Showing results by author "Joseph Conrad" in All Categories

Polish-born author and mariner Joseph Conrad is widely regarded as one of the greatest English novelists. His 16 years in the merchant navy profoundly shaped his fiction, giving him transformative experiences of adventure and exotic places, and a unique insight into the human psyche. Included here are adaptations of six of his best works, brought together for the first time and collected in chronological order, plus one fascinating bonus programmes exploring his life and art.

A gripping tale of espionage that influenced Graham Greene, Somerset Maugham and John le Carré, Under Western Eyes follows the story of Kyrilo Sidorovitch Razumov, an apolitical student who becomes a Czarist spy. Following a political assassination, he returns to his room to discover the culprit, Victor Haldin, who asks for help in making his escape.

Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness is an exploration of the nature of evil and how far a man can go towards it when released from the constraints of what can be called civilisation. Before beginning his life as a writer at the age of 36, Conrad spent 16 years as a merchant seaman. In 1889 he became captain of a steamboat in the Congo Free State, and the atrocities he witnessed there, perpetrated by the representatives of the Belgian colonial powers, led him to write what he called his Congo Diary.

As the Revolution rages in France, a seafarer named Peyrol, a master-gunner in the French republican navy, pirate, and for nearly 50 years, rover of the outer seas, comes to the end of a lifetime lived on the seas and seeks refuge in a remote farmhouse on the French Riviera. As he attempts to settle into a peaceful existence, Peyrol struggles to redefine himself and returns to the sea for one final voyage.

In fading light on the Thames Estuary near London, as Charles Marlow and his companions relax on deck, waiting for the turn of the tide, he tells of the time he turned ‘freshwater sailor’ on the River Congo. His perilous journey upriver in a little steamboat with a band of white colonialists and a group of cannibals takes him closer to the coveted ivory, closer to Kurtz the rogue agent, closer to certain unspeakable rites and the heart of darkness.

Written at the start of the Great War, when his son Borys was at the Western Front, The Shadow-Line is Conrad's supreme effort to open man's eyes to the meaning of war through the stimulus of art. In many ways an autobiographical narrative, this masterpiece of his final period relates the story of a young and inexperienced sea captain whose first command finds him with a ship becalmed in tropical seas and a crew smitten with fever.

Marlow, the story's narrator, tells his friends of an experience in the British Congo where he once ran a river steamer for a trading company. He tells of the ivory traders' cruel exploitation of the natives there. Chief among these is a greedy and treacherous European named Kurtz, who has used savagery to obtain semi-divine power over the natives. While Marlow tries to get Kurtz back down the river, Kurtz tries to justify his actions, asserting that he has seen into the very heart of things.

In the heart of St Petersburg and Geneva, a gripping and introspective psycho-political tragedy unfolds. It tells the harrowing story of Razumov, a promising young student whose dreams are shattered the moment a fellow student seeks refuge in his room after committing a political assassination. Stripped of his freedom and burdened by the weight of his predicament, Razumov grapples with deep sorrow and resentment, mirroring Joseph Conrads own turmoil as he reflects on the loss of his childhood to the devastating repercussions of his Polish parents resistance to Russian oppression. (Summary by ...

Joseph Conrad was a native of Poland, yet many critics regard him as one of the greatest English novelists. This is all the more remarkable, since he did not learn to speak English fluently until he was in his 20s. He became a naturalized British citizen in 1886. He wrote many books and stories, but the two that remain most popluar are Heart of Darkness and Lord Jim. Lord Jim is both an adventure story and a story of tragedy and repentence.

Hounded by an act of cowardice that follows him constantly, Jim wanders the world and eventually settles in the Far East. Here, slowly but surely, he comes to terms with his inner turmoil through acts of courage and leadership. But have the psychological demons that haunt him finally been exorcised? Listeners should be aware that the text contains racial epithets of the period that may be offensive to some of today's listeners.

