„Schulz/Forum” to czasopismo poświęcone osobie i dziełu Brunona Schulza, a także inspirowanym przez niego utworom literackim i artystycznym, które powstają obecnie. Główną ideą periodyku jest udostępnienie czytelnikom oraz komentatorom platformy do pogłębienia wiedzy o Schulzu i dzielenia się interpretacjami jego twórczości – zarówno prozatorskiej, jak i graficznej. Czasopismo ma również na celu uporządkowanie, publikację oraz krytyczne opracowanie materiałów archiwalnych pozostawionych przez pisarza, a także – w oparciu o tę podstawę – rekonstrukcję szczegółów jego biografii. Ostatnim, nie mniej ważnym, założeniem „Schulz/Forum” jest krytyczna refleksja nad dyskursem poświęconym Schulzowi, a także jego metodologiczna weryfikacja.
ISSN: 2300-5823 Supervisors: Stanisław Rosiek, Marek Wilczyński, Tomasz Swoboda, Piotr Millati, and Piotr Sitkiewicz Address: ul. Pniewskiego 4/1, 80-246 Gdańsk
Numer 19–20 stał się forum dla interpretacyjnych antagonizmów i komparatystycznych analogii. Pier... more Numer 19–20 stał się forum dla interpretacyjnych antagonizmów i komparatystycznych analogii. Pierwszą część zeszytu wypełniają spory schulzologów wokół kwestii interpretacji, druga z kolei prezentuje paralele (twórcze, fantazmatyczne, biograficzne) między „światami” Schulza, Schnitzlera, Benjamina, Lema i Pynchona. Zapraszamy do lektury.
Tematem przewodnim podwójnego numeru jest Paryż. „Paryż turystyczny”, w którym Schulz spędził pon... more Tematem przewodnim podwójnego numeru jest Paryż. „Paryż turystyczny”, w którym Schulz spędził ponad trzy tygodnie latem 1938 roku. Ale też „inny Paryż” – miasto nowych idei artystycznych i filozoficznych, które nie były Schulzowi obce.
Numer 16, poświęcony biografiom Brunona Schulza (tym istniejącym i tym dopiero pomy-ślanym), możn... more Numer 16, poświęcony biografiom Brunona Schulza (tym istniejącym i tym dopiero pomy-ślanym), można już czytać bezpłatnie w wersji elektronicznej. W środku:
Katarzyna Warska sprawdza, co to jest „dzieciństwo pisarza” Zbigniew Milczarek czyta przedwojenne zdjęcie – z Schulzem lub bez niego Aleksandra Skrzypczyk rekonstruuje doświadczenia audialne autora „Sklepów” Tymoteusz Skiba śledzi równoległe biografie Schulza i Gombrowicza Robert Dion i Frédéric Regard odwołują „śmierć autora” Christian Klein porządkuje założenia zwrotu biograficznego Marcin Romanowski recenzuje książkę Anny Kaszuby-Dębskiej „Bruno. Epoka genialna” Agata Tuszyńska w swoim stylu o relacji Józefiny Szelińskiej i Jerzego Ficowskiego Piotr Millati nareszcie odnalazł „Mesjasza” Zbigniew Maszewski w czułym schulzowskim pastiszu wspomina dzieje „Katalogu Bibljoteki Stanisława Weingartena”
Ponadto blok tekstów wokół Debory Vogel:
Esej Debory Vogel o Brunonie Schulzu Teksty programowe redakcji „Cusztajera” Adam Stepnowski o Galicji jako o jidyszlandzie Wiedeńskie i lwowskie ślady Debory Vogel w opracowaniu Piotra Szalszy
W numerze 15 między innymi:
Piotr Sitkiewicz sprawdza stopień pokrewieństwa między Schulzem a K... more W numerze 15 między innymi:
Piotr Sitkiewicz sprawdza stopień pokrewieństwa między Schulzem a Kafką, Zofia Ziemann śledzi losy „polskiego Kafki” za granicą, Piotr Millati zadaje niestosowne pytanie, czy Bruno Schulz był pisarzem.
W bloku [Kafka] publikujemy po raz pierwszy w języku polskim:
„Kartki konwersacyjne” Franza Kafki w przekładzie Łukasza Musiała, „Przedmowę” i rok „1917” z kalendarium Reinera Stacha „Kafka dzień po dniu” oraz sześć fragmentów z jego książki „Czy to Kafka?” w przekładzie Tadeusza Zatorskiego.
W bloku [czy to Schulz?] prezentujemy dwa niemieckojęzyczne opowiadania Brunona Schulza z lat 1917 i 1918:
„Der Pfennig mit dem Auge” / „Fenig z okiem” oraz „Du bist Staub. Kriegsskizze” / „Prochem jesteś. Szkic wojenny” w przekładzie Marka Szalszy, krótki komentarz ich znalazcy – Piotra Szalszy, ankietę redakcji, w której poprosiliśmy pięcioro schulzologów o pierwszą filologiczną ekspertyzę, a także esej Stanisława Rośka o tożsamości literackiej i potencjalnych sobowtórach drohobyckiego Schulza.
W numerze: Nieznane opowiadanie młodzieńcze Brunona Schulza; Obszerny komentarz jego odkrywczyni ... more W numerze: Nieznane opowiadanie młodzieńcze Brunona Schulza; Obszerny komentarz jego odkrywczyni – Łesi Chomycz; Eliza Kącka pisze o wyobraźni przestrzennej Schulza; Wojciech Owczarski jeszcze raz pyta, dlaczego Schulz się nie udaje na scenie; Urszula Makowska rekonstruuje (niedoszłe) spotkanie Brunona Schulza i Henryka Voglera; Mirosław Wójcik szuka Schulza w archiwum Emila Zegadłowicza; Marta Cwalina debiutuje szkicem o grupie „Przedmieście”; Taras Wozniak wyznaje, czym jest Schulz dla pokolenia „semantycznych sierot”; Wiera Meniok z czułością o Drohobyczu jako o miejscu metafizycznym.
Drugą część zeszytu, poświęconą wizerunkom Schulza, otwiera niepublikowany dotąd w języku polskim esej Jeana-Luca Nancy’ego i Federica Ferrariego „Portret autora sam(ego) w sobie” (w przekładzie Pauliny Tarasewicz); Katarzyna Warska pyta, jak uczniowie odmalowali nauczyciela Brunona Schulza; Małgorzata Ogonowska odsłania stereotypy męskości, w cieniu których powstawała legenda Schulza; Jakub Orzeszek tanatologicznie o pośmiertnym ciele (i kulcie) pisarza; Stanisław Rosiek w archiwalnym wspomnieniu Mariana Jachimowicza wskazuje na niepokojące opisy cielesności; Zofia Ziemann tłumaczy i komentuje wstęp Celiny Wieniewskiej do pierwszego anglojęzycznego wydania Schulza.
