title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Instead of an armored personnel carrier, the ARVN used the carried infantry as extra "dismountable soldiers" in "an oversized tank crew". These "ACAV" sets were eventually adapted to U.S. Army M113s with the arrival of the army's conventional forces in 1965. The vehicles continued to operate in the role of a light tank and reconnaissance vehicle, and not as designed in theater. Still, the M113 could carry 11 infantrymen inside, with two crewmen operating it.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The U.S. Army, after berating the South Vietnamese for flouting battle doctrine, came out with their own ACAV version. This more or less standardized ACAV kit included shields and a circular turret for the .50-caliber M2 machine gun in the track commander (TC) position, two M60 machine guns with shields for the left and right rear positions, and "belly armor"—steel armor bolted from the front bottom extending 1/2 to 2/3 of the way towards the bottom rear of the M113. The two rear machine gunners could fire their weapons while standing inside the rectangular open cargo hatch. This transformed the M113 into a fighting vehicle, but the vehicle still suffered from its lightly armored configuration, having never been designed for such a role. Canada also adopted the ACAV kits when employing the M113A2 during peacekeeping operations in the Balkans in the 1990s.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In order to improve the fighting ability of the mounted troops, a number of experiments were carried out in the 1960s under the MICV-65 project, which aimed to develop a true infantry fighting vehicle rather than an armored personnel carrier. Pacific Car and Foundry entered the steel-armored XM701, but this proved to be too slow and too heavy to be airmobile, even in the C-141. FMC entered the XM734, which was largely the ACAV M113, but whereas the M113 seated the troops facing inward on benches along the walls, the XM734 sat them facing outwards on a central bench.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Four gun ports and vision blocks were added on each side to allow the seated troops to fire even while under cover. Although neither the XM701 or XM734 were deemed worthwhile to produce, FMC continued development of their version as the XM765 advanced infantry fighting vehicle (AIFV). The AIFV was sold to a number of third party-users in the 1970s, including the Netherlands, the Philippines and Belgium.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Modified versions of the Vietnam War ACAV sets were deployed to Iraq (formerly referred to as "Southwest Asia" within the U.S. military) to equip the standard M113s still in service. The circular .50 caliber gun shields have been modified, while the rear port and starboard gun stations have been deleted for service in that region. Some of these modified vehicles have been utilized for convoy escort duties.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113 has relatively light armor, but it can be augmented with add-on steel plates for improved ballistic protection. Also, reactive armor and slat armor can be added for protection against rocket-propelled grenades. Windowed gunshields developed by an armorer in Iraq are reminiscent of ACAV vehicle modifications so effective in Southeast Asia (Vietnam War).


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Band tracks made of rubber are in use by Canadian and other forces to enable stealthy operation, less damage to paved roads, higher speed, less maintenance, access to terrain where operation of wheeled vehicles is impractical and less vibration and rolling resistance.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Most of the 13,000 M113s that are still in U.S. Army service have been upgraded to the A3 variant. The current U.S. Army M113 fleet includes a mix of M113A2 and A3 variants and other derivatives equipped with the most recent RISE (reliability improvements for selected equipment) package. The standard RISE package includes an upgraded propulsion system (turbocharged engine and new transmission), greatly improved driver controls (new power brakes and conventional steering controls), external fuel tanks, and 200-amp alternator with four batteries. Additional A3 improvements include the incorporation of spall liners and provision for mounting external armor.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The future M113A3 fleet is planned to include a number of vehicles that will have high speed digital networks and data transfer systems. The M113A3 digitization program includes applying appliqué hardware, software, and installation kits and hosting them in the M113 FOV.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113 has also been adopted to replace the aging fleet of visually modified M551s being used to simulate Russian-made combat vehicles at the U.S. Army's National Training Center in Fort Irwin, California as well as the M60A3s formerly at the Combat Maneuver Training Center near Hohenfels, Germany. These M113s, like the M551s they replaced, have also been modified to resemble enemy tanks and APCs, such as the T-80 and BMP-2. One of the advantages of the M113 being used to simulate the latter is that the infantry squad can now ride inside the simulated BMP instead of in a truck accompanying a tank masquerading as one, as was often the case with the M551s.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113 has received a variety of nicknames over the years. The South Vietnamese Army (ARVN) called it the "green dragon". United States troops tended to refer to the M113 simply as a "113" (spoken as "one-one-three"), or a "track". The Israel Defense Forces employ the M113 in many different variants, all designed in Israel, and have given each of them official names, from the baseline "Bardelas" ("lit." Cheetah) to the "Nagmash" (Hebrew acronym equivalent to "APC"), "Nagman", and "Kasman" variants for urban combat up to the "Zelda" and "Zelda 2", which are fitted with ERA-suites.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Australian Army refers to its M113A1s as "buckets", "bush taxis" and modified M113A1s fitted with 76 mm turrets as "beasts". The German Army has various nicknames, depending on location and branch of service, including "elephant shoe", "Tank Wedge" and "bathtub". In Spain's Army it is known as "TOA", the acronym of Transporte Oruga Acorazado, which is Spanish for Armored Tracked Carrier.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The basic M113 armored personnel carrier can be fitted with a number of weapon systems. The most common weapon fit is a single .50 caliber M2 machine gun. However, the mount can also be fitted with a 40 mm Mk 19 automatic grenade launcher. A number of anti-tank weapons could be fitted to the standard variant: the U.S. Army developed kits that allowed the M47 Dragon and BGM-71 TOW anti-tank missile systems to be mounted.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In the case of the M47, the system mated to the existing machine gun mount, without having to remove the machine gun. This allowed the commander to use both weapons. A large array of turrets and fixed mounts are available to mount high explosive cannon ranging from 20 mm to 105 mm on to the M113 series, making them function as assault guns and fire support; while in many cases still having room inside to carry dismounted infantry or cavalry scouts.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113 is built of 5083 aircraft-quality aluminum alloy. Aluminium alloy is lighter than steel but requires around three times the thickness for an equivalent level of ballistic protection, meaning the armor of the M113 was only designed for 7.62mm and shell splinter protection. All variants of the M113 are capable of mounting anti-landmine applique armor. The M113A3 was upgraded with internal spall liners and additional applique armor which provided 14.5mm ballistic protection. In comparison, a modern APC such as the Stryker has all-around 7.62mm armor-piercing protection, plus 14.5 mm protection on the front, sides, and rear, and a protection against antipersonnel mines.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Its weight allows the use of a relatively small engine to power the vehicle, a Detroit 6V53 V6 two-stroke diesel engine of with an Allison TX-100-1 three-speed automatic transmission. This allows the vehicle to carry a large payload cross-country and to be transported by fixed- and rotary-wing aircraft. Original production M113s can swim without deploying flotation curtains, using only a front-mounted trim vane; they are propelled in the water by their tracks.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Vietnam War was the first combat opportunity for mechanized infantry, a technically new type of infantry with its roots in the armored infantry of World War II, now using the M113 armored personnel carrier. In addition, armored cavalry squadrons in Vietnam consisted largely of M113s, after replacing the intended M114 in a variety of roles, and armor battalions contained M113s within their headquarters companies, such as the maintenance section, medical section, vehicle recovery section, mortar section, and the scout (reconnaissance) section. United States Army mechanized infantry units in Vietnam were fully equipped with the M113 APC/ACAV, which consisted of one headquarters company and three line companies, normally with an authorized strength of approximately 900 men. Ten U.S. mechanized infantry battalions were deployed to Vietnam from 1965 until their departure in 1972.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Company D, 16th Armor, 173rd Airborne Brigade, was the first U.S. Army armor unit deployed to Vietnam. It originally consisted of three platoons of M113s and a platoon of 90mm M56 Scorpion self-propelled anti-tank guns (SPAT). It was the only independent armor company in the history of the U.S. Army. Upon the company's arrival in Vietnam, a fourth line platoon was added; this was equipped with M106 4.2 in. mortar carriers (modified M113s).


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The mortar platoon often operated with Brigade infantry units to provide indirect fire support. It also deployed at times as a dismounted infantry unit. The remaining SPATS platoon was reequipped with M113s in late 1966 and the mortar platoon was deactivated in early 1967. From early 1967, D/16th had three line platoons equipped with M113s and eventually, its diesel version, the M113A1. It was also standardized in late 1968 with three machine guns per track, one M2 .50 caliber and two M60 machine guns mounted on each side.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: After several years, the machine gun array varied considerably from APC to APC. The company conducted search and destroy missions, road and firebase security. Twenty-five D/16th paratroopers were killed in action and many more were wounded during the course of the war. D Company's largest battle took place on 4 March 1968 at North Tuy Hoa. "During the day, the company lost 5 men killed, 16 wounded, and 3 missing (who are believed dead as two unrecognizable bodies were found). The enemy took a much greater loss. An estimated 2 enemy battalions, 85th Main Force (VC) and the 95th NVA Regiment, were rendered ineffective as they had 297 KIAs, with D/16th Armor receiving credit for killing 218."


