Reception, Critique and Impact
In Notes on My Books: Easyread Edition, Conrad wrote of his "mixed feelings" about the initial reception of the book which had been published while Europe had been engaged in fighting the great war. The initial reception of the work had considered it "a melodramatic, rather Victorian novel, representing Conrad's artistic decline." However, later critiques have described it as "a highly complex allegorical work whose psychological landscape and narrative structure lay the groundwork for the modern novel."
The character of Heyst has been compared to Shakespeare's Hamlet with the story itself drawing heavily on The Tempest and the ending of the work like "an Elizabethan stageplay where the stage is clogged with corpses" Allen Simmons states that the character of Lena was shaped by Therese from the French novel Le Lys rouge.
Adam Gillon and Raymond Brebach have proposed that Vladimir Nabokov's rejection of Conrad's "souvenir-shop style, and bottled ships and shell necklaces of romanticist cliches" resulted in Conrad's Victory being "one of the principal sources of inspiration" for Lolita through what they call "typical Nabakovian reversal."
Read more about this topic: Victory (novel)
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