While it is certainly true that Joseph Conrad's parents attract special attention today because their son became one of the greatest writers of the last century, it is also true that Conrad's father, Apollo Korzeniowski, was a man of letters and of action who would have been remembered, at least in his native Poland, even if his marriage with a remarkable woman coming from a very remarkable family had remained childless. In fact, very few writers have had a similarly distinguished parentage; in Britain one may think perhaps only of the Mill and Woolf families.

A Conrad specialist who wants to present the portraits of Conrad's mother and father should therefore suspend his awareness that he is writing about the parents of a great man, and try to approach Ewa (née Bobrowska) and Apollo Korzeniowski on their own merits. I believe that most of the numerous misunderstandings and misconceptions concerning these two persons have originated in treating them ‘instrumentally’, as appendages or even keys to the inner life of their son. How much the boy Conrad – orphaned of his mother at the age of eight and of his father four years later – knew about his parents, and particularly about his father's achievements, will for ever remain a matter of conjecture. But to put conjectures on a firm ground we have first to get the verifiable facts as straight as possible.

Apollo Korzeniowski was born on 21 February 1820 in Honoratka, a village near Lipowiec, in the Kiev governship, in a Polish szlachta family of modest means, settled in the Ukraine for several generations.