W numerze: Urszula Makowska pisze o wystawach, które są przełużeniem ciała artysty; Eliza Kącka a... more W numerze: Urszula Makowska pisze o wystawach, które są przełużeniem ciała artysty; Eliza Kącka anatomizuje Schulzowski mit Piłsudskiego; Paweł Tomczok szuka w jego opowiadaniach „ucieleśnionych nieporozumień”; Magdalena Rabizo-Birek pisze o uobecnieniach Schulza w poezji „ośmielonej wyobraźni”; Marcin Romanowski nie o ciałach, ale o duchach lat dziewięćdziesiątych; Balbina Hoppe pyta, czy Schulz to pisarz „niesceniczny”; Helena Hejman debiutuje u nas esejem o ambalażach, powierzchniach, powłokach; Stanisław Rosiek przedstawia osobistą teorię indeksowania dzieła literackiego; Jakub Orzeszek praktykuje ją w indeksie ciała, cielesności i wydzielin do „Sklepów cynamonowych”; Magdalena Wasąg prezentuje mało znane rysunki Schulza z lat trzydziestych i historię, która się za nimi skrywa.
Szczególną uwagę zwracamy na dwa teksty Georga Groddecka, przełożone przez Tadeusza Zatorskiego i opatrzone komentarzem Agnieszki Więckiewicz, które wprowadzają tego „dzikiego psychoanalityka” i pisarza do literatury polskojęzycznej.
W numerze dwunastym: zamiast wstępu impresja o bliźnich, bliznach i spotkaniach niemożliwych; Eli... more W numerze dwunastym: zamiast wstępu impresja o bliźnich, bliznach i spotkaniach niemożliwych; Eliza Kącka powraca do literackiej egzekucji; Wyki i Napierskiego; Józef Olejniczak pyta, jaki jest związek między sanatorium Gotarda i uniwersytetem 2.0; Marcin Całbecki demaskuje patriarchalne uzurpacje Jakuba; Kris vas Heuckelom odnajduje schulzowskie wątki w twórczości Piotra Pazińskiego i Erwina Mortiera; Katarzyna Lukas pisze o „niemieckiej refleksji pamięcioznawczej” oraz o „heretyckiej pamięciologii” Schulza; Tymoteusz Skiba za Lemem przedstawia nowy ustrój: legitymacjonizm; Ewa Graczyk „nie chce interpretować, chce robić coś innego”; Aleksandra Naróg w swoim debiucie odsłania abiektualność „Karakonów”; Maciej Abramowski debiutuje u nas jako badacz ekonomii literatury i umieszcza Schulza w perspektywie kapitalizmu; Piotr Sitkiewicz zwalcza biografem o sytuacji materialnej Schulza (#odbrązawianie); Małgorzata Ogonowska z nim polemizuje: szuka innego sposobu mówienia o finansach autora „Sklepów”; Włodzimierz Rudnicki wreszcie identyfikuje techniki, w jakich są wykonane Schulzowskie ekslibrisy; Aleksandra Skrzypczyk na tropie rodzinnej legendy i pewnych okładek Schulza (?); Eliza Gościniak szuka Xięgi bałwochwalczej w reprodukcjach; Branislava Stojanović podsumowuje rok 2018; Stanisław Rosiek wspomina Bogdana Konopkę.
Urodzić się w Jeziorach? Albo w Małoszycach? Jakie to może mieć znaczenie? Dla Witkacego i Gombro... more Urodzić się w Jeziorach? Albo w Małoszycach? Jakie to może mieć znaczenie? Dla Witkacego i Gombrowicza – żadnego. A co z Drohobyczem Schulza? Pisarz miał (nie)szczęście urodzić się i żyć właśnie tam. To średniej wielkości miasto w Galicji końca XIX wieku, satelitarne wobec stołecznego Lwowa, stało się podszewką jego biografii. Nie sposób dzisiaj myśleć o Schulzu poza Drohobyczem. W innych miastach, w których się pojawia: w Wiedniu, w Marienbadzie, Kudowie czy Zakopanem, w Warszawie i Paryżu, jest uchodźcą, kuracjuszem, gościem lub turystą – więc zawsze kimś obcym. I czuje się obco. Tak też postrzegają go współcześni. Po części winien jest temu sam Schulz. Byłoby może inaczej, gdyby tak często w listach (ale też pewnie w bezpośrednich kontaktach) nie deklarował, że nie potrafi żyć i tworzyć poza swoim rodzinnym miastem. Ale oświadczenia samego pisarza jedynie mogły ośmielać innych do tworzenia stereotypu „skromnego nauczyciela z małego miasteczka”, piewcy prowincjonalności, którego proza w pełni realizuje program grupy literackiej „Przedmieście”. Resztę zrobiły panujące schematy, według których porządkowano i wartościowano mapę świata. Schulz jednak stawia na głowie istniejące w świecie podziały i napięcia. Centrum świata – dzięki pisaniu – przemieszcza do rodzinnego miasteczka. I dzięki temu Drohobycz staje się stolicą XX wieku? Tak, każdy Drohobycz.
W dziesiątym numerze Schulz/Forum przyglądamy się temu, jak, gdzie i kiedy historia XX wieku odci... more W dziesiątym numerze Schulz/Forum przyglądamy się temu, jak, gdzie i kiedy historia XX wieku odcisnęła się na indywidualnej biografii Brunona Schulza. Stanisław Rosiek o tym, czy można wymknąć się z biegu dziejów, Joanna Sass o losach pisarza-uchodźcy, Malgorzata Ogonowska o relacjach Schulza z Piłsudskim, Łesia Chomycz o sowieckiej okupacji Drohobycza, Jakub Orzeszek o nekrotyczności grafik i tekstów Schulza, Katarzyna Warska o szkolnej recepcji Schulza za Stalina.
Ponadto Piotr Millati na marginesach książki „Gombrowicz. Ja, geniusz” (Klementyna Suchanow, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2017), Żaneta Nalewajk o „Wiośnie” w kontekście interkulturowym, Filip Szałasek na nowo o relacjach ojciec-syn w Schulzowskiej prozie, protokoły relacji z zagłady Żydów drohobyckich, Małgorzata Groth o portalu schulzforum.pl, Balbina Hoppe o spektaklu Robert Drobniucha „Sklepy cynamonowe” (Teatr Lalki i Aktora "Kubuś" w Kielcach), Tymoteusz Skiba jak Jacek Dukaj w schulzologicznym sci-fi.
