Joseph Conrad

Victory Joseph Conrad

Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv (Polish: Berdyczów), Ukraine, then part of the Russian Empire; the region had once been part of the Crown of the Kingdom of Poland. He was the only child of Apollo Korzeniowski-a writer, translator, political activist, and would-be revolutionary-and his wife Ewa Bobrowska. He was christened Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski after his maternal grandfather Józef, his paternal grandfather Teodor, and the heroes (both named "Konrad") of two poems by Adam Mickiewicz, Dziady and Konrad Wallenrod, and was known to his family as "Konrad", rather than "Józef". Though the vast majority of the surrounding area's inhabitants were Ukrainians, and the great majority of Berdychiv's residents were Jewish, almost all the countryside was owned by the Polish szlachta (nobility), to which Conrad's family belonged as bearers of the Nalecz coat-of-arms. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population. Victory (also published as Victory: An Island Tale) is a psychological novel by Joseph Conrad first published in 1915, through which Conrad achieved "popular success."The New York Times, however, called it "an uneven book" and "more open to criticism than most of Mr. Conrad's best work."The novel's "most striking formal characteristic is its shifting narrative and temporal perspective"[4] with the first section from the viewpoint of a sailor, the second from omniscient perspective of Axel Heyst, the third from an interior perspective from Heyst, and the final section has an omniscient narrator. It has been adapted into film a number of times.