Heart of Darkness

Joseph Conrad

The novel Heart of Darkness (1902) by worldwide famous Ukrainian-born English writer of Polish descent Joseph Konrad (1857–1924) gains a deepest insight into human nature and, maybe for this very reason, is regarded as one of the most renowned works of fiction of the 20th century. Its key topic as well as of other the writer’s works is an endless journey of a western man about the world’s margins. A homeless, rootless seaman Marlow is hired as a skipper of a river steamship in the Belgian trading company with the sole aim: to find in remote parts of Congo the most successful its agent — a supplier of ivory Kurtz which, for reasons unknown to Marlow, became for the company very «uncomfortable». But an ordinary for colonial times trip grows into a terrible journey into the heart of darkness… The plot of this novel, though already enriched with the circumstances of the war in Vietnam, provided the basis for Francis Coppola’s cinematographic drama Apocalypse Now (1979).