This article examines the literary activities of Joseph Conrad’s father – Apollo Nałęcz-Korzeniowski (1820–1869) – as a critic and translator. It shows that the breadth of Nałęcz-Korzeniowski’s knowledge of various literary conventions was not unconnected with his work as a translator. As well as translating several plays by Shakespeare, he translated into Polish almost all the plays written by Victor Hugo. His best translations are considered to be those of Charles Dickens’s Hard Times and Alfred de Vigny’s Chatterton. Nałęcz-Korzeniowski had a deep and extensive knowledge not only of literature (ancient and modern – Polish and foreign), but also of the political, social and economic issues of his times. In his Enquiry into Shakespeare’s Dramatic Art (Studya nad dramatycznością w utworach Szekspira – 1868) he expressed the view that nineteenth-century playwrights ought to take their inspiration from Shakespeare, whose plays best refl ected the complex, tragicomic atmosphere of the modern world.

This article shows that Apollo Korzeniowski practised what he preached by writing plays of a mixed emotional tonality that ranged from lyricism to bitter sarcasm. Unfortunately his poetry and plays were soon forgotten after his death and for almost a century he was remembered chiefly as Conrad’s father and as yet another victim of tsarist repression (in 1861 he and his wife were sentenced to a term of exile in northern Russia for their involvement in Polish patriotic activities). Apollo Nałęcz-Korzeniowski wrote several highly distinctive comedies of manners which are a scathing critique of the vices of a large section of the Polish nobility of his day – in particular their failure to live up to the ethos of chivalry, their selfi shness, their hypocrisy and their greed. His plays (some of which were never fi nished) display elements of tragicomedy, satire, realism and naturalism and some of them were conceived as pièces à thèse.