunction with his father. As a boy, Conrad was pale, delicate, unstable and epilectic; as an adult, hypersensitve, intensely nervous and frequently ill. He had inflammation of the lungs in May 1862, en route to Vologda, and again in 1863. Three years later, he had a series of epilectic attacks. In June 1868 he suffered from what Apollo called a new onset of his old illness: urinary deposits in his bladder that caused constant stomach cramps. And in his early teens he had severe migraine headaches and nervous attacks.”
“Apollo taught his son at home, partly because he didn’t want the delicate child to be educated in Russian schools. But Apollo was too demanding and Conrad, living in almost complete isolation, burrowed “too deeply” into books. Though Apollo frequently asked friends to send him school materials, he mentioned in 1868 that Conrad’s poor health, especially his epilepsy, had prevented him from studying during the past two years.”
“For a year and a half, from May 1866 until the autumn of 1867, Conrad was “torn” from Apollo while receiving medical treatment in Kiev, Zhitomir and Novofastov. In November 1866, Apollo wrote, with an element of self-pity: “I am lonely. Konradek is with his granny...We both suffer equally: just imagine, the boy is so stupid that he misses his loneliness where all he saw was my clouded face and where the only diversions of his nine-year-old life were arduous lessons...The boy pines away – he must be stupid, and, I fear, will remain so all his life!””
“Apollo was a poor estate administrator, a mediocre poet and a disastrous revolutionary – in short: a failure. These failures intensified his sacrificial patriotism, deepened his despairing mysticism and led to a morbid cult of his dead wife, all of which made life unbearably dreary for young Conrad. Apollo’s religion – his only hope in life, apart from his son – was based on a kind of Christian stoicism rather than on reasoned belief. “Everything that surrounds me,” he wrote from Chernikhov, “bids me doubt the existence of a divine omnipotence, in which I nonetheless place all my faith and to which I entrust the fate of my little one.””
“In January 1868 Prince Gollitzen, the Governor of Chernikhov, declared that the dying Apollo, after five and a half years in Russia, was no longer dangerous, and released him from exile. Apollo received permission to travel to Algiers and Madeira, but – living frugally on Eva’s inheritance, his modest literary earnings and handouts from the family – had neither the funds nor the energy to do so.”
“Austrian Poland, which recognised Polish nationality and allowed Poles civil rights if not political independence, was much freer than the parts of the country under German and Russian rule. In the Ukraine, for example, the school system had become thoroughly Russified after 1864; Polish, even in private conversation, was forbidden in school buildings. For these reasons, father and son moved west to Galicia, lived in Lvov, the provincial capital, for six weeks during January-February 1868, and then in the old royal and academic city of Cracow. In 1868 Apollo wrote that Conrad was having German lessons so that he could go to school. He passed the entrance examination for St. Anne’s Gymnasium, but probably attended St. Jacek’s school.”
“By the time he reached Cracow, Apollo was a desperately ill and mortally weary man – vanquished by disillusion, bereavement and gloom. Embittered by Galician indifference to the cause of Polish freedom, he told a friend: “I am broken, fit for nothing, too tired even to spit upon things.”
The Death of Apollo
“On May 23, 1869, Apollo, like Eva, died of tuberculosis. His funeral turned into a patriotic demonstration by several thousand people. Conrad, emotionally exhausted and no longer able to cry, led “the long procession...”[8]
“After Apollo’s death, Conrad became the ward of his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who grew wheat and sugar beet on an estate at Kazimierkowka, about thirty miles southeast of Zhitomir.”[9]
“Conrad remained in Cracow: during the first year in a pension for boys run by Ludwik Georgeon, a veteran of the 1863 rising, on Florianska Street; and during the next three years at his grandmother’s flat on Szpitalna Street. During this time, he was frequently in poor health, attended school irregularly and was tutored by a medical student at Jagiellonian University in Cracow, Adam Pulman. Conrad and his tutor spent the summers of 1870-72 at Krynica, in the Carpathian Mountains, southeast of Cracow; and during the spring and summer of 1873 they travelled in Switzerland, Bavaria, Austria and northern Italy.”
“During the Cracow years, the solitary, hypersensitive and well-read young Conrad impressed friends by memorising and reciting long passages from Mickiewcz’s Pan Tadeusz and by writing patriotic plays like “The Eyes of Jan Sobieski”, in which Polish patriots defeated the Muscovite enemy.”[10]
“Conrad left high school early in 1874 without finishing the course. An indifferent scholar, he had studied some Greek, Latin and German, Polish Romantic Literature, mathematics, history and his favourite subject, geography.”[11]
“Though Conrad’s motives for leaving Poland were extremely complex, he had good political and personal reasons for going into voluntary exile. He believed that the 1863 rebellion had been a pointless and unqualified disaster. When he left Russian Poland in 1874, his country had suffered more than one hundred years of servitude and had absolutely no prospects for independence. Like Apollo, Conrad found the enormous Russian garrison, the despotism of petty officials and the extreme hostility to all things Polish oppressive and intolerable.”
“Conrad’s sense of humiliation, his bitterness and anger, could never be extinguished. Speaking of Poland later in life, he told friends: “(I) spring from an oppressed race where oppression was not a matter of history but a crushing fact in the daily life of all individuals, made still more bitter by declared hatred and contempt...I can’t think of Poland often. It feels bad, bitter, painful. It would make life unbearable... (The Russian) mentality and their emotionalism have always been repugnant to me, hereditarily and individually.””
“His motives for going to sea were both practical and romantic. A family physician, fearing that Conrad might die of the same tuberculosis that had stricken his parents, believed he could be saved by living near the sea and getting plenty of physical exercise. He had been thrilled by the Black Sea at Odessa and by the Adriatic at Venice. Inspired by reading fictional sea adventures, he had as a child wanted to enter the marine cadet school at Pola… in Austrian Croatia. He found Austria the most liberal and least antipathetic of the three powers ruling Poland, had some sympathy for the Hapsburg dynasty and wished to serve in the Austrian navy. But when his application for Austrian citizenship was refused, he was unable to enter the school.”
“Conrad’s destiny was also determined by another practical consideration. As the son of a political convict, he was liable, when he reached military age, for conscription into the ranks of the Russian army for twenty-five years. Conrad had to leave Poland.”[12]
He was by no means alone in doing so. Between 1870 and 1914 three and a half million Poles left their homeland.[13]
The tale of Conrad in the Ukraine shows how brutal and oppressive life there actually was. The brutality of Russian oppression, which lasted for literally centuries, is one of the reasons for the current rise of extremism in the Ukraine. In this respect: the Russians only have themselves to blame; the sins of the fathers are now being visited upon the sons.
[1] pp. 34-35 Ukraine, Birth of a Modern Nation, Serhy Yekelchyk
[2] Conrad and Ukraine: A Note on JSTOR https://www.jstor.org/stable/20874137
[3] pp.11-13 Joseph Conrad, Jeffrey Meyers
[4] Ibid p.13
[5] Ibid pp.13-14
[6] Ibid pp.14-15
[7] Ibid p.15
[8] Ibid pp.21-25
[9] Ibid p.26
[10] Ibid p.27
[11] Ibid p.28
[12] Ibid p.29
[13] Ibid pp.29-30