Giovane ufficiale della marina mercantile, Jim coltiva il sogno di una vita eroica, fatta di gesti nobili e prove di coraggio. Ma una notte, sul decrepito piroscafo Patna, quell'immagine luminosa di sé si infrange: convinto che la nave stia per affondare, sopraffatto dal panico, Jim la abbandona insieme all'equipaggio, lasciando a bordo centinaia di pellegrini. Il Patna però non affonda, e l'inchiesta che segue sancisce la sua colpa. Da allora Jim vaga per i porti d'Oriente, in cerca di un luogo dove il suo nome non sia macchiato, braccato dal rimorso più che dagli uomini.

Lord Jim tells the story of a young, idealistic Englishman---"as unflinching as a hero in a book"---who is disgraced by a single act of cowardice while serving as an officer on the Patna, a merchant-ship sailing from an eastern port. His life is ruined: an isolated scandal has assumed horrifying proportions. But then he is befriended by an older man named Marlow....

Brought to you by Penguin. This Penguin Classic is performed by Luke Norris, known for his role in BBC drama Poldark. This definitive recording includes an Introduction by Michael Newton. In the only novel Conrad set in London, The Secret Agent communicates a profoundly ironic view of human...

Here are legendary director, producer, screenwriter, author, and actor Orson Welles' historic interpretations of excerpts from classic literature. Includes selections from Oscar Wilde's "The Happy Prince', H.G. Wells' "The Red Room", Saki's "Shredni Vashtar", Joseph Conrad's "The Secret Sharer", Rudyard Kipling's "Riki-Tikii-Tavi", Nathaniel Hawthorne's "Wakefield", Edgar Allan Poe's "The Tell Tale Heart", and Robert Louis Stevenson's "Letter to the Reverend Dr. Hyde".

In Das Ende vom Lied entwirft Joseph Conrad das eindrucksvolle Porträt eines alternden Kapitäns, der zwischen Loyalität, wirtschaftlichem Druck und innerer Würde zerrieben wird. Mit leiser Dramatik, emotionaler Tiefe und sprachlicher Präzision erzählt Conrad von einem späten Lebensabschnitt, der zur existenziellen Prüfung wird. Ein literarisch anspruchsvolles Werk über Ehre, Selbstaufopferung und das stille Scheitern in einer Welt ökonomischer Zwänge – voller Melancholie und humanistischer Größe.

This work set the style for a whole class of literature, a work that the critic Morton Dauwen Zabel calls an example of Conrad's "central theme...the grip of circumstances that enforce self-discovery and its cognate, the discovery of reality and truth...." It is a novel about a man's lifelong efforts to atone for an act of instinctive cowardice.

A classic of early literary modernism, Lord Jim tells the story of a young "simple and sensitive character" who loses his honor in a display of cowardice at sea -- and of his expiation of that sin against his own "shadowy ideal of conduct" on the remote island of Patusan. The novel, written by Conrad for magazine serialization during an intense and chaotic ten months in 1899 and 1900, has, in the words of Thomas C. Moser, "the rare distinction of being a masterpiece in two separate genres. It is at once an exotic adventure story of the Eastern seas in the popular tradition of Kipling and ...

Marlowe tells a tale of his youth before he ventured into the heart of darkness. After several false starts, he signs as second officer on a trading ship to Bangkok. Before their final disembarkation, he discovers that all the rats are abandoning ship before they had even left the dockyard. It isn't until Marlowe and his crew are halfway to Singapore that they discover the horror the rats have left behind.

In this captivating novella, an older man reflects on the complex interplay of personal desires and uncanny coincidences that shaped his challenging journey as a young ships officer. He navigates the elusive shadow line that divides the carefree days of youth from the weight of adult responsibilities. Join him as he unravels a profound transition that many can relate to. - Summary by Peter Dann

The story of Charlie Marlow's voyage from the civilized world of Europe into the primitive interior of the Congo of Africa. As a manager of a Belgian ivory company, Marlow travels into the interior of Africa up the Congo River to meet Kurtz, an agent of the ivory company. Deep in the interior of Africa, Marlow finds Kurtz living among the savage natives, who revere him as a god.