Austi Classics explainers

From the foreword to the Austi Classics edition

Heart of Darkness is Conrad's classic on Belgian colonisation in the Congo, and more generally on the Western colonisation.

Dear reader, Heart of Darkness is not a commentary on humanity as a whole nor on a 'dark heart' that any of us may possess due to our human faults.

Conrad invites us to think about the internationalist policies of invasion and related topics. This is more obvious when we consider that Conrad's Polish parents were arrested and exiled for agitating against the Russian takeover of Poland and, as a result, Conrad grew up an orphan in the care of his uncle.

Humans are the solution, not the problem, but sometimes policies cause problems too which need to be solved later by others.

Dan Abramson
Sydney Australia
July 2016, updated December 2025

Heart of Darkness print edition at Amazon

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