W numerze: Paweł Sitkiewicz o tym, czy Schulz widział „Gabinet doktora Caligari”, Marek Tomaszews... more W numerze: Paweł Sitkiewicz o tym, czy Schulz widział „Gabinet doktora Caligari”, Marek Tomaszewski o Schulzu-proroku, Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska analizuje Schulzowskie analogie i oksymorony, Zofia Ziemann broni przekładu Celiny Wieniewskiej, Katarzyna Kaszorek o „Polish Kafce”, czyli pierwszej recepcji Schulza w Ameryce, Anna Jarmuszkiewicz o kolorach, a Piotr Sitkiewicz o puzonach – czyli o tym, co skrywa obwoluta pierwszego wydania „Sklepów”.
Małgorzata Sady o drodze braci Quay do Schulza, Balbina Hoppe o „Lustrze” Leszka Mądzika, Stanisław Rosiek o schulzopodobnych fotografiach Bogdana Konopki. Aleksandra Skrzypczyk i Piotr Maksymowicz o Schulzu w operze. Agnieszka Hudzik rozmawia z Henrykiem Mittelstaedtem, tłumaczem Schulza na argentyński, Sotiris Karageorgos o greckim odbiorze Schulza, Irena Chawrilska o Schulzu według Jonathana Foera, Paweł Łapiński o grze tekstowej „Bałwochwał”, Tymoteusz Skiba o nowej stronie www o Jerzym Ficowskim.
W numerze ósmym Tomasz Swoboda o plagiacie przez antycypację, Żaneta Nalewajk o transtekstualnych... more W numerze ósmym Tomasz Swoboda o plagiacie przez antycypację, Żaneta Nalewajk o transtekstualnych relacjach z Schulzem w literaturze polskiej XX i XXI wieku, Marek Wilczyński o wspólnych przestrzeniach Schulza, Romana Jaworskiego i Stefana Grabowskiego. Dalej: Stefan Okołowicz o spotkaniach Schulza i Witkacego, Ałła Tatarenko o „genie schulzowskim” w prozie Danilo Kiša, Magdalena Jarnotowska o tym, jak Beksiński naśladował Schulza, Błażej Szymankiewicz o paralelach między Schulzem a Blecherem, Ewa Goczał o poezji Ficowskiego, Mariusz Kubielas o fotografiach inspirowanych Schulzem.
Ina Söllner wspomina jak portretował ją Schulz, Piotr Sitkiewicz pisze o parodiach i pastiszach Schulza w międzywojniu (prezentujemy trzy najzabawniejsze), Maciej Urbanowski komentuje korespondencję Napierskiego z Wyką, której fragment prezentujemy. Ponadto Celestyna Schuman o sposobach na samouspokojenie, wiersz Łukasza Kamińskiego o spotkaniu przy kawie z cynamonem, recenzje trzech książek schulzologicznych (Aleksandra Wołkowicz o „Martwym sezonie” Łukasza Wojnarowskiego, Tymoteusz Skiba o „Mesjaszu” Wojciecha Żmudzińskiego, Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska o „Brunie. Chłopcu, który nauczył się latać” duetu Nadia Terranova–Ofra Amit) oraz analiza odpowiedzi w ankiecie Andrzeja Pietruszki „Czy Schulz znany jest w Drohobyczu?”.
W siódmym numerze Schulz/Forum pierwszy polski przekład „Psychopatia Sexualis” Richarda von Kraff... more W siódmym numerze Schulz/Forum pierwszy polski przekład „Psychopatia Sexualis” Richarda von Kraffta-Ebinga i masochistyczne fotografie z jego zbiorów. George Bataille o Kraffcie, Julia Kristeva o miłości poza Ziemią. Gilles Deleuze przygląda się Sacher-Masochowi, a Tomasz Swoboda – spojrzeniu Deleuze’a. Kapitan Henry Węgrocki z wojskowych służb medycznych, nieznany dotąd korespondent Schulza, omawia masochistyczne wątki jego twórczości. List Schulza do Węgrockiego przekładają z angielskiego Mirosław Wójcik, Piotr Millati i Jerzy Jarzębski.
Paweł Dybel wyznacza Schulzowski próg wstydu, Stanisław Rosiek i Filip Szałasek reinterpretują sen o kastracji z listu do Szumana, Marcin Romanowski pisze o poglądach Ficowskiego na masochizm, Jerzy Kandziora o kolegach Schulza i o tym, co z nich zostało. Prezentujemy nieletnią muzę Schulza-portrecisty – Irenę Kejlinównę, a także trzy listy Tadeusza Lubowieckiego (Izydora Friedmana) do biografa Schulza i fotograficzne przykłady metatropizmu/masochizmu. Jan Gondowicz oraz Eliza Kącka wikłają się w nierozwiązane zagadki schulzologii, a Ariko Kato szuka podobieństw między Schulzem i Eduardem Fuchsem.
W szóstym numerze Schulz/Forum nieznany wcześniej tekst Schulza o Maurycym Lilienie i sztuce żydo... more W szóstym numerze Schulz/Forum nieznany wcześniej tekst Schulza o Maurycym Lilienie i sztuce żydowskiej (z komentarzem Piotra Sitkiewicza), a także nowy rysunek Schulza odkryty na odwrocie rysunku już znanego, recenzja Schulza z wystawy prac Feliksa Lachowicza oraz przygoda Schulza z typografią na przykładzie zaprojektowanej przezeń winiety „Przeglądu Podkarpacia”.
Ponadto Jerzy Jarzębski o Schulzu uniwersalnym, Piotr Millati o fabułach, które Schulz odrzucił, ale których możemy się domyślać, Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska o antyportrecie w wersji literackiej, Stanisław Rosiek o biografii Schulza jako wyzwaniu rzuconym historii, Jakub Orzeszek o notatce Schulza z lektury Taine’a, Magdalena Jarnotowska o zwierzętach i wyobraźni, Alain van Crugten o przekładzie Schulza na francuski, Tomasz Swoboda o paryskiej wystawie „Mannequin d’artiste, mannequin fétiche”, Marek Wilczyński o V Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Brunona Schulza w Drohobyczu, Anna Kaszuba-Dębska o projekcie „Emeryty”.
