"Cliff Notes - Lord Jim" - читать интересную книгу автора (Cliff Notes)

JOSEPH CONRAD: THE AUTHOR AND HIS TIMES

No one could have expected Joseph Conrad to become one of the
great English novelists. His driving ambition as a youth was to
be not a writer but a sailor; on top of that, he wasn't English.
Incredibly, English was his third language, and he didn't learn
it until he was past 20.

The novelist, whose real name was Jozef Teodor Konrad
Korzeniowski, was born on December 3, 1857, at Berdichev, a city
in Polish Russia that now belongs to the Soviet Union. Both his
parents were committed revolutionaries in the Poles' struggle
for independence from Russia. His father's subversive
activities led to his arrest in 1861 and the family's exile to
the remote Russian city of Vologda. Traveling there,
four-year-old Jozef was stricken with pneumonia. Illness dogged
his childhood, and as an adult he suffered from recurrent bouts
of ill health.

Life was hard in Vologda--too hard for Conrad's mother. The
family eventually received permission to move to a less severe
climate, but she died of tuberculosis when her son was only
seven years old. Conrad's father was broken in health and in
spirit. Once an original poet, he turned to translating to make
a living; Conrad's first contact with the English language
occurred when he observed his father translating Shakespeare.
Although the father was finally allowed to return to the Polish
city of Cracow, he died after a year there, in 1869, when Conrad
was eleven.

Conrad's maternal grandmother took over the job of bringing him
up, and a stern but devoted uncle, Tadeusz Bobrowski, oversaw
his education. Conrad wasn't an easy charge. He was a less
than spectacular student. (His talent for languages didn't
become apparent till much later. At this stage, even his Polish
needed work.) To make matters worse, the boy decided when he was
14 that he wanted to become a sailor--an unusual ambition in
landlocked Poland. His uncle sent him on the Grand Tour of
Europe with a tutor who was supposed to bring him to his senses.
It didn't work. The tutor ended up pronouncing Conrad a
"hopeless Don Quixote," and in 1874 the 16-year-old youth
journeyed to the French port of Marseilles to learn the ropes as
a sailor. Many readers have found echoes of Conrad's youthful
idealism and romantic outlook in Lord Jim.

Conrad's four years in the French merchant marine included
voyages to the West Indies and, possibly, the Venezuelan coast,
as well as a gun-running adventure in Spain. He took advantage
of Marseilles' cultural life, but the city's social life proved