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The revised official count for D/16 was 8 KIA and 21 WIA. The company commander, Captain Robert Helmick, was awarded the DSC, and many D/16th soldiers earned awards for valor. D Company, 16th Armor, was awarded a Meritorious Unit Award for its actions in Vietnam. It was deactivated in 1969 and the company's M113s were distributed to E Company, 17th Cavalry, 173rd Airborne Brigade.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113s were instrumental in conducting reconnaissance in force (RIFs), search and destroy missions, and large invasions (incursions) such as the U.S. invasion of Cambodia on 1 May 1970 and later Laos (Operation Lam Son 719) in 1971; all of which used the M113 as the primary work horse for moving the ground armies. While operating with cavalry and armor units, the M113s often worked in conjunction with U.S. M48 Patton and M551 Sheridan tanks. During the Vietnam War, U.S. Army gun trucks, along with V-100 armored cars, conducted convoy escorts for military traffic.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The USAF used M113 and M113A1 ACAV vehicles in USAF security police squadrons, which provided air base ground defense support in Vietnam. Also, M113s were supplied to the ARVN. One notable ARVN unit equipped with the M113 APC, the 3d Armored Cavalry Squadron, earned the Presidential Unit Citation. Additional M113s were supplied to the Cambodian Khmer National Armed Forces, equipped with a turret for the machine gun and a M40 recoilless rifle mounted on the roof.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Army of the Republic of Vietnam also used M113 armored personnel carriers. In 1975, 1381 ARVN M113s were destroyed and captured. Losses in other years are unknown.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Australian Army also used the M113 in Vietnam. After initial experiences showed that the crew commander was too vulnerable to fire, the Australians tried a number of different gun shields and turrets, eventually standardizing with the Cadillac-Cage T-50 turret fitted with two .30 cal Browning machine guns, or a single .30-single .50 combination. Other turrets were tried as were various gun shields, the main design of which was similar to the gun shield used on the U.S. M113 ACAV version.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In addition, the Australians operated an M113 variant fitted with a Saladin armored car turret, with a 76 mm gun as a fire support vehicle, or FSV, for infantry fire support. This has now also been removed from service.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Subsequent to Vietnam all Australian M113 troop carriers were fitted with the T50 turret. The FSV was eventually phased out and replaced with a modernized version known as an "MRV" (medium reconnaissance vehicle). The MRV featured a Scorpion turret with 76 mm gun, improved fire control, and passive night vision equipment.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Regiments using the M113 included former Citizens' Military Forces (CMF) units like the 4/19th Prince of Wales Light Horse Regiment (Armoured Reconnaissance) and Regular units such as 2ns Cavalry regiment (Armoured Reconnaisdsance) and 3/4th Cavalry Regiment (APC Regiment) An Armoured Reconnaissance Troop consisted of Alpha Track – Charlie Track (M113 LRV) Bravo – Delta Track (M113 MRV) Echo Track (M113 APC) with Assault Section (Armoured Infantry) later known as Scouts...


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Medium Reconnaissance Vehicle (MRV) – Saladin Turret (later Scorpion turret) – formerly known as a Fire Support Vehicle


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Israel Defense Forces are the second largest user of the M113 after the United States, with over 6000 of the vehicles in service.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In 1967 some Jordanian M113 were captured in the West Bank during the Six-Day War and were integrated into the Israeli Army. In 1970 Israel started to receive M113A1 to replace the antiquated half-tracks. The IDF M-113s were armed with M2 HB machine guns, and two MAG 7.62 mm machine guns on either side of the upper crew compartment door.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113 took part in the Yom Kippur War in October 1973, when the IDF was equipped with 448 M113s that saw action on the Sinai and Golan fronts. They proved inadequate for direct fighting due to their poor armor protection. In the Battle of Buq'atta most of the 7th Recon Company was wiped out while trying to assault Syrian commandos with their M-113s.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: They were used by the IDF in the 1978 South Lebanon conflict. In the 1982 Lebanon War, they saw heavy action. PLO ambushes with RPGs caused extensive casualties because of the tendency of the M113's aluminum armor to catch on fire after being hit by anti-tank weapons. Israeli infantrymen being ferried by M113s learned to quickly dismount and fight on foot when engaged.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: By the time of the Siege of Beirut, M113s were only used to carry supplies to the front line, always stopping at least 100 meters from enemy lines. M113s were subsequently used by both the IDF and the South Lebanon Army during the South Lebanon conflict.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The IDF utilized M113s during the First Intifada and the Second Intifada. In May 2004, two fully laden IDF M113s were destroyed by IEDs in the Gaza Strip, killing 11 soldiers, all those inside the vehicles on both occasions. This became known in Israel as the "APC disaster". The vulnerability of the M113 armored personnel carrier to IEDs and RPGs led the IDF to later begin to develop the Namer APC. M113s were used again in the 2006 Lebanon War and Operation Cast Lead.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In 2014, during the first wave of the IDF's ground incursion into Gaza in Operation Protective Edge, a Hamas RPG-29 destroyed a fully loaded M113 in Gaza during the Battle of Shuja'iyya, killing all seven Golani Brigade soldiers inside the vehicle. As a result, the IDF faced calls from the Israeli public to build more Namer APCs over the next decade and to gradually reduce the number of M113s used in its future combat operations. A group of 30 Israeli reserve soldiers subsequently notified their commanders that they would refuse to enter the Gaza Strip in M113s.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Israel Defense Forces still operates large numbers of the M113, maintaining a fleet of 6,000 of the vehicles. On numerous occasions since their introduction in the late 1960s, the IDF's M113s have proven vulnerable to modern anti-tank missiles, IEDs, and RPGs, resulting in the deaths of many Israeli soldiers riding inside the vehicles. The IDF has nonetheless been unable to replace the use of them in combat operations, due to budget constraints in equipping its large mechanized infantry regiments.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Israel is prototyping the Eitan (Hebrew for steadfast), an eight-wheeled armored fighting vehicle to replace their M113s. Designed to serve alongside the tracked Namer, the Eitan is planned to be cheaper and lighter, at 35 tons, incorporating an active protection system and a turret. They are expected to begin replacing the M113 starting in 2020. However, due to the slow rate of production of replacement APCs, the IDF is expected to be dependent on the M113 well into the 2020s. The IDF has also increased production of Namer APCs to replace the M113.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In the United States, M113s have been adopted by numerous law enforcement agencies. An M113 belonging to the Midland County Sheriff's Department was used in the 2008 raid of the Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints compound.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Brazilian Marine Corps's M113s were used in joint operations with Batalhão de Operações Policiais Especiais during the 2010 raid on Complexo do Alemão.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The M113 will be replaced in U.S. Army service by the Armored Multi-Purpose Vehicle (AMPV) program. Some 2,897 vehicles in five mission roles are set to take its place at the brigade level and below within armored brigades. However, the AMPV program is not developing a vehicle to replace the M113 in supporting echelons above brigade level, which will have different requirements.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: BAE Systems proposed a turretless variant of the Bradley Fighting Vehicle. In December 2014, the U.S. Army selected BAE proposal, the only proposal it received, to replace over 2800 M113s in service.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: , five variants of the AMPV are planned: M1283 General Purpose (522 planned), M1284 Medical Evacuation Vehicle (790 planned), M1285 Medical Treatment Vehicle (216 planned) and M1286 Mission Command (993 planned).


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The AMPVs are to be produced at a rate of around 180 vehicles per year, enough to equip 1.3 armored brigades. With 12 brigades to modernize, the M113 is not planned be entirely replaced in armored brigades until the late 2020s. With studies on what vehicle to replace M113s with in rear-echelon units ongoing, the M113 is not likely to be phased out of U.S. Army service until after 2030, over 70 years after entering service.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Starting in 1964, the gasoline engine was replaced with a 6V-53 Detroit Diesel engine, to take advantage of the better fuel economy and the reduced fire hazard of the diesel engine. The suffix A1 was used on all variants to denote a diesel engine, i.e. an M106A1 was an M106 mortar carrier equipped with a diesel engine.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In 1979, further upgrades were introduced. Engine cooling was improved by switching the locations of the fan and radiator. Higher-strength torsion bars increased ground clearance, and shock absorbers reduced the effects of ground strikes. The weight of the M113A2 was increased to . Because the added weight affected its freeboard when afloat, it was no longer required to be amphibious. Four-tube smoke grenade launchers were also added. The suffix A2 is used on all variants to denote upgrade to A2 standard.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In 1987, further improvements for "enhanced (battlefield) survival" were introduced. This included a yoke for steering instead of laterals, a brake pedal, a more powerful engine (the turbocharged 6V-53T Detroit Diesel), and internal spall liners for improved protection. Armored fuel tanks were added externally on both sides of the rear ramp, freeing up 0.45 cubic metres (16 cu ft) of internal space. The suffix A3 is used on all variants to denote upgrade to A3 standard.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The "armored cavalry assault vehicle" or "ACAV", was a concept and field modification pioneered by the ARVN in 1963 during the Vietnam War. The ARVN troops utilized the M113 armored personnel carrier as an infantry fighting vehicle, and more often than not, as a light tank by fighting mounted rather than as a "battle taxi" as dictated by U.S. Army doctrine.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: After it was found that the commander and cargo hatch positions were extremely exposed, and hence the commander and troops were vulnerable to enemy fire, South Vietnamese engineers thought out a simple and cheap remedy to this problem: Initially, field expedient shields and mounts were made from sunken ships, but this was soft metal and could be penetrated by small arms fire. Then armor plating from scrapped armored vehicles was used. This worked well, and by the end of 1964 all ARVN ACAVs were equipped with gun shields.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: For the U.S. Army, ACAV sets were produced industrially in Okinawa for the machine gun, and rear aft and starboard M60 machine gun positions. Finally, the ARVN's ACAV modifications were adopted by the U.S. Army in Vietnam, and by 1965 the full ACAV set was mass-produced in the U.S. The kit included shields and circular turret armor for the commander's M2 12.7 mm machine gun, and two additional 7.62 mm M60 machine guns, again with shields, fitted on either side of the top cargo hatch. This kit could be retrofitted to any M113.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: ACAV sets were sometimes fitted to the M106 mortar carrier, but the different rear hatch found on this vehicle required the left M60 machine gun to be fitted to the back instead of the side. Many kits were added in the field, but at least in the case of the 11th Armored Cavalry Regiment, the vehicles had their ACAV sets installed in the U.S. prior to their deployment to Vietnam in 1966 from Fort Meade, Maryland. Additional armor in the form of a mine protective kit under the hull was also frequently fitted.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: A huge number of vehicles based on the running gear of the M113 have been created, ranging from APCs to tactical ballistic missile launchers. The M113 has become one of the most prolific armored vehicles of the second half of the 20th century, and continues to serve with armies around the world into the 21st century.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: A mortar carrier armed with an M30 mortar 106.7mm (4.2-inch, or "Four-deuce") mounted on a turntable in the rear troop compartment. On this variant, the single hatch over the rear troop compartment was exchanged for a three-part circular hatch. The mortar could be fired from the vehicle, but could also be fired dismounted. Currently, the U.S. Army mortar carrier is the M106 upgraded to A3 standard and armed with an M121 120mm mortar, a variant of the M120 mortar.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Variant equipped with a turret armed with a flamethrower and a .50 caliber machine gun. These vehicles are no longer used by the U.S. Army. Vehicles upgraded to A1 standard were known as "M132A1s".