W piątym zeszycie Schulz/Forum Marek Wilczyński pisze o Schulzu w kontekście prozy galicyjskiej p... more W piątym zeszycie Schulz/Forum Marek Wilczyński pisze o Schulzu w kontekście prozy galicyjskiej przed i po wojnie, Marcin Całbecki naświetla antropologiczne wątki „Sklepów cynamonowych”, Rolf Fieguth przedstawia swoje notatki z Schulzowskiej intertekstualności, Serge Fauchereau prezentuje manekiny w roli maszyn metafizycznych, Ałła Tatarenko zgłębia literackie poglądy Schulza, Damir Šodan śledzi powinowactwa Schulza z Gottfriedem Bennem, Stanisław Rosiek rozważa praktyczne (i ontologiczne) powody niedostępności „Xięgi bałwochwalczej”, Piotr Sitkiewicz natrafia na Schulzu w Poznaniu, a ponadto Joanna Sass o niemieckich przekładach Schulza oraz recenzje dwóch powieści na motywach Schulza: Tymoteusz Skiba o „Mesjaszu ze Sztokholmu” Cynthii Ozick i Filip Szałasek o „Portrecie psubrata” Ewarda Mielniczka.
Numer 19–20 stał się forum dla interpretacyjnych antagonizmów i komparatystycznych analogii. Pier... more Numer 19–20 stał się forum dla interpretacyjnych antagonizmów i komparatystycznych analogii. Pierwszą część zeszytu wypełniają spory schulzologów wokół kwestii interpretacji, druga z kolei prezentuje paralele (twórcze, fantazmatyczne, biograficzne) między „światami” Schulza, Schnitzlera, Benjamina, Lema i Pynchona. Zapraszamy do lektury.
Tematem przewodnim podwójnego numeru jest Paryż. „Paryż turystyczny”, w którym Schulz spędził pon... more Tematem przewodnim podwójnego numeru jest Paryż. „Paryż turystyczny”, w którym Schulz spędził ponad trzy tygodnie latem 1938 roku. Ale też „inny Paryż” – miasto nowych idei artystycznych i filozoficznych, które nie były Schulzowi obce.
Numer 16, poświęcony biografiom Brunona Schulza (tym istniejącym i tym dopiero pomy-ślanym), możn... more Numer 16, poświęcony biografiom Brunona Schulza (tym istniejącym i tym dopiero pomy-ślanym), można już czytać bezpłatnie w wersji elektronicznej. W środku:
Katarzyna Warska sprawdza, co to jest „dzieciństwo pisarza” Zbigniew Milczarek czyta przedwojenne zdjęcie – z Schulzem lub bez niego Aleksandra Skrzypczyk rekonstruuje doświadczenia audialne autora „Sklepów” Tymoteusz Skiba śledzi równoległe biografie Schulza i Gombrowicza Robert Dion i Frédéric Regard odwołują „śmierć autora” Christian Klein porządkuje założenia zwrotu biograficznego Marcin Romanowski recenzuje książkę Anny Kaszuby-Dębskiej „Bruno. Epoka genialna” Agata Tuszyńska w swoim stylu o relacji Józefiny Szelińskiej i Jerzego Ficowskiego Piotr Millati nareszcie odnalazł „Mesjasza” Zbigniew Maszewski w czułym schulzowskim pastiszu wspomina dzieje „Katalogu Bibljoteki Stanisława Weingartena”
Ponadto blok tekstów wokół Debory Vogel:
Esej Debory Vogel o Brunonie Schulzu Teksty programowe redakcji „Cusztajera” Adam Stepnowski o Galicji jako o jidyszlandzie Wiedeńskie i lwowskie ślady Debory Vogel w opracowaniu Piotra Szalszy
W numerze 15 między innymi:
Piotr Sitkiewicz sprawdza stopień pokrewieństwa między Schulzem a K... more W numerze 15 między innymi:
Piotr Sitkiewicz sprawdza stopień pokrewieństwa między Schulzem a Kafką, Zofia Ziemann śledzi losy „polskiego Kafki” za granicą, Piotr Millati zadaje niestosowne pytanie, czy Bruno Schulz był pisarzem.
W bloku [Kafka] publikujemy po raz pierwszy w języku polskim:
„Kartki konwersacyjne” Franza Kafki w przekładzie Łukasza Musiała, „Przedmowę” i rok „1917” z kalendarium Reinera Stacha „Kafka dzień po dniu” oraz sześć fragmentów z jego książki „Czy to Kafka?” w przekładzie Tadeusza Zatorskiego.
W bloku [czy to Schulz?] prezentujemy dwa niemieckojęzyczne opowiadania Brunona Schulza z lat 1917 i 1918:
„Der Pfennig mit dem Auge” / „Fenig z okiem” oraz „Du bist Staub. Kriegsskizze” / „Prochem jesteś. Szkic wojenny” w przekładzie Marka Szalszy, krótki komentarz ich znalazcy – Piotra Szalszy, ankietę redakcji, w której poprosiliśmy pięcioro schulzologów o pierwszą filologiczną ekspertyzę, a także esej Stanisława Rośka o tożsamości literackiej i potencjalnych sobowtórach drohobyckiego Schulza.
W numerze: Nieznane opowiadanie młodzieńcze Brunona Schulza; Obszerny komentarz jego odkrywczyni ... more W numerze: Nieznane opowiadanie młodzieńcze Brunona Schulza; Obszerny komentarz jego odkrywczyni – Łesi Chomycz; Eliza Kącka pisze o wyobraźni przestrzennej Schulza; Wojciech Owczarski jeszcze raz pyta, dlaczego Schulz się nie udaje na scenie; Urszula Makowska rekonstruuje (niedoszłe) spotkanie Brunona Schulza i Henryka Voglera; Mirosław Wójcik szuka Schulza w archiwum Emila Zegadłowicza; Marta Cwalina debiutuje szkicem o grupie „Przedmieście”; Taras Wozniak wyznaje, czym jest Schulz dla pokolenia „semantycznych sierot”; Wiera Meniok z czułością o Drohobyczu jako o miejscu metafizycznym.
