Tim Middleton writes: "Referring to his dual Polish and English allegiances he once described himself as 'homo-duplex' (CL3: 89 [Joseph Conrad, Cambridge Collected Letters, vol. 3, p. 89])—the double man." Tim Middleton, Joseph Conrad, Routledge, 2006, p. xiv.
Rudyard Kipling felt that "with a pen in his hand he was first amongst us" but that there was nothing English in Conrad's mentality: "When I am reading him, I always have the impression that I am reading an excellent translation of a foreign author." Cited in Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, p. 209. Cf. Zdzisław Najder's similar observation: "He was [...] an English writer who grew up in other linguistic and cultural environments. His work can be seen as located in the borderland of auto-translation." Zdzisław Najder, Joseph Conrad: A Life, 2007, p. ix.
Conrad wrote: "In this world—as I have known it—we are made to suffer without the shadow of a reason, of a cause or of guilt.[...] There is no morality, no knowledge and no hope; there is only the consciousness of ourselves which drives us about a world that[...] is always but a vain and fleeting appearance." Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: A Biography, 1991, p. 166.
H.S. Zins writes: "Conrad made English literature more mature and reflective because he called attention to the sheer horror of political realities overlooked by English citizens and politicians. The case of Poland, his oppressed homeland, was one such issue. The colonial exploitation of Africans was another. His condemnation of imperialism and colonialism, combined with sympathy for its persecuted and suffering victims, was drawn from his Polish background, his own personal sufferings, and the experience of a persecuted people living under foreign occupation. Personal memories created in him a great sensitivity for human degradation and a sense of moral responsibility." H. S. Zins, "Joseph Conrad and British Critics of Colonialism", Pula, vol. 12, nos. 1 & 2, 1998, p. 63.
Conrad's biographer Zdzisław Najder writes in a 2-page online article, [1] （頁面存檔備份，存於網際網路檔案館） "Jak się nazywał Joseph Conrad?" ("What Was Joseph Conrad's Name?"):
"... When he was baptized at the age of two days, on 5 December 1857 in Berdyczów, no birth certificate was recorded because the baptism was only 'of water.' And during his official, documented baptism (in Żytomierz) five years later, he himself was absent, as he was in Warsaw, awaiting exile into Russia together with his parents.
"Thus there is much occasion for confusion. This is attested by errors on tablets and monuments. But examination of documents—not many, but quite a sufficient number, survive—permits an entirely certain answer to the title question.
"On 5 December 1857 the future writer was christened with three given names: Józef (in honor of his maternal grandfather), Teodor (in honor of his paternal grandfather) and Konrad (doubtless in honor of the hero of part III of Adam Mickiewicz's Dziady). These given names, in this order (they appear in no other order in any records), were given by Conrad himself in an extensive autobiographical letter to his friend Edward Garnett of 20 January 1900 (Polish text in Listy J. Conrada [Letters of J. Conrad], edited by Zdzisław Najder, Warsaw, 1968).
"However, in the official birth certificate (a copy of which is found in the Jagiellonian University Library in Kraków, manuscript no. 6391), only one given name appears: Konrad. And that sole given name was used in their letters by his parents, Ewa, née Bobrowska, and Apollo Korzeniowski, as well as by all members of the family.
"He himself signed himself with this single given name in letters to Poles. And this single given name, and the surname 'Korzeniowski,' figured in his passport and other official documents. For example, when 'Joseph Conrad' visited his native land after a long absence in 1914, just at the outbreak of World War I, the papers issued to him by the military authorities of the Imperial-Royal Austro-Hungarian Monarchy called him 'Konrad Korzeniowski.'"
"Russia's defeat by Britain, France and Turkey [in the Crimean War] had once again raised hopes of Polish independence. Apollo celebrated his son's christening with a characteristic patriotic–religious poem: "To my son born in the 85th year of Muscovite oppression". It alluded to the partition of 1772, burdened the new-born [...] with overwhelming obligations, and urged him to sacrifice himself as Apollo would for the good of his country: 'Bless you, my little son: Be a Pole! Though foes May spread before you A web of happiness Renounce it all: love your poverty... Baby, son, tell yourself You are without land, without love, Without country, without people, While Poland – your Mother is in her grave For only your Mother is dead – and yet She is your faith, your palm of martyrdom... This thought will make your courage grow, Give Her and yourself immortality.'" Jeffrey Meyers, Joseph Conrad: a Biography, p. 10.
It was still an age of exploration, in which Poles participated: Paweł Edmund Strzelecki mapped the Australian interior; the writer Sygurd Wiśniowski, having sailed twice around the world, described his experiences in Australia, Oceania and the United States; Jan Kubary, a veteran of the 1863 Uprising, explored the Pacific islands.
Colm Tóibín writes: "[B]ecause he kept his doubleness intact, [Conrad] remains our contemporary, and perhaps also in the way he made sure that, in a time of crisis as much as in a time of calm, it was the quality of his irony that saved him." Colm Tóibín, "The Heart of Conrad" (review of Maya Jasanoff, The Dawn Watch: Joseph Conrad in a Global World, Penguin, 375 pp.), The New York Review of Books, vol. LXV, no. 3 (22 February 2018), p. 11. V. S. Naipaul writes: "Conrad's value to me is that he is someone who sixty to seventy years ago meditated on my world, a world I recognize today. I feel this about no other writer of the [20th] century." (Quoted in Colm Tóibín, "The Heart of Conrad", p. 8.) Maya Jasanoff, drawing analogies between events in Conrad's fictions and 21st-century world events, writes: "Conrad's pen was like a magic wand, conjuring the spirits of the future." (Quoted in Colm Tóibín, "The Heart of Conrad", p. 9.)
Adam Hochschild makes the same point about Conrad's seeming prescience in his review of Maya Jasanoff's The Dawn Watch: Adam Hochschild, "Stranger in Strange Lands: Joseph Conrad lived in a far wider world than even the greatest of his contemporaries", Foreign Affairs, vol. 97, no. 2 (March / April 2018), pp. 150–55. Hochschild also notes (pp. 150–51): "It is startling... how seldom [in the late 19th century and the first decade of the 20th century, European imperialism in South America, Africa, and Asia] appear[ed] in the work of the era's European writers." Conrad was a notable exception.