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Self-propelled variant of the M167 VADS short-range air-defense system, mounting an M61 Vulcan cannon with a radar rangefinder and 2,100 rounds of ammunition on a modified M113 chassis (M741 carrier).


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Command variant, the roof over the rear troop compartment is higher. The vehicle also carries additional radios and a generator. A variant of this is the M1068 standard integrated command post system carrier, equipped with the newest U.S. Army automated command and control system.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: A fitter and repair vehicle equipped with a crane. This vehicle was not taken into U.S. Army service.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Repair and recovery vehicle equipped with an internal winch and two earth anchors mounted on the rear hull


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: A variant of the M113 fitted with a modified Bradley turret as part of a vismod package specifically for training. This version also features MILES gear, a MGSS/TWGSS system, and fake ERA around the turret.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: A lowered and shortened version of the M113 developed for the Netherlands. It was used for reconnaissance duties with cavalry battalions and armoured engineer companies. It had four road wheels on either side. The engine was moved to the rear of the vehicle although the drive sprockets were maintained at the front. Armament was a 25mm cannon in a remotely operated turret. Crew consisted of commander, driver and gunner. It has also been used by the Canadian Army as 'Lynx reconnaissance vehicle'.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: In 1994, a stretched version of the M113 was presented by its manufacturer, also known as Mobile Tactical Vehicle Light (MTVL). Its hull is lengthened by 34 inches and equipped with an additional road wheel (six on each side) to sustain the added dry weight and payload. The vehicle was developed as a "production-tooled demonstrator" with private-industry funding from United Defense. United Defense LP proposed the MTVL for the Interim Armored Vehicle program in 2000. Although the U.S. Army did not buy it, it was acquired by other nations, and is copied today by Pakistan, Turkey and Egypt in their local plants. Some nations, like Canada and Australia, also stretched existing M113 hulls.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: The Army plans to convert four M113s into unmanned ground vehicles (UGVs) by late 2019 to serve in experimentation roles to test unmanned movement and combat concepts prior to the fielding of purpose-built robotic combat vehicles, planned by 2028.


title: M113 armored personnel carrier

text: Several countries acquired M113s and later copied the design and proceeded to produce clones or evolved models (post-M113A3-standard) in their own indigenous factories. Pakistan produces an armored personnel carrier known as Talha which has a number of mechanical and automotive parts in common with the M113. Turkey produces the ACV-300 based on the AIFV. Egypt produces many variants of the M113 including the Egyptian Infantry Fighting Vehicle (EIFV), which features a combination of an M113A3-base and the fully functional and stabilized two-man turret of the M2 Bradley. Iran is also producing its own M113s.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: Nikko Allen Jenkins (sometimes spelled Nicholas on first name; born September 16, 1986) is an American spree killer convicted of committing four murders in Omaha, Nebraska, in August 2013. The murders occurred within a month after he had been released from prison after serving 10-and-a-half years of the 18 years to which he had been sentenced for a carjacking committed at age 15 and for assaults committed in prison. Jenkins stated that he had committed the killings at the command of the ancient serpent god Apophis. He was found competent to stand trial, found guilty of the four murders, and was sentenced to death in May 2017.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: Jenkins was born in Colorado to parents David A. Magee and Lori Jenkins. Jenkins began a criminal record at age 7 when he was charged with bringing a gun to school.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: At about 5:01 a.m. on August 11, 2013, a patrol officer discovered two bodies in a white Ford pickup truck parked near a city swimming pool at 18th and F St, in Spring Lake Park. The two victims, identified as Juan Uribe-Pena and Jorge C. Cajiga-Ruiz, had been shot in the head, and their pockets turned inside out. They were lured to meet two women for a sexual encounter. The murder spree began with this random double-murder less than two weeks after his release from prison on July 30.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: On August 19, around 7 a.m., the body of Curtis Bradford was found outside a detached garage at 18th and Clark St. by a man returning home from a night shift at a convenience store. Investigators arrived to find two bullet wounds in Bradford's back. It was later revealed that Bradford and Jenkins had posed for a Facebook photo posted the day before. Bradford would be the only victim familiar to Jenkins.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: Jenkins' fourth and final victim, Andrea Kruger, was discovered on August 21, at about 2:15 a.m., by a deputy sheriff responding to a shots-fired call. Her body was found lying in the road at 168th and Fort St., with multiple 12-gauge shotgun wounds to the face, neck, and shoulder. Kruger had been returning home after a bartending shift near 178th, and Pacific St. Surveillance footage showed her locking up the Deja Vu Lounge at 1:47 a.m. At 6:30 that evening, Kruger's gold 2012 Chevrolet Traverse SUV was found abandoned away in an alley at 43rd and Charles St. Later that week, a news conference was held by Douglas County Sheriff Tim Dunning, in which he stated that investigators believed the SUV had been abandoned roughly 2.5 hours after being stolen, and that a "feeble attempt" had been made at setting the vehicle's interior ablaze.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: On August 30, 2013, Jenkins was arrested on an unrelated terroristic threats charge. By then, the evidence against him had mounted—investigators had the image of a female associate on surveillance footage at a local gun outlet buying the kind of distinctive ammunition (Brenneke Classic Magnum 12-gauge, commonly known as "deer slugs") that had been used to commit the killings. Additional footage had been pulled from cameras along the route to Kruger's abandoned SUV. On the evening of September 3, Jenkins confessed to all four murders during a rambling 8-hour interview. Jenkins told police that the acts were sacrifices to Apophis, a deity in the ancient Egyptian religion. He was charged with four counts of murder following the confession.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: In handwritten letters dated November 3, 2013, submitted to the "Omaha World-Herald", prosecutors, and a judge, Jenkins said he wished to plead guilty to all counts in the four slayings and that he would protect Apophis' kingdom with "animalistic savage brutality."


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: On February 19, 2014, Jenkins filed a federal lawsuit seeking $24.5 million from the State of Nebraska for wrongfully releasing him from prison. He stated that his claims of hearing voices from Apophis were repeatedly ignored. In the six-page handwritten filing, he stated that being kept in solitary confinement augmented his schizophrenia. He blamed corrections officials for the four killings. Jenkins claimed that his problems were caused by mental illness, and that he had schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and obsessive-compulsive disorder. The judge ordered a psychiatric evaluation, and a psychiatrist concluded that Jenkins had antisocial personality disorder and was faking psychotic symptoms.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: After being declared competent to stand trial (Jenkins scored 68 on an administered IQ test), the proceedings against Jenkins commenced. On his request, Jenkins was allowed to represent himself at trial under the guidance of advisory attorneys. Throughout the trial, Jenkins maintained that he acts under the command of Apophis. His courtroom antics included speaking in tongues, howling, and laughing as prosecutors recounted the details of his victims' deaths. On April 16, 2014, Judge Peter Bataillon found Nikko Jenkins guilty of all four murders.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: Jenkins was initially scheduled to be sentenced on August 11, 2014. The date was delayed indefinitely following a hearing held to determine whether he was capable of understanding the death penalty proceedings against him. On July 29, Judge Bataillon ordered Jenkins to be housed at the Lincoln Regional Center psychiatric hospital until doctors were satisfied with his condition. Officials at the Regional Center refused to house Jenkins due to inadequate security, but doctors agreed to treat him at a Lincoln prison.


title: Nikko Jenkins

text: In May 2017, Jenkins was sentenced to death by a three-judge panel. He was also sentenced to 450 years on weapons charges connected with the murders.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Joseph Conrad (born Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski, ; 3 December 1857 – 3 August 1924) was a Polish-British novelist and short story writer. He is regarded as one of the greatest writers in the English language; though he did not speak English fluently until his twenties, he came to be regarded a master prose stylist who brought a non-English sensibility into English literature. He wrote novels and stories, many in nautical settings, that depict crises of human individuality in the midst of what he saw as an indifferent, inscrutable and amoral world.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad is considered a literary impressionist by some and an early modernist by others, though his works also contain elements of 19th-century realism. His narrative style and anti-heroic characters, as in "Lord Jim", for example, have influenced numerous authors. Many dramatic films have been adapted from and inspired by his works. Numerous writers and critics have commented that his fictional works, written largely in the first two decades of the 20th century, seem to have anticipated later world events.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Writing near the peak of the British Empire, Conrad drew on the national experiences of his native Poland—during nearly all his life, parceled out among three occupying empires—and on his own experiences in the French and British merchant navies, to create short stories and novels that reflect aspects of a European-dominated world—including imperialism and colonialism—and that profoundly explore the human psyche. Postcolonial analysis of Conrad's work has stimulated substantial debate; in 1975, author Chinua Achebe published an article denouncing "Heart of Darkness" as racist and dehumanising, whereas other scholars, including Adam Hochschild and Peter Edgerly Firchow, have rebutted Achebe's view.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad was born on 3 December 1857 in Berdychiv (), 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". His family called him "Konrad", rather than "Józef".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: 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 Nałęcz coat-of-arms. Polish literature, particularly patriotic literature, was held in high esteem by the area's Polish population.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The Korzeniowski family had played a significant role in Polish attempts to regain independence. Conrad's paternal grandfather Teodor had served under Prince Józef Poniatowski during Napoleon's Russian campaign and had formed his own cavalry squadron during the November 1830 Uprising. Conrad's fiercely patriotic father Apollo belonged to the "Red" political faction, whose goal was to re-establish the pre-partition boundaries of Poland, but which also advocated land reform and the abolition of serfdom. Conrad's subsequent refusal to follow in Apollo's footsteps, and his choice of exile over resistance, were a source of lifelong guilt for Conrad.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Because of the father's attempts at farming and his political activism, the family moved repeatedly. In May 1861 they moved to Warsaw, where Apollo joined the resistance against the Russian Empire. He was arrested and imprisoned in Pavilion X of the Warsaw Citadel. Conrad would write: "[I]n the courtyard of this Citadel—characteristically for our nation—my childhood memories begin." On 9 May 1862 Apollo and his family were exiled to Vologda, north of Moscow and known for its bad climate. In January 1863 Apollo's sentence was commuted, and the family was sent to Chernihiv in northeast Ukraine, where conditions were much better. However, on 18 April 1865 Ewa died of tuberculosis.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Apollo did his best to teach Conrad at home. The boy's early reading introduced him to the two elements that later dominated his life: in Victor Hugo's "Toilers of the Sea", he encountered the sphere of activity to which he would devote his youth; Shakespeare brought him into the orbit of English literature. Most of all, though, he read Polish Romantic poetry. Half a century later he explained that


