Kurtz (Heart of Darkness) circumstances and remote settings to assert power over others. It is widely believed that Conrad drew influence from these characters, as well as Stevenson's plot lines, when writing "Heart of Darkness". In the 1958 loose adaptation for the CBS television anthology series "Playhouse 90" Kurtz was played by Boris Karloff. This version uses the encounter between Marlow and Kurtz as its final act, and adds a backstory in which Marlow had been Kurtz's adopted son. Francis Ford Coppola's acclaimed Vietnam War film "Apocalypse Now" (1979) centers on the protagonist's mission to find and kill the renegade Colonel Kurtz (played by
Heart of Darkness "The Engineer of Human Souls", Kurtz is seen as the epitome of exterminatory colonialism, and here and elsewhere Škvorecký emphasises the importance of Conrad's concern with Russian imperialism in Eastern Europe. T. S. Eliot wrote "Mistah Kurtz—he dead" at the beginning of the poem "The Hollow Men", quoting the "manager's boy" when he announced the death of Kurtz to the crew. Heart of Darkness Heart of Darkness (1899) is a novella by Polish-English novelist Joseph Conrad about a narrated voyage up the Congo River into the Congo Free State in the so-called "heart of Africa". Charles Marlow, the narrator, tells