page_title: Apollo Korzeniowski
section_title: Life
hierarchical_section_title: Apollo Korzeniowski / Life
caption_attribution_description: Polski: Grobowiec Apolla Korzeniowskiego - ojca Josepha Conrada, Kraków Cmentarz Rakowicki
context_page_description: Apollo Korzeniowski was a Polish poet, playwright, translator, clandestine political activist, and father of Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad.
context_section_description: Apollo Korzeniowski was born on 21 February 1820 in the Imperial Russian village of Honoratka, then in Lypovets Uyezd, Kiev Governorate, now Vinnytsia Oblast, Ukraine.  He was the son of Teodor Korzeniowski, an 1831 Polish Army captain, an impoverished nobleman who made a living running leaseholds, and Julia née Dyakiewicz.
  After graduating from secondary school in Zhytomyr, Apollo studied law and Oriental studies at the University of St. Petersburg, then returned to Ukraine, where in 1852 he became an estate manager in the Podole village of Łuczyniec.
  In 1854, during the Crimean War, Apollo took an active part in preparations to organize in Ukraine—in the rears of the Russian armies fighting in Crimea—a Polish uprising. It came to nought due to British and French reluctance to get involved in the Polish cause.
  In April 1856, Apollo married Ewa Bobrowska, sister of Tadeusz Bobrowski and Stefan Bobrowski.  Together with his mother-in-law, Apollo leased the village of Derebczynka.  On 3 December 1857 the Korzeniowskis welcomed into the world their only child, Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski—who would be referred to by Polish family and friends as Konrad—the future English-language novelist Joseph Conrad.
  In early 1859, after losing all their fortune on the leasehold, the Korzeniowskis moved permanently to Zhytomyr, where Apollo for a time served as secretary of a bookselling and publishing association and became a member of the board of directors of a Polish theatre.
  It was Korzeniowski's years at Łuczyniec, Derebczynka and Zhytomyr that saw the greatest flowering of his literary creativity.  His first substantial work was a manuscript cycle of religious-patriotic poems, Purgatorial Songs (Czyśćcowe pieśni, 1849–54), which came into being under the clear—and none too fortunate—influence of Zygmunt Krasiński's poetry.  Apollo overcame this influence only in the final poem of the cycle, "Forethunder" ("Przedgrom"), into which his earlier preparations for the unrealized uprising introduced revolutionary accents.  These accents also appeared in a manuscript cycle of poems written in 1855 at the news of the Tsarist Army's bloody suppression of a peasant revolt in Skvira County.
  In 1854 Korzeniowski wrote his chef d'oeuvre, the drama Komedia (Comedy), its beginning parts modeled after Aleksandr Griboyedov's comedy, Gorie ot uma (Woe from Wit).  In Comedy, Korzeniowski severely criticized the Polish nobility in Ukraine and opposed it to two positive heroes—Henryk, a revolutionary-conspirator, and the Secretary, a cowed plebeian who, as the action develops, rebels against his employer.  The play's 1855 publication (together with a lyric cycle, Stray Strophes—Strofy oderwane) became a social scandal.  Comedy, severely treated by the critics, could gain a stage production.
  In 1858 Korzeniowski published a second drama, For a Pretty Penny (Dla miłego grosza), which was to some extent a continuation of Comedy.  The new play likewise contained criticism of the wealthy Polish nobility in Ukraine, which was passing over to new, capitalist methods of management; this time, however, the criticized milieu was contrasted only with an old nobleman-conservative who desperately clung to the feudal system.
  Apart from original work, Korzeniowski did translations, including Alfred de Vigny's 1835 drama Chatterton and several works by Victor Hugo:  Hernani, Marion Delorme and fragments of La Légende des siècles.  He also wrote much correspondence to the Warsaw newspapers.
  At the turn of the 1850s and 1860s, Korzeniowski once again engaged in sociopolitical activity.  Thus, in April 1861 he took part, at Zhytomyr, in deliberations by delegates of the nobility from the three guberniyas comprising Rus Province—deliberations whose aim was the creation, with the help of the guberniya Agricultural Associations, of a common Polish organization for the Rus and Lithuanian provinces; Korzeniowski proposed then sending the Tsar a demand that these two provinces be joined administratively to Congress Poland.
  In May 1861, hearing of a patriotic movement develo
caption: Korzeniowski's grave, Rakowicki Cemetery, Kraków
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