SOURCE: “Echoes from Konrad Wallenrod in Almayer's Folly and A Personal Record,” in Nineteenth-Century Literature, Vol. 53, No. 1, June, 1998, pp. 91-110.

In the following essay, Szczypien examines the influence of Mickiewicz, specifically his Konrad Wallenrod on the works of Joseph Conrad. In this analysis, Szczypien finds that Konrad Wallenrod is the most Byronic of Mickiewicz's work.

Józef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski became Joseph Conrad upon the publication of Almayer's Folly in London on 29 April 1895. He had taken the third of his given names for a pen name, partly in deference to an English-speaking public but also, certainly, because he knew the historical significance of that name and its literary sources, two preeminent works of Polish Romanticism by Adam Mickiewicz: Dziady (Forefathers' Eve) and Konrad Wallenrod. In Part Three of Dziady, written in Dresden in 1832 and published in Paris in the same year, Gustaw, a czarist prisoner, “is transformed from...