title: Joseph Conrad

text: "The Polishness in my works comes from Mickiewicz and Słowacki. My father read [Mickiewicz's] "Pan Tadeusz" aloud to me and made me read it aloud... I used to prefer [Mickiewicz's] "Konrad Wallenrod" [and] "Grażyna". Later I preferred Słowacki. You know why Słowacki?... [He is the soul of all Poland]".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In the autumn of 1866, young Conrad was sent for a year-long retreat for health reasons, to Kyiv and his mother's family estate at .


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In December 1867, Apollo took his son to the Austrian-held part of Poland, which for two years had been enjoying considerable internal freedom and a degree of self-government. After sojourns in Lwów and several smaller localities, on 20 February 1869 they moved to Kraków (until 1596 the capital of Poland), likewise in Austrian Poland. A few months later, on 23 May 1869, Apollo Korzeniowski died, leaving Conrad orphaned at the age of eleven. Like Conrad's mother, Apollo had been gravely ill with tuberculosis.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The young Conrad was placed in the care of Ewa's brother, Tadeusz Bobrowski. Conrad's poor health and his unsatisfactory schoolwork caused his uncle constant problems and no end of financial outlay. Conrad was not a good student; despite tutoring, he excelled only in geography. At that time he likely received private tutoring only, as there is no evidence he attended any school regularly. Since the boy's illness was clearly of nervous origin, the physicians supposed that fresh air and physical work would harden him; his uncle hoped that well-defined duties and the rigors of work would teach him discipline. Since he showed little inclination to study, it was essential that he learn a trade; his uncle thought he could work as a sailor-cum-businessman, who would combine maritime skills with commercial activities. In the autumn of 1871, thirteen-year-old Conrad announced his intention to become a sailor. He later recalled that as a child he had read (apparently in French translation) Leopold McClintock's book about his 1857–59 expeditions in the "Fox", in search of Sir John Franklin's lost ships ' and '. Conrad also recalled having read books by the American James Fenimore Cooper and the English Captain Frederick Marryat. A playmate of his adolescence recalled that Conrad spun fantastic yarns, always set at sea, presented so realistically that listeners thought the action was happening before their eyes.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In August 1873 Bobrowski sent fifteen-year-old Conrad to Lwów to a cousin who ran a small boarding house for boys orphaned by the 1863 Uprising; group conversation there was in French. The owner's daughter recalled:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad had been at the establishment for just over a year when in September 1874, for uncertain reasons, his uncle removed him from school in Lwów and took him back to Kraków.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: On 13 October 1874 Bobrowski sent the sixteen-year-old to Marseilles, France, for Conrad's planned merchant-marine career on French merchant ships. His uncle provided him with a monthly stipend as well (set at 150 francs). Though Conrad had not completed secondary school, his accomplishments included fluency in French (with a correct accent), some knowledge of Latin, German and Greek; probably a good knowledge of history, some geography, and probably already an interest in physics. He was well read, particularly in Polish Romantic literature. He belonged to the second generation in his family that had had to earn a living outside the family estates. They were born and reared partly in the milieu of the working intelligentsia, a social class that was starting to play an important role in Central and Eastern Europe. He had absorbed enough of the history, culture and literature of his native land to be able eventually to develop a distinctive world view and make unique contributions to the literature of his adoptive Britain.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Tensions that originated in his childhood in Poland and increased in his adulthood abroad contributed to Conrad's greatest literary achievements. Zdzisław Najder, himself an emigrant from Poland, observes:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Some critics have suggested that when Conrad left Poland, he wanted to break once and for all with his Polish past. In refutation of this, Najder quotes from Conrad's 14 August 1883 letter to family friend Stefan Buszczyński, written nine years after Conrad had left Poland:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In Marseilles Conrad had an intense social life, often stretching his budget. A trace of these years can be found in the northern Corsica town of Luri, where there is a plaque to a Corsican merchant seaman, Dominique Cervoni, whom Conrad befriended. Cervoni became the inspiration for some of Conrad's characters, such as the title character of the 1904 novel "Nostromo". Conrad visited Corsica with his wife in 1921, partly in search of connections with his long-dead friend and fellow merchant seaman.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In late 1877 Conrad's maritime career was interrupted by the refusal of the Russian consul to provide documents needed for him to continue his service. As a result, Conrad fell into debt, and in March 1878 he attempted suicide. He survived, and received further financial aid from his uncle, allowing him to resume his normal life. After nearly four years in France and on French ships, Conrad joined the British merchant marine, enlisting in April 1878 (he had most likely started learning English shortly before).