Drugą część zeszytu, poświęconą wizerunkom Schulza, otwiera niepublikowany dotąd w języku polskim esej Jeana-Luca Nancy’ego i Federica Ferrariego „Portret autora sam(ego) w sobie” (w przekładzie Pauliny Tarasewicz); Katarzyna Warska pyta, jak uczniowie odmalowali nauczyciela Brunona Schulza; Małgorzata Ogonowska odsłania stereotypy męskości, w cieniu których powstawała legenda Schulza; Jakub Orzeszek tanatologicznie o pośmiertnym ciele (i kulcie) pisarza; Stanisław Rosiek w archiwalnym wspomnieniu Mariana Jachimowicza wskazuje na niepokojące opisy cielesności; Zofia Ziemann tłumaczy i komentuje wstęp Celiny Wieniewskiej do pierwszego anglojęzycznego wydania Schulza.
W numerze: Urszula Makowska pisze o wystawach, które są przełużeniem ciała artysty; Eliza Kącka a... more W numerze: Urszula Makowska pisze o wystawach, które są przełużeniem ciała artysty; Eliza Kącka anatomizuje Schulzowski mit Piłsudskiego; Paweł Tomczok szuka w jego opowiadaniach „ucieleśnionych nieporozumień”; Magdalena Rabizo-Birek pisze o uobecnieniach Schulza w poezji „ośmielonej wyobraźni”; Marcin Romanowski nie o ciałach, ale o duchach lat dziewięćdziesiątych; Balbina Hoppe pyta, czy Schulz to pisarz „niesceniczny”; Helena Hejman debiutuje u nas esejem o ambalażach, powierzchniach, powłokach; Stanisław Rosiek przedstawia osobistą teorię indeksowania dzieła literackiego; Jakub Orzeszek praktykuje ją w indeksie ciała, cielesności i wydzielin do „Sklepów cynamonowych”; Magdalena Wasąg prezentuje mało znane rysunki Schulza z lat trzydziestych i historię, która się za nimi skrywa.
Szczególną uwagę zwracamy na dwa teksty Georga Groddecka, przełożone przez Tadeusza Zatorskiego i opatrzone komentarzem Agnieszki Więckiewicz, które wprowadzają tego „dzikiego psychoanalityka” i pisarza do literatury polskojęzycznej.
W numerze dwunastym: zamiast wstępu impresja o bliźnich, bliznach i spotkaniach niemożliwych; Eli... more W numerze dwunastym: zamiast wstępu impresja o bliźnich, bliznach i spotkaniach niemożliwych; Eliza Kącka powraca do literackiej egzekucji; Wyki i Napierskiego; Józef Olejniczak pyta, jaki jest związek między sanatorium Gotarda i uniwersytetem 2.0; Marcin Całbecki demaskuje patriarchalne uzurpacje Jakuba; Kris vas Heuckelom odnajduje schulzowskie wątki w twórczości Piotra Pazińskiego i Erwina Mortiera; Katarzyna Lukas pisze o „niemieckiej refleksji pamięcioznawczej” oraz o „heretyckiej pamięciologii” Schulza; Tymoteusz Skiba za Lemem przedstawia nowy ustrój: legitymacjonizm; Ewa Graczyk „nie chce interpretować, chce robić coś innego”; Aleksandra Naróg w swoim debiucie odsłania abiektualność „Karakonów”; Maciej Abramowski debiutuje u nas jako badacz ekonomii literatury i umieszcza Schulza w perspektywie kapitalizmu; Piotr Sitkiewicz zwalcza biografem o sytuacji materialnej Schulza (#odbrązawianie); Małgorzata Ogonowska z nim polemizuje: szuka innego sposobu mówienia o finansach autora „Sklepów”; Włodzimierz Rudnicki wreszcie identyfikuje techniki, w jakich są wykonane Schulzowskie ekslibrisy; Aleksandra Skrzypczyk na tropie rodzinnej legendy i pewnych okładek Schulza (?); Eliza Gościniak szuka Xięgi bałwochwalczej w reprodukcjach; Branislava Stojanović podsumowuje rok 2018; Stanisław Rosiek wspomina Bogdana Konopkę.
Urodzić się w Jeziorach? Albo w Małoszycach? Jakie to może mieć znaczenie? Dla Witkacego i Gombro... more Urodzić się w Jeziorach? Albo w Małoszycach? Jakie to może mieć znaczenie? Dla Witkacego i Gombrowicza – żadnego. A co z Drohobyczem Schulza? Pisarz miał (nie)szczęście urodzić się i żyć właśnie tam. To średniej wielkości miasto w Galicji końca XIX wieku, satelitarne wobec stołecznego Lwowa, stało się podszewką jego biografii. Nie sposób dzisiaj myśleć o Schulzu poza Drohobyczem. W innych miastach, w których się pojawia: w Wiedniu, w Marienbadzie, Kudowie czy Zakopanem, w Warszawie i Paryżu, jest uchodźcą, kuracjuszem, gościem lub turystą – więc zawsze kimś obcym. I czuje się obco. Tak też postrzegają go współcześni. Po części winien jest temu sam Schulz. Byłoby może inaczej, gdyby tak często w listach (ale też pewnie w bezpośrednich kontaktach) nie deklarował, że nie potrafi żyć i tworzyć poza swoim rodzinnym miastem. Ale oświadczenia samego pisarza jedynie mogły ośmielać innych do tworzenia stereotypu „skromnego nauczyciela z małego miasteczka”, piewcy prowincjonalności, którego proza w pełni realizuje program grupy literackiej „Przedmieście”. Resztę zrobiły panujące schematy, według których porządkowano i wartościowano mapę świata. Schulz jednak stawia na głowie istniejące w świecie podziały i napięcia. Centrum świata – dzięki pisaniu – przemieszcza do rodzinnego miasteczka. I dzięki temu Drohobycz staje się stolicą XX wieku? Tak, każdy Drohobycz.
W dziesiątym numerze Schulz/Forum przyglądamy się temu, jak, gdzie i kiedy historia XX wieku odci... more W dziesiątym numerze Schulz/Forum przyglądamy się temu, jak, gdzie i kiedy historia XX wieku odcisnęła się na indywidualnej biografii Brunona Schulza. Stanisław Rosiek o tym, czy można wymknąć się z biegu dziejów, Joanna Sass o losach pisarza-uchodźcy, Malgorzata Ogonowska o relacjach Schulza z Piłsudskim, Łesia Chomycz o sowieckiej okupacji Drohobycza, Jakub Orzeszek o nekrotyczności grafik i tekstów Schulza, Katarzyna Warska o szkolnej recepcji Schulza za Stalina.
