Tadeusz Bobrowski

Tadeusz Bobrowski (1829–1894) was a Polish landowner living in Ukraine, best known outside Poland as the guardian and mentor of his nephew Józef Konrad Korzeniowski, who would later become the well-known English-language novelist Joseph Conrad.

Born March 19, 1829, in Terechów, a village in Berdychiv County, Ukraine (then part of the Russian Empire), he was the son of Józef and Teofilia, née Pilchowska, and brother of Stefan Bobrowski, a leader of the Polish January 1863 Uprising.

[1]: 163 Taciturn and plain-spoken, a rationalist and an opponent of insurgencies, Bobrowski found little sympathy among the szlachta (nobility), though he was capable of earning their respect; and so he did not play that social role to which he might otherwise have been entitled by his legal education and intellect.

[1]: 163 Bobrowski left a Memoir of no small literary value, a wide-ranging, richly-detailed picture of Ukrainian life in the mid-19th century, whose caustic character and numerous indiscretions evoked violent protests upon its publication in 1900.

[1]: 163 A recluse, early bereft of his family (his wife died in childbirth in 1858, and his daughter in her 15th year), Bobrowski became deeply devoted to his nephew, the son of Ewelina Korzeniowska, née Bobrowska—Konrad Korzeniowski, the future English-language novelist Joseph Conrad.