title: Joseph Conrad

text: For the next fifteen years, he served under the Red Ensign. He worked on a variety of ships as crew member (steward, apprentice, able seaman) and then as third, second and first mate, until eventually achieving captain's rank. During the 19 years from the time that Conrad had left Kraków in October 1874 until he signed off the "Adowa" in January 1894, he had worked in ships, including long periods in port, for 10 years and almost 8 months. He had spent just over 8 years at sea—9 months of it as a passenger. His sole captaincy took place in 1888–89, when he commanded the barque "Otago" from Sydney to Mauritius.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: During a brief call in India in 1885–86, 28-year-old Conrad sent five letters to Joseph Spiridion, a Pole eight years his senior whom he had befriended at Cardiff in June 1885 just before sailing for Singapore in the clipper ship "Tilkhurst". These letters are Conrad's first preserved texts in English. His English is generally correct but stiff to the point of artificiality; many fragments suggest that his thoughts ran along the lines of Polish syntax and phraseology.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: More importantly, the letters show a marked change in views from those implied in his earlier correspondence of 1881–83. He had abandoned "hope for the future" and the conceit of "sailing [ever] toward Poland", and his Panslavic ideas. He was left with a painful sense of the hopelessness of the Polish question and an acceptance of England as a possible refuge. While he often adjusted his statements to accord to some extent with the views of his addressees, the theme of hopelessness concerning the prospects for Polish independence often occurs authentically in his correspondence and works before 1914.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The year 1890 marked Conrad's first return to Poland, where he would visit his uncle and other relatives and acquaintances. His visit took place while he was waiting to proceed to the Congo Free State, having been hired by Albert Thys, deputy director of the "Société Anonyme Belge pour le Commerce du Haut-Congo". Conrad's association with the Belgian company, on the Congo River, would inspire his novella, "Heart of Darkness". During this period, in 1890 in the Congo, Conrad befriended Roger Casement, who was investigating matters there and was later knighted for his advocacy of human rights. Casement later became active in Irish Republicanism after leaving the British consular service.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad left Africa at the end of December 1890, arriving in Brussels by late January next year. He rejoined the British marine, as first mate, in November. When he left London on 25 October 1892 aboard the passenger clipper ship "Torrens", one of the passengers was William Henry Jacques, a consumptive Cambridge University graduate who died less than a year later (19 September 1893). According to Conrad's "A Personal Record", Jacques was the first reader of the still-unfinished manuscript of Conrad's "Almayer's Folly". Jacques encouraged Conrad to continue writing the novel.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad completed his last long-distance voyage as a seaman on 26 July 1893 when the "Torrens" docked at London and "J. Conrad Korzemowin" (per the certificate of discharge) debarked. When the "Torrens" had left Adelaide on 13 March 1893, the passengers had included two young Englishmen returning from Australia and New Zealand: 25-year-old lawyer and future novelist John Galsworthy; and Edward Lancelot Sanderson, who was going to help his father run a boys' preparatory school at Elstree. They were probably the first Englishmen and non-sailors with whom Conrad struck up a friendship; he would remain in touch with both. The protagonist of one of Galsworthy's first literary attempts, "The Doldrums" (1895–96), the first mate Armand, is obviously modelled on Conrad. At Cape Town, where the "Torrens" remained from 17 to 19 May, Galsworthy left the ship to look at the local mines. Sanderson continued his voyage and seems to have been the first to develop closer ties with Conrad. Later that year, Conrad would visit his relatives in Poland and Ukraine once again.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad's later letters to literary friends show the attention that he devoted to analysis of style, to individual words and expressions, to the emotional tone of phrases, to the atmosphere created by language. In this, Conrad in his own way followed the example of Gustave Flaubert, notorious for searching days on end for "le mot juste"—for the right word to render the "essence of the matter." Najder opines: "[W]riting in a foreign language admits a greater temerity in tackling personally sensitive problems, for it leaves uncommitted the most spontaneous, deeper reaches of the psyche, and allows a greater distance in treating matters we would hardly dare approach in the language of our childhood. As a rule it is easier both to swear and to analyze dispassionately in an acquired language."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In 1894, aged 36, Conrad reluctantly gave up the sea, partly because of poor health, partly due to unavailability of ships, and partly because he had become so fascinated with writing that he had decided on a literary career. "Almayer's Folly", set on the east coast of Borneo, was published in 1895. Its appearance marked his first use of the pen name "Joseph Conrad"; "Konrad" was, of course, the third of his Polish given names, but his use of it—in the anglicised version, "Conrad"—may also have been an homage to the Polish Romantic poet Adam Mickiewicz's patriotic narrative poem, "Konrad Wallenrod".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Edward Garnett, a young publisher's reader and literary critic who would play one of the chief supporting roles in Conrad's literary career, had—like Unwin's first reader of "Almayer's Folly", Wilfrid Hugh Chesson—been impressed by the manuscript, but Garnett had been "uncertain whether the English was good enough for publication." Garnett had shown the novel to his wife, Constance Garnett, later a translator of Russian literature. She had thought Conrad's foreignness a positive merit.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: While Conrad had only limited personal acquaintance with the peoples of Maritime Southeast Asia, the region looms large in his early work. According to Najder, Conrad, the exile and wanderer, was aware of a difficulty that he confessed more than once: the lack of a common cultural background with his Anglophone readers meant he could not compete with English-language authors writing about the English-speaking world. At the same time, the choice of a non-English colonial setting freed him from an embarrassing division of loyalty: "Almayer's Folly", and later "An Outpost of Progress" (1897, set in a Congo exploited by King Leopold II of Belgium) and "Heart of Darkness" (1899, likewise set in the Congo), contain bitter reflections on colonialism. The Malay states came theoretically under the suzerainty of the Dutch government; Conrad did not write about the area's British dependencies, which he never visited. He "was apparently intrigued by... struggles aimed at preserving national independence. The prolific and destructive richness of tropical nature and the dreariness of human life within it accorded well with the pessimistic mood of his early works."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: "Almayer's Folly", together with its successor, "An Outcast of the Islands" (1896), laid the foundation for Conrad's reputation as a romantic teller of exotic tales—a misunderstanding of his purpose that was to frustrate him for the rest of his career.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Almost all of Conrad's writings were first published in newspapers and magazines: influential reviews like "The Fortnightly Review" and the "North American Review"; avant-garde publications like the "Savoy", "New Review", and "The English Review"; popular short-fiction magazines like "The Saturday Evening Post" and "Harper's Magazine"; women's journals like the "Pictorial Review" and "Romance"; mass-circulation dailies like the "Daily Mail" and the "New York Herald"; and illustrated newspapers like "The Illustrated London News" and the "Illustrated Buffalo Express". He also wrote for "The Outlook", an imperialist weekly magazine, between 1898 and 1906.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Financial success long eluded Conrad, who often requested advances from magazine and book publishers, and loans from acquaintances such as John Galsworthy. Eventually a government grant ("civil list pension") of £100 per annum, awarded on 9 August 1910, somewhat relieved his financial worries, and in time collectors began purchasing his manuscripts. Though his talent was early on recognised by English intellectuals, popular success eluded him until the 1913 publication of "Chance", which is often considered one of his weaker novels.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad was a reserved man, wary of showing emotion. He scorned sentimentality; his manner of portraying emotion in his books was full of restraint, scepticism and irony. In the words of his uncle Bobrowski, as a young man Conrad was "extremely sensitive, conceited, reserved, and in addition excitable. In short [...] all the defects of the "Nałęcz" family."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad suffered throughout life from ill health, physical and mental. A newspaper review of a Conrad biography suggested that the book could have been subtitled "Thirty Years of Debt, Gout, Depression and Angst". In 1891 he was hospitalised for several months, suffering from gout, neuralgic pains in his right arm and recurrent attacks of malaria. He also complained of swollen hands "which made writing difficult". Taking his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski's advice, he convalesced at a spa in Switzerland. Conrad had a phobia of dentistry, neglecting his teeth until they had to be extracted. In one letter he remarked that every novel he had written had cost him a tooth. Conrad's physical afflictions were, if anything, less vexatious than his mental ones. In his letters he often described symptoms of depression; "the evidence", writes Najder, "is so strong that it is nearly impossible to doubt it."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In March 1878, at the end of his Marseilles period, 20-year-old Conrad attempted suicide, by shooting himself in the chest with a revolver. According to his uncle, who was summoned by a friend, Conrad had fallen into debt. Bobrowski described his subsequent "study" of his nephew in an extensive letter to , his own ideological opponent and a friend of Conrad's late father Apollo. To what extent the suicide attempt had been made in earnest likely will never be known, but it is suggestive of a situational depression.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In 1888 during a stop-over on Mauritius, in the Indian Ocean, Conrad developed a couple of romantic interests. One of these would be described in his 1910 story "A Smile of Fortune", which contains autobiographical elements (e.g., one of the characters is the same Chief Mate Burns who appears in "The Shadow Line"). The narrator, a young captain, flirts ambiguously and surreptitiously with Alice Jacobus, daughter of a local merchant living in a house surrounded by a magnificent rose garden. Research has confirmed that in Port Louis at the time there was a 17-year-old Alice Shaw, whose father, a shipping agent, owned the only rose garden in town.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: More is known about Conrad's other, more open flirtation. An old friend, Captain Gabriel Renouf of the French merchant marine, introduced him to the family of his brother-in-law. Renouf's eldest sister was the wife of Louis Edward Schmidt, a senior official in the colony; with them lived two other sisters and two brothers. Though the island had been taken over in 1810 by Britain, many of the inhabitants were descendants of the original French colonists, and Conrad's excellent French and perfect manners opened all local salons to him. He became a frequent guest at the Schmidts', where he often met the Misses Renouf. A couple of days before leaving Port Louis, Conrad asked one of the Renouf brothers for the hand of his 26-year-old sister Eugenie. She was already, however, engaged to marry her pharmacist cousin. After the rebuff, Conrad did not pay a farewell visit but sent a polite letter to Gabriel Renouf, saying he would never return to Mauritius and adding that on the day of the wedding his thoughts would be with them.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: On 24 March 1896 Conrad married an Englishwoman, Jessie George. The couple had two sons, Borys and John. The elder, Borys, proved a disappointment in scholarship and integrity. Jessie was an unsophisticated, working-class girl, sixteen years younger than Conrad. To his friends, she was an inexplicable choice of wife, and the subject of some rather disparaging and unkind remarks. (See Lady Ottoline Morrell's opinion of Jessie in Impressions.) However, according to other biographers such as Frederick Karl, Jessie provided what Conrad needed, namely a "straightforward, devoted, quite competent" companion. Similarly, Jones remarks that, despite whatever difficulties the marriage endured, "there can be no doubt that the relationship sustained Conrad's career as a writer", which might have been much less successful without her.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The couple rented a long series of successive homes, mostly in the English countryside. Conrad, who suffered frequent depressions, made great efforts to change his mood; the most important step was to move into another house. His frequent changes of home were usually signs of a search for psychological regeneration. Between 1910 and 1919 Conrad's home was Capel House in Orlestone, Kent, which was rented to him by Lord and Lady Oliver. It was here that he wrote "The Rescue", "Victory", and "The Arrow of Gold".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Except for several vacations in France and Italy, a 1914 vacation in his native Poland, and a 1923 visit to the United States, Conrad lived the rest of his life in England.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The 1914 vacation with his wife and sons in Poland, at the urging of Józef Retinger, coincided with the outbreak of World War I. On 28 July 1914, the day war broke out between Austro-Hungary and Serbia, Conrad and the Retingers arrived in Kraków (then in the Austro-Hungarian Empire), where Conrad visited childhood haunts. As the city lay only a few miles from the Russian border, there was a risk of being stranded in a battle zone. With wife Jessie and younger son John ill, Conrad decided to take refuge in the mountain resort town of Zakopane. They left Kraków on 2 August. A few days after arrival in Zakopane, they moved to the Konstantynówka "pension" operated by Conrad's cousin Aniela Zagórska; it had been frequented by celebrities including the statesman Józef Piłsudski and Conrad's acquaintance, the young concert pianist Artur Rubinstein.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Zagórska introduced Conrad to Polish writers, intellectuals, and artists who had also taken refuge in Zakopane, including novelist Stefan Żeromski and Tadeusz Nalepiński, a writer friend of anthropologist Bronisław Malinowski. Conrad aroused interest among the Poles as a famous writer and an exotic compatriot from abroad. He charmed new acquaintances, especially women. However, Marie Curie's physician sister, Bronisława Dłuska, wife of fellow physician and eminent socialist activist Kazimierz Dłuski, openly berated Conrad for having used his great talent for purposes other than bettering the future of his native land.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: But thirty-two-year-old Aniela Zagórska (daughter of the "pension" keeper), Conrad's niece who would translate his works into Polish in 1923–39, idolised him, kept him company, and provided him with books. He particularly delighted in the stories and novels of the ten-years-older, recently deceased Bolesław Prus, read everything by his fellow victim of Poland's 1863 Uprising—"my beloved Prus"—that he could get his hands on, and pronounced him "better than Dickens"—a favourite English novelist of Conrad's.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad, who was noted by his Polish acquaintances to still be fluent in his native tongue, participated in their impassioned political discussions. He declared presciently, as Józef Piłsudski had earlier in 1914 in Paris, that in the war, for Poland to regain independence, Russia must be beaten by the Central Powers (the Austro-Hungarian and German Empires), and the Central Powers must in turn be beaten by France and Britain.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: After many travails and vicissitudes, at the beginning of November 1914 Conrad managed to bring his family back to England. On his return, he was determined to work on swaying British opinion in favour of restoring Poland's sovereignty.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Jessie Conrad would later write in her memoirs: "I understood my husband so much better after those months in Poland. So many characteristics that had been strange and unfathomable to me before, took, as it were, their right proportions. I understood that his temperament was that of his countrymen."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The most extensive and ambitious political statement that Conrad ever made was his 1905 essay, "Autocracy and War", whose starting point was the Russo-Japanese War (he finished the article a month before the Battle of Tsushima Strait). The essay begins with a statement about Russia's incurable weakness and ends with warnings against Prussia, the dangerous aggressor in a future European war. For Russia he predicted a violent outburst in the near future, but Russia's lack of democratic traditions and the backwardness of her masses made it impossible for the revolution to have a salutary effect. Conrad regarded the formation of a representative government in Russia as unfeasible and foresaw a transition from autocracy to dictatorship. He saw western Europe as torn by antagonisms engendered by economic rivalry and commercial selfishness. In vain might a Russian revolution seek advice or help from a materialistic and egoistic western Europe that armed itself in preparation for wars far more brutal than those of the past.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad's distrust of democracy sprang from his doubts whether the propagation of democracy as an aim in itself could solve any problems. He thought that, in view of the weakness of human nature and of the "criminal" character of society, democracy offered boundless opportunities for demagogues and charlatans. Conrad kept his distance from partisan politics, and never voted in British national elections.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: He accused social democrats of his time of acting to weaken "the national sentiment, the preservation of which [was his] concern"—of attempting to dissolve national identities in an impersonal melting-pot. "I look at the future from the depth of a very black past and I find that nothing is left for me except fidelity to a cause lost, to an idea without future." It was Conrad's hopeless fidelity to the memory of Poland that prevented him from believing in the idea of "international fraternity", which he considered, under the circumstances, just a verbal exercise. He resented some socialists' talk of freedom and world brotherhood while keeping silent about his own partitioned and oppressed Poland.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Before that, in the early 1880s, letters to Conrad from his uncle Tadeusz show Conrad apparently having hoped for an improvement in Poland's situation not through a liberation movement but by establishing an alliance with neighbouring Slavic nations. This had been accompanied by a faith in the Panslavic ideology—"surprising", Najder writes, "in a man who was later to emphasize his hostility towards Russia, a conviction that... Poland's [superior] civilization and... historic... traditions would [let] her play a leading role... in the Panslavic community, [and his] doubts about Poland's chances of becoming a fully sovereign nation-state."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad's alienation from "partisan" politics went together with an abiding sense of the thinking man's burden imposed by his personality, as described in an 1894 letter by Conrad to a relative-by-marriage and fellow author, Marguerite Poradowska ("née" Gachet, and cousin of Vincent van Gogh's physician, Paul Gachet) of Brussels:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad wrote H.G. Wells that the latter's 1901 book, "Anticipations", an ambitious attempt to predict major social trends, "seems to presuppose... a sort of select circle to which you address yourself, leaving the rest of the world outside the pale. [In addition,] you do not take sufficient account of human imbecility which is cunning and perfidious."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In a 23 October 1922 letter to mathematician-philosopher Bertrand Russell, in response to the latter's book, "The Problem of China", which advocated socialist reforms and an oligarchy of sages who would reshape Chinese society, Conrad explained his own distrust of political panaceas:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In an August 1901 letter to the editor of "The New York Times Saturday Book Review", Conrad wrote: "Egoism, which is the moving force of the world, and altruism, which is its morality, these two contradictory instincts, of which one is so plain and the other so mysterious, cannot serve us unless in the incomprehensible alliance of their irreconcilable antagonism."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: On 3 August 1924, Conrad died at his house, Oswalds, in Bishopsbourne, Kent, England, probably of a heart attack. He was interred at Canterbury Cemetery, Canterbury, under a misspelled version of his original Polish name, as "Joseph Teador Conrad Korzeniowski". Inscribed on his gravestone are the lines from Edmund Spenser's "The Faerie Queene" which he had chosen as the epigraph to his last complete novel, "The Rover":