Ponadto Piotr Millati na marginesach książki „Gombrowicz. Ja, geniusz” (Klementyna Suchanow, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2017), Żaneta Nalewajk o „Wiośnie” w kontekście interkulturowym, Filip Szałasek na nowo o relacjach ojciec-syn w Schulzowskiej prozie, protokoły relacji z zagłady Żydów drohobyckich, Małgorzata Groth o portalu schulzforum.pl, Balbina Hoppe o spektaklu Robert Drobniucha „Sklepy cynamonowe” (Teatr Lalki i Aktora "Kubuś" w Kielcach), Tymoteusz Skiba jak Jacek Dukaj w schulzologicznym sci-fi.
W numerze: Paweł Sitkiewicz o tym, czy Schulz widział „Gabinet doktora Caligari”, Marek Tomaszews... more W numerze: Paweł Sitkiewicz o tym, czy Schulz widział „Gabinet doktora Caligari”, Marek Tomaszewski o Schulzu-proroku, Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska analizuje Schulzowskie analogie i oksymorony, Zofia Ziemann broni przekładu Celiny Wieniewskiej, Katarzyna Kaszorek o „Polish Kafce”, czyli pierwszej recepcji Schulza w Ameryce, Anna Jarmuszkiewicz o kolorach, a Piotr Sitkiewicz o puzonach – czyli o tym, co skrywa obwoluta pierwszego wydania „Sklepów”.
Małgorzata Sady o drodze braci Quay do Schulza, Balbina Hoppe o „Lustrze” Leszka Mądzika, Stanisław Rosiek o schulzopodobnych fotografiach Bogdana Konopki. Aleksandra Skrzypczyk i Piotr Maksymowicz o Schulzu w operze. Agnieszka Hudzik rozmawia z Henrykiem Mittelstaedtem, tłumaczem Schulza na argentyński, Sotiris Karageorgos o greckim odbiorze Schulza, Irena Chawrilska o Schulzu według Jonathana Foera, Paweł Łapiński o grze tekstowej „Bałwochwał”, Tymoteusz Skiba o nowej stronie www o Jerzym Ficowskim.
W numerze ósmym Tomasz Swoboda o plagiacie przez antycypację, Żaneta Nalewajk o transtekstualnych... more W numerze ósmym Tomasz Swoboda o plagiacie przez antycypację, Żaneta Nalewajk o transtekstualnych relacjach z Schulzem w literaturze polskiej XX i XXI wieku, Marek Wilczyński o wspólnych przestrzeniach Schulza, Romana Jaworskiego i Stefana Grabowskiego. Dalej: Stefan Okołowicz o spotkaniach Schulza i Witkacego, Ałła Tatarenko o „genie schulzowskim” w prozie Danilo Kiša, Magdalena Jarnotowska o tym, jak Beksiński naśladował Schulza, Błażej Szymankiewicz o paralelach między Schulzem a Blecherem, Ewa Goczał o poezji Ficowskiego, Mariusz Kubielas o fotografiach inspirowanych Schulzem.
Ina Söllner wspomina jak portretował ją Schulz, Piotr Sitkiewicz pisze o parodiach i pastiszach Schulza w międzywojniu (prezentujemy trzy najzabawniejsze), Maciej Urbanowski komentuje korespondencję Napierskiego z Wyką, której fragment prezentujemy. Ponadto Celestyna Schuman o sposobach na samouspokojenie, wiersz Łukasza Kamińskiego o spotkaniu przy kawie z cynamonem, recenzje trzech książek schulzologicznych (Aleksandra Wołkowicz o „Martwym sezonie” Łukasza Wojnarowskiego, Tymoteusz Skiba o „Mesjaszu” Wojciecha Żmudzińskiego, Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska o „Brunie. Chłopcu, który nauczył się latać” duetu Nadia Terranova–Ofra Amit) oraz analiza odpowiedzi w ankiecie Andrzeja Pietruszki „Czy Schulz znany jest w Drohobyczu?”.
W siódmym numerze Schulz/Forum pierwszy polski przekład „Psychopatia Sexualis” Richarda von Kraff... more W siódmym numerze Schulz/Forum pierwszy polski przekład „Psychopatia Sexualis” Richarda von Kraffta-Ebinga i masochistyczne fotografie z jego zbiorów. George Bataille o Kraffcie, Julia Kristeva o miłości poza Ziemią. Gilles Deleuze przygląda się Sacher-Masochowi, a Tomasz Swoboda – spojrzeniu Deleuze’a. Kapitan Henry Węgrocki z wojskowych służb medycznych, nieznany dotąd korespondent Schulza, omawia masochistyczne wątki jego twórczości. List Schulza do Węgrockiego przekładają z angielskiego Mirosław Wójcik, Piotr Millati i Jerzy Jarzębski.
Paweł Dybel wyznacza Schulzowski próg wstydu, Stanisław Rosiek i Filip Szałasek reinterpretują sen o kastracji z listu do Szumana, Marcin Romanowski pisze o poglądach Ficowskiego na masochizm, Jerzy Kandziora o kolegach Schulza i o tym, co z nich zostało. Prezentujemy nieletnią muzę Schulza-portrecisty – Irenę Kejlinównę, a także trzy listy Tadeusza Lubowieckiego (Izydora Friedmana) do biografa Schulza i fotograficzne przykłady metatropizmu/masochizmu. Jan Gondowicz oraz Eliza Kącka wikłają się w nierozwiązane zagadki schulzologii, a Ariko Kato szuka podobieństw między Schulzem i Eduardem Fuchsem.
W szóstym numerze Schulz/Forum nieznany wcześniej tekst Schulza o Maurycym Lilienie i sztuce żydo... more W szóstym numerze Schulz/Forum nieznany wcześniej tekst Schulza o Maurycym Lilienie i sztuce żydowskiej (z komentarzem Piotra Sitkiewicza), a także nowy rysunek Schulza odkryty na odwrocie rysunku już znanego, recenzja Schulza z wystawy prac Feliksa Lachowicza oraz przygoda Schulza z typografią na przykładzie zaprojektowanej przezeń winiety „Przeglądu Podkarpacia”.
Ponadto Jerzy Jarzębski o Schulzu uniwersalnym, Piotr Millati o fabułach, które Schulz odrzucił, ale których możemy się domyślać, Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska o antyportrecie w wersji literackiej, Stanisław Rosiek o biografii Schulza jako wyzwaniu rzuconym historii, Jakub Orzeszek o notatce Schulza z lektury Taine’a, Magdalena Jarnotowska o zwierzętach i wyobraźni, Alain van Crugten o przekładzie Schulza na francuski, Tomasz Swoboda o paryskiej wystawie „Mannequin d’artiste, mannequin fétiche”, Marek Wilczyński o V Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Brunona Schulza w Drohobyczu, Anna Kaszuba-Dębska o projekcie „Emeryty”.
