Hello and welcome to this episode of Chronicles where we're going to be discussing the 1899 novella,

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness,

a very, very famous and wonderfully controversial text.

So, I suppose let's just begin with a little bit about Joseph Conrad himself.

Joseph Conrad was actually not British by birth, although it became his adoptive country later in his life,

and he became one of the most remarkable writers in the English language.

Conrad's birth and heritage was actually Poland, and specifically Poland as annexed by the Russian Empire and partitioned.

And so his father was very, very instrumental in constantly rebelling against the Russian Empire.

And this meant that Conrad grew up without very much stability in his life.

In fact, in 1865, he and his family were even forcibly exiled

to northern Russia as punishment for rebellion. And he lost his mother at quite an early age.

From then on, when Conrad was eight years old, his father took on work

translating texts into Polish, and one of the first was Shakespeare. And so Conrad grew up

from an early age, slowly being inculcated with a love of the English language itself.

He also watched his father work as he translated other works by Victor Hugo, Dickens and

Thackeray, and other such famous writers of the age. And so Heart of Darkness is very much a tale, a novella, inspired by Conrad's

own personal life, because from there and moving away from Poland and towards Western

Europe, Conrad went on to have a great deal of time seafaring, sailing across the world very, very extensively, might I add.

He went as far as Borneo and the Caribbean and Singapore and most importantly for the texts that we're going to be discussing, the Congo.

And this is a tale where Conrad's experiences in the Congo is not necessarily autobiographical, but it is a story born out of his impressions

of what he saw firsthand with King Leopold the second of Belgian's personal private colony,

which was the only one in the world at that time, and possibly ever, although don't quote me

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