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad's modest funeral took place amid great crowds. His old friend Edward Garnett recalled bitterly:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Another old friend of Conrad's, Cunninghame Graham, wrote Garnett: "Aubry was saying to me... that had Anatole France died, all Paris would have been at his funeral."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Despite the opinions even of some who knew Conrad personally, such as fellow-novelist Henry James, Conrad—even when only writing elegantly crafted letters to his uncle and acquaintances—was always at heart a writer who sailed, rather than a sailor who wrote. He used his sailing experiences as a backdrop for many of his works, but he also produced works of similar world view, without the nautical motifs. The failure of many critics to appreciate this caused him much frustration.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: He wrote oftener about life at sea and in exotic parts than about life on British land because—unlike, for example, his friend John Galsworthy, author of "The Forsyte Saga"—he knew little about everyday domestic relations in Britain. When Conrad's "The Mirror of the Sea" was published in 1906 to critical acclaim, he wrote to his French translator: "The critics have been vigorously swinging the censer to me... Behind the concert of flattery, I can hear something like a whisper: 'Keep to the open sea! Don't land!' They want to banish me to the middle of the ocean." Writing to his friend Richard Curle, Conrad remarked that "the public mind fastens on externals" such as his "sea life", oblivious to how authors transform their material "from particular to general, and appeal to universal emotions by the temperamental handling of personal experience".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Nevertheless, Conrad found much sympathetic readership, especially in the United States. H.L. Mencken was one of the earliest and most influential American readers to recognise how Conrad conjured up "the general out of the particular". F. Scott Fitzgerald, writing to Mencken, complained about having been omitted from a list of Conrad imitators. Since Fitzgerald, dozens of other American writers have acknowledged their debts to Conrad, including William Faulkner, William Burroughs, Saul Bellow, Philip Roth, Joan Didion, and Thomas Pynchon.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: An October 1923 visitor to Oswalds, Conrad's home at the time—Cyril Clemens, a cousin of Mark Twain—quoted Conrad as saying: "In everything I have written there is always one invariable intention, and that is to capture the reader's attention."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad the artist famously aspired, in the words of his preface to "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'" (1897), "by the power of the written word to make you hear, to make you feel... before all, to make you "see". That—and no more, and it is everything. If I succeed, you shall find there according to your deserts: encouragement, consolation, fear, charm—all you demand—and, perhaps, also that glimpse of truth for which you have forgotten to ask."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Writing in what to the visual arts was the age of Impressionism, and what to music was the age of impressionist music, Conrad showed himself in many of his works a prose poet of the highest order: for instance, in the evocative "Patna" and courtroom scenes of "Lord Jim"; in the scenes of the "melancholy-mad elephant" and the "French gunboat firing into a continent", in "Heart of Darkness"; in the doubled protagonists of "The Secret Sharer"; and in the verbal and conceptual resonances of "Nostromo" and "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad used his own memories as literary material so often that readers are tempted to treat his life and work as a single whole. His "view of the world", or elements of it, is often described by citing at once both his private and public statements, passages from his letters, and citations from his books. Najder warns that this approach produces an incoherent and misleading picture. "An... uncritical linking of the two spheres, literature and private life, distorts each. Conrad used his own experiences as raw material, but the finished product should not be confused with the experiences themselves."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Many of Conrad's characters were inspired by actual persons he had met, including, in his first novel, "Almayer's Folly" (completed 1894), William Charles Olmeijer, the spelling of whose surname Conrad probably altered to "Almayer" inadvertently. The historic trader Olmeijer, whom Conrad encountered on his four short visits to Berau in Borneo, subsequently haunted Conrad's imagination. Conrad often borrowed the authentic names of actual individuals, e.g., Captain McWhirr ("Typhoon"), Captain Beard and Mr. Mahon ("Youth"), Captain Lingard ("Almayer's Folly" and elsewhere), and Captain Ellis ("The Shadow Line"). "Conrad", writes J. I. M. Stewart, "appears to have attached some mysterious significance to such links with actuality." Equally curious is "a great deal of namelessness in Conrad, requiring some minor virtuosity to maintain." Thus we never learn the surname of the protagonist of "Lord Jim". Conrad also preserves, in "The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'", the authentic name of the ship, the "Narcissus", in which he sailed in 1884.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Apart from Conrad's own experiences, a number of episodes in his fiction were suggested by past or contemporary publicly known events or literary works. The first half of the 1900 novel "Lord Jim" (the "Patna" episode) was inspired by the real-life 1880 story of the ; the second part, to some extent by the life of James Brooke, the first White Rajah of Sarawak. The 1901 short story "Amy Foster" was inspired partly by an anecdote in Ford Madox Ford's "The Cinque Ports" (1900), wherein a shipwrecked sailor from a German merchant ship, unable to communicate in English, and driven away by the local country people, finally found shelter in a pigsty.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In "Nostromo" (completed 1904), the theft of a massive consignment of silver was suggested to Conrad by a story he had heard in the Gulf of Mexico and later read about in a "volume picked up outside a second-hand bookshop." The novel's political strand, according to Maya Jasanoff, is related to the creation of the Panama Canal. "In January 1903", she writes, "just as Conrad started writing "Nostromo", the US and Colombian secretaries of state signed a treaty granting the United States a one-hundred-year renewable lease on a six-mile strip flanking the canal... While the [news]papers murmured about revolution in Colombia, Conrad opened a fresh section of "Nostromo" with hints of dissent in Costaguana", his fictional South American country. He plotted a revolution in the Costaguanan fictional port of Sulaco that mirrored the real-life secessionist movement brewing in Panama. When Conrad finished the novel on 1 September 1904, writes Jasanoff, "he left Sulaco in the condition of Panama. As Panama had gotten its independence instantly recognized by the United States and its economy bolstered by American investment in the canal, so Sulaco had "its" independence instantly recognized by the United States, and its economy underwritten by investment in the [fictional] San Tomé [silver] mine."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: "The Secret Agent" (completed 1906) was inspired by the French anarchist Martial Bourdin's 1894 death while apparently attempting to blow up the Greenwich Observatory. Conrad's story "The Secret Sharer" (completed 1909) was inspired by an 1880 incident when Sydney Smith, first mate of the "Cutty Sark", had killed a seaman and fled from justice, aided by the ship's captain. The plot of "Under Western Eyes" (completed 1910) is kicked off by the assassination of a brutal Russian government minister, modelled after the real-life 1904 assassination of Russian Minister of the Interior Vyacheslav von Plehve. The near-novella "Freya of the Seven Isles" (completed in March 1911) was inspired by a story told to Conrad by a Malaya old hand and fan of Conrad's, Captain Carlos M. Marris.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: For the natural surroundings of the high seas, the Malay Archipelago and South America, which Conrad described so vividly, he could rely on his own observations. What his brief landfalls could not provide was a thorough understanding of exotic cultures. For this he resorted, like other writers, to literary sources. When writing his Malayan stories, he consulted Alfred Russel Wallace's "The Malay Archipelago" (1869), James Brooke's journals, and books with titles like "Perak and the Malays", "My Journal in Malayan Waters", and "Life in the Forests of the Far East". When he set about writing his novel "Nostromo", set in the fictional South American country of Costaguana, he turned to "The War between Peru and Chile"; Edward Eastwick, "Venezuela: or, Sketches of Life in a South American Republic" (1868); and George Frederick Masterman, "Seven Eventful Years in Paraguay" (1869). As a result of relying on literary sources, in "Lord Jim", as J. I. M. Stewart writes, Conrad's "need to work to some extent from second-hand" led to "a certain thinness in Jim's relations with the... peoples... of Patusan..." This prompted Conrad at some points to alter the nature of Charles Marlow's narrative to "distanc[e] an uncertain command of the detail of Tuan Jim's empire."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In keeping with his scepticism and melancholy, Conrad almost invariably gives lethal fates to the characters in his principal novels and stories. Almayer ("Almayer's Folly", 1894), abandoned by his beloved daughter, takes to opium, and dies. Peter Willems ("An Outcast of the Islands", 1895) is killed by his jealous lover Aïssa. The ineffectual "Nigger", James Wait ("The Nigger of the 'Narcissus'", 1897), dies aboard ship and is buried at sea. Mr. Kurtz ("Heart of Darkness", 1899) expires, uttering the words, "The horror! The horror!" "Tuan" Jim ("Lord Jim", 1900), having inadvertently precipitated a massacre of his adoptive community, deliberately walks to his death at the hands of the community's leader. In Conrad's 1901 short story, "Amy Foster", a Pole transplanted to England, Yanko Goorall (an English transliteration of the Polish "Janko Góral", "Johnny Highlander"), falls ill and, suffering from a fever, raves in his native language, frightening his wife Amy, who flees; next morning Yanko dies of heart failure, and it transpires that he had simply been asking in Polish for water. Captain Whalley ("The End of the Tether", 1902), betrayed by failing eyesight and an unscrupulous partner, drowns himself. Gian' Battista Fidanza, the eponymous respected Italian-immigrant "Nostromo" () of the novel "Nostromo" (1904), illicitly obtains a treasure of silver mined in the South American country of "Costaguana" and is shot dead due to mistaken identity. Mr. Verloc, "The Secret Agent" (1906) of divided loyalties, attempts a bombing, to be blamed on terrorists, that accidentally kills his mentally defective brother-in-law Stevie, and Verloc himself is killed by his distraught wife, who drowns herself by jumping overboard from a channel steamer. In "Chance" (1913), Roderick Anthony, a sailing-ship captain, and benefactor and husband of Flora de Barral, becomes the target of a poisoning attempt by her jealous disgraced financier father who, when detected, swallows the poison himself and dies (some years later, Captain Anthony drowns at sea). In "Victory" (1915), Lena is shot dead by Jones, who had meant to kill his accomplice Ricardo and later succeeds in doing so, then himself perishes along with another accomplice, after which Lena's protector Axel Heyst sets fire to his bungalow and dies beside Lena's body.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: When a principal character of Conrad's does escape with his life, he sometimes does not fare much better. In "Under Western Eyes" (1911), Razumov betrays a fellow University of St. Petersburg student, the revolutionist Victor Haldin, who has assassinated a savagely repressive Russian government minister. Haldin is tortured and hanged by the authorities. Later Razumov, sent as a government spy to Geneva, a centre of anti-tsarist intrigue, meets the mother and sister of Haldin, who share Haldin's liberal convictions. Razumov falls in love with the sister and confesses his betrayal of her brother; later, he makes the same avowal to assembled revolutionists, and their professional executioner bursts his eardrums, making him deaf for life. Razumov staggers away, is knocked down by a streetcar, and finally returns as a cripple to Russia.