W piątym zeszycie Schulz/Forum Marek Wilczyński pisze o Schulzu w kontekście prozy galicyjskiej p... more W piątym zeszycie Schulz/Forum Marek Wilczyński pisze o Schulzu w kontekście prozy galicyjskiej przed i po wojnie, Marcin Całbecki naświetla antropologiczne wątki „Sklepów cynamonowych”, Rolf Fieguth przedstawia swoje notatki z Schulzowskiej intertekstualności, Serge Fauchereau prezentuje manekiny w roli maszyn metafizycznych, Ałła Tatarenko zgłębia literackie poglądy Schulza, Damir Šodan śledzi powinowactwa Schulza z Gottfriedem Bennem, Stanisław Rosiek rozważa praktyczne (i ontologiczne) powody niedostępności „Xięgi bałwochwalczej”, Piotr Sitkiewicz natrafia na Schulzu w Poznaniu, a ponadto Joanna Sass o niemieckich przekładach Schulza oraz recenzje dwóch powieści na motywach Schulza: Tymoteusz Skiba o „Mesjaszu ze Sztokholmu” Cynthii Ozick i Filip Szałasek o „Portrecie psubrata” Ewarda Mielniczka.
The article presents the paratextual framing of the first English edition of Bruno Schulz’s short... more The article presents the paratextual framing of the first English edition of Bruno Schulz’s short story collection: “Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories,” published in 1963 in London by McGibbon & Kee. It describes the book cover and blurb, and offers a brief commentary on Celina Wieniewska’s “Translator’s Preface,” setting it in the context of its time. Naive and error-ridden as it seems today, Wieniewska’s short introduction, largely based on Jerzy Ficowski’s early findings, reflects the state of knowledge about Schulz prior to the development of Schulz Studies as we know it, and it is worth scholarly attention as the first English-language text of this kind. Interestingly, despite being out of date, it has been reprinted without revision in almost all subsequent editions of Wieniewska’s translation, up until the most recent one, from 2012.
Polish translation of Celina Wieniewska’s "Translator’s Preface" from the first English edition o... more Polish translation of Celina Wieniewska’s "Translator’s Preface" from the first English edition of Bruno Schulz’s short story collection: "Cinnamon Shops and Other Stories," published in 1963 in London by McGibbon & Kee.
The paper is an extended comment on Marian Jachimowicz’s “Reminiscence of Bruno Schulz.” On the b... more The paper is an extended comment on Marian Jachimowicz’s “Reminiscence of Bruno Schulz.” On the basis of ample unpublished archive materials, the author reconstructs Jachimowicz’s biography, paying the most attention to the period of 1938–1942, when Jachimowicz as an aspiring man of letters had close friendly contacts with Schulz as well as other artists and writers of the Drogobych and Borysław region, known as the “Borysław Poetry Zone” (Marek Zwillich, Anna Płockier, Henryk Wiciński, Juliusz Wit, Artur Rzeczyca, and others). It turns out that his relationship with Schulz was a formative literary experience for the young poet. As he admits, it was thanks to the access to Schulz’s library and his recommendations, that he came across the books by poets who became important for his own development. Meeting Schulz was also important for another reason: he was the first “great artist” whom Jachimowicz met in person, knowing his literary works – “Cinnamon Shops” and “A Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass” – and appreciating them highly. Jachimowicz’s attitude to Schulz was ambiguous, and this is what the present paper is mainly about. Starting with an analysis of an unpublished “source reminiscence” of 1948, the author approaches its subsequent versions published in journals (“Twórczość”, 1958 and “Poezja,” 1966). It was characteristic for Jachimowicz that his imagination and memory, fixed upon Schulz for several decades, pictured the Drogobych writer as “approaching.” Particularly in the first version of his text, Jachimowicz describes Schulz’s physique, doing it in a shockingly brutal, even abjectal, way. On the other hand, his essays demonstrate a more and more intense tone of mourning. The world of Drogobych and Borysław, to which both Jachimowicz and Schulz belonged before the war, appears in them as an irrevocably lost Arcadia, the only reality where the former did not feel all alone.
An unpublished reminiscence of Bruno Schulz, written on May 7, 1946 by the poet Marian Jachimowic... more An unpublished reminiscence of Bruno Schulz, written on May 7, 1946 by the poet Marian Jachimowicz, who before World War II lived in Borysław and in 1938–1942 was Schulz’s friend.
Na początku lat osiemdziesiątych rzeźbiarz Marek Tomza, wówczas student Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w... more Na początku lat osiemdziesiątych rzeźbiarz Marek Tomza, wówczas student Akademii Sztuk Pięknych w Warszawie, zaprojektował symboliczny nagrobek Brunona Schulza. Wprowadzenie stanu wojennego uniemożliwiło realizację jego pracy. Kolejną próbę autor podjął dopiero w roku 1989. Jednak również wtedy nie udało się planów urzeczywistnić, mimo że w sprawę zaangażował się Jerzy Ficowski, popularyzując projekt w prasie. Po trzydziestu latach prezentu jemy archiwalną ikonografię projektu, udostępnioną nam życzliwie przez autora, wraz z autorskim opisem oraz komentarzem Ficowskiego.
The paper addresses the problem of the mourning cult of Bruno Schulz. The presented approach is c... more The paper addresses the problem of the mourning cult of Bruno Schulz. The presented approach is critical of its excess in the Schulzean biographical discourses as well as literary and artistic references to his life and work, but it is by no means provocative like that of Janusz Rudnicki, who in the 1990s mocked the “hagiographic” idiom of Jerzy Ficowski. Analyzing archive records and testimonies, the author attempts to reconstruct the circumstances of Schulz’s death in possibly the minutest details. Comparing contradictory pieces of information with the official version made popular by Ficowski, he shows how profoundly it has been marked by the unperformed work of mourning over Schulz and the Holocaust – both the failed work of Ficowski himself and of his postwar correspondents whose letters determined the form of “The Regions of Great Heresy.” Using the idiom of thanatology and taking the role of a necrographer rather than that of a Schulz specialist, the author supposes that the dynamic of loss in the case of Schulz reaches far beyond the act of the writer’s execution on the street to include also the posthumous annihilation of his corpse and grave. This particular kind of necroviolence, perhaps the most hateful from the vantage point of the Jewish tradition and the heritage of Western culture in general, which consists in removing the material remains of the deceased has been called by Holocaust scholars “necrocide.” The absence of material traces and the “mourning objects” that usually help to cure the semiotic crisis which is death makes writers and artists commemorate Schulz with lyrical and artistic epitaphs. Their function is to restore the bodily identity of the dead person by creating his other body, told about and imagined in effigie, existing not beside but instead of the missing “mourning object.” However, the expansion of those elegiac narratives, particularly those produced outside Poland, often results in unintended reductionism. As a human being, writer, and artist, Schulz has been reduced in them to an emblem of the Holocaust, while such obituaries ignore the history of his archive. The other, historical and material body of the writer consists of his manuscripts, drawings, graphic works, and official documents. It exists, drawn and quartered, in archives, to be put up for auction for tens of thousands of dollars, exposed in museums and art galleries, and hoarded by collectors as precious relics.
