Joseph Conrad father Apollo Korzeniowski
What gave [Conrad] such a rare ability to see the arrogance and theft at the heart of imperialism?...  Much of it surely had to do with the fact that he himself, as a Pole, knew what it was like to live in conquered territory....  [F]or the first few years of his life, tens of millions of peasants in the Russian empire were the equivalent of slave laborers:  serfs.
Conrad's poet father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a Polish nationalist and an opponent of serfdom...  [The] boy [Konrad] grew up among exiled prison veterans, talk of serfdom, and the news of relatives killed in uprisings [and he] was ready to distrust imperial conquerors who claimed they had the right to rule other peoples.
Conrad's experience in the Belgian-run Congo made him one of the fiercest critics of the "white man's mission."  It was also, writes Najder, Conrad's most daring and last "attempt to become a homo socialis, a cog in the mechanism of society. By accepting the job in the trading company, he joined, for once in his life, an organized, large-scale group activity on land....  It is not accidental that the Congo expedition remained an isolated event in Conrad's life. Until his death he remained a recluse in the social sense and never became involved with any institution or clearly defined group of people."
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