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad was keenly conscious of tragedy in the world and in his works. In 1898, at the start of his writing career, he had written to his Scottish writer-politician friend Cunninghame Graham: "What makes mankind tragic is not that they are the victims of nature, it is that they are conscious of it. [A]s soon as you know of your slavery the pain, the anger, the strife—the tragedy begins." But in 1922, near the end of his life and career, when another Scottish friend, Richard Curle, sent Conrad proofs of two articles he had written about Conrad, the latter objected to being characterised as a gloomy and tragic writer. "That reputation... has deprived me of innumerable readers... I absolutely object to being called a "tragedian"."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad claimed that he "never kept a diary and never owned a notebook." John Galsworthy, who knew him well, described this as "a statement which surprised no one who knew the resources of his memory and the brooding nature of his creative spirit." Nevertheless, after Conrad's death, Richard Curle published a heavily modified version of Conrad's diaries describing his experiences in the Congo; in 1978 a more complete version was published as "The Congo Diary and Other Uncollected Pieces". The first accurate transcription was published in Robert Hampson's Penguin edition of "Heart of Darkness" in 1995; Hampson's transcription and annotations were reprinted in the Penguin edition of 2007.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Unlike many authors who make it a point not to discuss work in progress, Conrad often did discuss his current work and even showed it to select friends and fellow authors, such as Edward Garnett, and sometimes modified it in the light of their critiques and suggestions.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Edward Said was struck by the sheer quantity of Conrad's correspondence with friends and fellow writers; by 1966, it "amount[ed] to eight published volumes". Said comments: "[I]t seemed to me that if Conrad wrote of himself, of the problem of self-definition, with such sustained urgency, some of what he wrote must have had meaning for his fiction. [I]t [was] difficult to believe that a man would be so uneconomical as to pour himself out in letter after letter and then not use and reformulate his insights and discoveries in his fiction." Said found especially close parallels between Conrad's letters and his shorter fiction. "Conrad... believed... that artistic distinction was more tellingly demonstrated in a shorter rather than a longer work... He believed that his [own] life was like a series of short episodes... because he was himself so many different people...: he was a Pole and an Englishman, a sailor and a writer." Another scholar, Najder, writes:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad borrowed from other, Polish- and French-language authors, to an extent sometimes skirting plagiarism. When the Polish translation of his 1915 novel "Victory" appeared in 1931, readers noted striking similarities to Stefan Żeromski's kitschy novel, "The History of a Sin" ("Dzieje grzechu", 1908), including their endings. Comparative-literature scholar Yves Hervouet has demonstrated in the text of "Victory" a whole mosaic of influences, borrowings, similarities and allusions. He further lists hundreds of concrete borrowings from other, mostly French authors in nearly all of Conrad's works, from "Almayer's Folly" (1895) to his unfinished "Suspense". Conrad seems to have used eminent writers' texts as raw material of the same kind as the content of his own memory. Materials borrowed from other authors often functioned as allusions. Moreover, he had a phenomenal memory for texts and remembered details, "but [writes Najder] it was not a memory strictly categorized according to sources, marshalled into homogeneous entities; it was, rather, an enormous receptacle of images and pieces from which he would draw."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Continues Najder: "[H]e can never be accused of outright plagiarism. Even when lifting sentences and scenes, Conrad changed their character, inserted them within novel structures. He did not imitate, but (as Hervouet says) 'continued' his masters. He was right in saying: 'I don't resemble anybody.' Ian Watt put it succinctly: 'In a sense, Conrad is the least derivative of writers; he wrote very little that could possibly be mistaken for the work of anyone else.' Conrad's acquaintance George Bernard Shaw says it well: "[A] man can no more be completely original [...] than a tree can grow out of air."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad, like other artists, faced constraints arising from the need to propitiate his audience and confirm their own favourable self-regard. This may account for his describing the admirable crew of the "Judea" in his 1898 story "Youth" as "Liverpool hard cases", whereas the crew of the "Judea"'s actual 1882 prototype, the "Palestine", had included not a single Liverpudlian, and half the crew had been non-Britons; and for Conrad's transforming the real-life 1880 criminally negligent British captain J. L. Clark, of the , in his 1900 novel "Lord Jim", into the captain of the fictitious "Patna"—"a sort of renegade New South Wales German" so monstrous in physical appearance as to suggest "a trained baby elephant". Similarly, in his letters Conrad—during most of his literary career, struggling for sheer financial survival—often adjusted his views to the predilections of his correspondents.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Historians have also noted that Conrad's works which were set in European colonies and intended to critique the effects of colonialism were set in Dutch and Belgian colonies, instead of the British Empire.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The singularity of the universe depicted in Conrad's novels, especially compared to those of near-contemporaries like his friend and frequent benefactor John Galsworthy, is such as to open him to criticism similar to that later applied to Graham Greene. But where "Greeneland" has been characterised as a recurring and recognisable atmosphere independent of setting, Conrad is at pains to create a sense of place, be it aboard ship or in a remote village; often he chose to have his characters play out their destinies in isolated or confined circumstances. In the view of Evelyn Waugh and Kingsley Amis, it was not until the first volumes of Anthony Powell's sequence, "A Dance to the Music of Time", were published in the 1950s, that an English novelist achieved the same command of atmosphere and precision of language with consistency, a view supported by later critics like A. N. Wilson; Powell acknowledged his debt to Conrad. Leo Gurko, too, remarks, as "one of Conrad's special qualities, his abnormal awareness of place, an awareness magnified to almost a new dimension in art, an ecological dimension defining the relationship between earth and man."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: T. E. Lawrence, one of many writers whom Conrad befriended, offered some perceptive observations about Conrad's writing:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In a letter of 14 December 1897 to his Scottish friend, Robert Bontine Cunninghame Graham, Conrad wrote that science tells us, "Understand that thou art nothing, less than a shadow, more insignificant than a drop of water in the ocean, more fleeting than the illusion of a dream."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In a letter of 20 December 1897 to Cunninghame Graham, Conrad metaphorically described the universe as a huge machine:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad spoke his native Polish and the French language fluently from childhood and only acquired English in his twenties. He would probably have spoken some Ukrainian as a child; he certainly had to have some knowledge of German and Russian. His son Borys records that, though Conrad had insisted that he spoke only a few words of German, when they reached the Austrian frontier in the family's attempt to leave Poland in 1914, Conrad spoke German "at considerable length and extreme fluency". Russia, Prussia, and Austria had divided up Poland among them, and he was officially a Russian subject until his naturalization as a British subject. As a result, up to this point, his official documents were in Russian. His knowledge of Russian was good enough that his uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski wrote him (22 May 1893) advising that, when Conrad came to visit, he should "telegraph for horses, but in Russian, for doesn't receive or accept messages in an 'alien' language."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad chose, however, to write his fiction in English. He says in his preface to "A Personal Record" that writing in English was for him "natural", and that the idea of his having made a deliberate choice between English and French, as some had suggested, was in error. He explained that, though he had been familiar with French from childhood, "I would have been afraid to attempt expression in a language so perfectly 'crystallized'." In 1915, as Jo Davidson sculpted his bust, Conrad answered his question: "Ah… to write French you have to know it. English is so plastic—if you haven't got a word you need you can make it, but to write French you have to be an artist like Anatole France." These statements, as so often in Conrad's "autobiographical" writings, are subtly disingenuous. In 1897 Conrad was visited by a fellow Pole, the philosopher Wincenty Lutosławski, who asked Conrad, "Why don't you write in Polish?" Lutosławski recalled Conrad explaining: "I value our beautiful Polish literature too much to bring into it my clumsy efforts. But for the English my gifts are sufficient and secure my daily bread."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad wrote in "A Personal Record" that English was "the speech of my secret choice, of my future, of long friendships, of the deepest affections, of hours of toil and hours of ease, and of solitary hours, too, of books read, of thoughts pursued, of remembered emotions—of my very dreams!" In 1878 Conrad's four-year experience in the French merchant marine had been cut short when the French discovered he did not have a permit from the Imperial Russian consul to sail with the French. This, and some typically disastrous Conradian investments, had left him destitute and had precipitated a suicide attempt. With the concurrence of his mentor-uncle Tadeusz Bobrowski, who had been summoned to Marseilles, Conrad decided to seek employment with the British merchant marine, which did not require Russia's permission. Thus began Conrad's sixteen years' seafarer's acquaintance with the British and with the English language.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Had Conrad remained in the Francophone sphere or had he returned to Poland, the son of the Polish poet, playwright, and translator Apollo Korzeniowski—from childhood exposed to Polish and foreign literature, and ambitious to himself become a writer—he might have ended up writing in French or Polish instead of English. Certainly his Uncle Tadeusz thought Conrad might write in Polish; in an 1881 letter he advised his 23-year-old nephew:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In the opinion of some biographers, Conrad's third language, English, remained under the influence of his first two languages—Polish and French. This makes his English seem unusual. Najder writes that:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Inevitably for a trilingual Polish–French–English-speaker, Conrad's writings occasionally show linguistic spillover: "Franglais" or "Poglish"—the inadvertent use of French or Polish vocabulary, grammar, or syntax in his English writings. In one instance, Najder uses "several slips in vocabulary, typical for Conrad (Gallicisms) and grammar (usually Polonisms)" as part of internal evidence against Conrad's sometime literary collaborator Ford Madox Ford's claim to have written a certain instalment of Conrad's novel "Nostromo", for publication in "T. P.'s Weekly", on behalf of an ill Conrad.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: The impracticality of working with a language which has long ceased to be one's principal language of daily use is illustrated by Conrad's 1921 attempt at translating into English the Polish physicist, columnist, story-writer, and comedy-writer Bruno Winawer's short play, "The Book of Job". Najder writes:


title: Joseph Conrad

text: As a practical matter, by the time Conrad set about writing fiction, he had little choice but to write in English. Poles who accused Conrad of cultural apostasy because he wrote in English instead of Polish missed the point—as do Anglophones who see, in Conrad's default choice of English as his artistic medium, a testimonial to some sort of innate superiority of the English language.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: According to Conrad's close friend and literary assistant Richard Curle, the fact of Conrad writing in English was "obviously misleading" because Conrad "is no more completely English in his art than he is in his nationality". Conrad, according to Curle, "could never have written in any other language save the English language...for he would have been dumb in any other language but the English."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad always retained a strong emotional attachment to his native language. He asked his visiting Polish niece Karola Zagórska, "Will you forgive me that my sons don't speak Polish?" In June 1924, shortly before his death, he apparently expressed a desire that his son John marry a Polish girl and learn Polish, and toyed with the idea of returning for good to now independent Poland.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad bridled at being referred to as a Russian or "Slavonic" writer. The only Russian writer he admired was Ivan Turgenev. "The critics", he wrote an acquaintance on 31 January 1924, six months before his death, "detected in me a new note and as, just when I began to write, they had discovered the existence of Russian authors, they stuck that label on me under the name of Slavonism. What I venture to say is that it would have been more just to charge me at most with Polonism." However, though Conrad protested that Dostoyevsky was "too Russian for me" and that Russian literature generally was "repugnant to me hereditarily and individually", "Under Western Eyes" is viewed as Conrad's response to the themes explored in Dostoyevsky's "Crime and Punishment".


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad had an awareness that, in any language, individual expressions – words, phrases, sentences – are fraught with connotations. He once wrote: "No English word has clean edges." All expressions, he thought, carried so many connotations as to be little more than "instruments for exciting blurred emotions." This might help elucidate the impressionistic quality of many passages in his writings. It also explains why he chose to write his literary works not in Polish or French but in English, with which for decades he had had the greatest contact.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: In 1975 the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe published an essay, "", which provoked controversy by calling Conrad a "thoroughgoing racist". Achebe's view was that "Heart of Darkness" cannot be considered a great work of art because it is "a novel which celebrates... dehumanisation, which depersonalises a portion of the human race." Referring to Conrad as a "talented, tormented man", Achebe notes that Conrad (via the protagonist, Charles Marlow) reduces and degrades Africans to "limbs", "ankles", "glistening white eyeballs", etc., while simultaneously (and fearfully) suspecting a common kinship between himself and these natives—leading Marlow to sneer the word "ugly." Achebe also cited Conrad's description of an encounter with an African: "A certain enormous buck nigger encountered in Haiti fixed my conception of blind, furious, unreasoning rage, as manifested in the human animal to the end of my days." Achebe's essay, a landmark in postcolonial discourse, provoked debate, and the questions it raised have been addressed in most subsequent literary criticism of Conrad.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Achebe's critics argue that he fails to distinguish Marlow's view from Conrad's, which results in very clumsy interpretations of the novella. In their view, Conrad portrays Africans sympathetically and their plight tragically, and refers sarcastically to, and condemns outright, the supposedly noble aims of European colonists, thereby demonstrating his skepticism about the moral superiority of white men. Ending a passage that describes the condition of chained, emaciated slaves, the novelist remarks: "After all, I also was a part of the great cause of these high and just proceedings." Some observers assert that Conrad, whose native country had been conquered by imperial powers, empathised by default with other subjugated peoples. Jeffrey Meyers notes that Conrad, like his acquaintance Roger Casement, "was one of the first men to question the Western notion of progress, a dominant idea in Europe from the Renaissance to the Great War, to attack the hypocritical justification of colonialism and to reveal... the savage degradation of the white man in Africa." Likewise, E.D. Morel, who led international opposition to King Leopold II's rule in the Congo, saw Conrad's "Heart of Darkness" as a condemnation of colonial brutality and referred to the novella as "the most powerful thing written on the subject."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad scholar Peter Firchow writes that "nowhere in the novel does Conrad or any of his narrators, personified or otherwise, claim superiority on the part of Europeans on the grounds of alleged genetic or biological difference." If Conrad or his novel is racist, it is only in a weak sense, since "Heart of Darkness" acknowledges racial distinctions "but does not suggest an essential superiority" of any group. Achebe's reading of "Heart of Darkness" can be (and has been) challenged by a reading of Conrad's other African story, "An Outpost of Progress", which has an omniscient narrator, rather than the embodied narrator, Marlow. Some younger scholars, such as Masood Ashraf Raja, have also suggested that if we read Conrad beyond "Heart of Darkness", especially his Malay novels, racism can be further complicated by foregrounding Conrad's positive representation of Muslims.


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad's experience in the Belgian-run Congo made him one of the fiercest critics of the "white man's mission." It was also, writes Najder, Conrad's most daring and last "attempt to become a "homo socialis", a cog in the mechanism of society. By accepting the job in the trading company, he joined, for once in his life, an organized, large-scale group activity on land... It is not accidental that the Congo expedition remained an isolated event in Conrad's life. Until his death he remained a recluse in the social sense and never became involved with any institution or clearly defined group of people."


title: Joseph Conrad

text: Conrad was a Russian subject, having been born in the Russian part of what had once been the Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth. After his father's death, Conrad's uncle Bobrowski had attempted to secure Austrian citizenship for him—to no avail, probably because Conrad had not received permission from Russian authorities to remain abroad permanently and had not been released from being a Russian subject. Conrad could not return to Ukraine, in the Russian Empire—he would have been liable to many years' military service and, as the son of political exiles, to harassment.