Three Thousand Versts of Loneliness

I have been reading Joseph Conrad ’s attempt at a 19th century revolutionary Russian novel, Under Western Eyes. The book is considered Conrad’s riposte to Dostoevsky’s Crime and Punishment and many of the devices and conclusions of that great novel are inverted and even satirised. Despite Conrad’s supposed detestation of Dostoevsky, however, I can’t help feeling that the two novelists perhaps had more in common than the Pole might acknowledged and their treatment of common themes in their novels may not have diverged as radically as he believed. Joseph Conrad was born in what is currently modern Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire) into a passionately nationalist family of Polish aristocrats. Indeed his father was arrested by the Tsarist authorities for his involvement in the movement which would foment the 1863 January Uprising by citizens of the Polish – Lithuanian Commonwealth. His father’s arrest and exile, coupled with the subsequent premature deaths of both his parent