The paper is an attempt to shed light on Bruno Schulz as a man seen in a specific social and hist... more The paper is an attempt to shed light on Bruno Schulz as a man seen in a specific social and historical context. It is a kind of reconstruction of his (un)manliness. A starting point was an intuitive supposition that for Schulz being a (“real”) man might have been a genuine ordeal and that few people actually perceived him as one. The reconstruction is based on testimonies, letters, and individual observations of the writer’s colleagues and friends. They questioned those elements of Schulz’s male identity which did not fit the accepted social model. The picture that has been revealed by a number of memories, distorting or exaggerating his actual features and attitudes under the influence of the stereotypes of the times, consists of at least six elements: (1) Schulz was an ugly weakling; (2) a sickly mamma’s boy always in depression; (3) a sexual impotent, maniac, and pervert; (4) a sluggard and a schlemiel; (5) a parasite depending on his clever, socially prominent, and wealthy elder brother; and (6) a burden to the family that he should have supported. The author opposes that stereotype which, even though impressive in literary terms and well rooted in Schulz’s biographical myth, significantly simplifies his picture and biography by reducing him to a caricature of a great but socially castrated artist. Paradoxically, what made Schulz an artist: his talent, sensitivity or perhaps even hypersensitivity, gentleness, shyness, a unique (maybe pretended?) sense of separation from reality, as well as deep insight in it somehow deprived him of manliness as defined by society and made him unmanly. On the other hand though, all those traits contributed to an explanation, a shield, and an alibi of the stereotypical unmanliness. Thus, sometimes some people were able to forgive him his weakness since after all he was an artist. But what if had been a shoemaker or, for that matter, a dealer in textile fabrics?
Bruno Schulz used to portray his students. They were usually glad for it, although some claimed t... more Bruno Schulz used to portray his students. They were usually glad for it, although some claimed that Schulz at times crossed the comfort limit of female students. After many years, students portrayed him in their testimonies in which they tried to remember what he was like, and their perspective was different from that of Schulz’s friends. Students always remain lower in the school hierarchy and usually they cannot get to know their teacher very well. Thus, they have to rely on what they observed during lessons or outside of school. Corporeality played an important role in students’ stories, simply because they had visual access to it: Schulz appeared in class in his bodily form. As a teacher, he used his body to work – he spoke, drew, walked, etc. He played with his body and was observed as a central figure in the classroom, playing his role of an authority before an audience. Consequently, students drew conclusions about his mental traits in reference to physical ones. Generally, the teacher’s body should be asexual, sterile, aesthetically pleasing, and reliable. Therefore, Schulz’s body was not entirely his own since it had to fit his social role, which it did not always do. Because Schulz’s corporeality was quite uncommon, students talked about it and then Schulz specialists asked their professional questions. Students described in detail his figure, gait, face, look, hands, clothes, voice, and sexuality. The essay is an attempt to collect all the relevant texts that address the topic. It proves that especially corporeality impacted how Schulz was perceived as a teacher and a human being. Students saw him either as rather withdrawn and stressed, or as a strong magnetic personality. It is hard to judge the truth value of their opinions – probably they tell us little about the real Schulz. However, dozens of statements by Schulz’s students that refer to his corporality greatly enhance his picture known from photos. A gender perspective makes the problem even more interesting, as we can see a difference between the memories of women and men: the former seem to resemble Schulz’s drawings and portraits of female sitters, while the latter his portraits of the male ones. Unfortunately, we have only a few female testimonies since Schulz taught mainly in a school for boys.
A fragment of a philosophical essay by Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari titled “Iconographie d... more A fragment of a philosophical essay by Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari titled “Iconographie dell’auteur” (Paris, 2005), published for the first time in Polish, that addresses the problem of a relationship between the image of the author and his/her work.
The paper is an attempt at a personal polemic with the title of the conference “Leaving Drogobych... more The paper is an attempt at a personal polemic with the title of the conference “Leaving Drogobych,” organized in November 2019 at the University of Gdańsk as one of the events during Schulz Days. The author agrees that the study of those elements of Schulz’s biography which are not related to his hometown is interesting and rewarding, but remembers that he did not feel comfortable out of Drogobych and, as he himself and his friends often admitted, avoided long trips to any other places. That, however, did not necessarily mean that Schulz was just an “average provincial teacher” who suffered from many phobias, but rather an outsider whose perception of physical space was unusual – unknown and uninviting, it was frequently considered by the writer as a genuine and immediate danger. On the other hand though, no actual journeys affected Schulz’s unique metaphysics of place and the metaphors he chose to use to evoke it. Drogobych was for him a metaphysical place, almost as the only one – or perhaps indeed the only one – that stimulated his metaphorical vocabulary, imagination, and fiction. It is an axiom that Schulz remained and still remains in Drogobych. He never left it, and this is good because otherwise many of those who keep looking for him, including two outstanding Ukrainian poets: Yuri Andrukhovych and Serhiy Zhadan, would have never found him there. The founders of the International Schulz Festival and the “Second Autumn” Festival have also contributed to Schulz’s continuous presence in his hometown.
The essay presents a personal approach to Bruno Schulz not only as an outstanding writer and arti... more The essay presents a personal approach to Bruno Schulz not only as an outstanding writer and artist, but above all as a figure of imagination that connects the worlds and cultures of Poles, Ukrainians, and Jews. The author defines this function as “worldbuilding” and places it in a process of reconstructing the semantic landscape of Galicia, devastated by World War II and mass deportations, which turned the postwar generations into semantic orphans. This reconstruction does not consist in the impossible return of Poles, Jews, and Ukrainians to Drogobych or Lviv, but in acknowledging the complex past of the region which is our home. Its picture stems from the text of the architectural heritage as well as written texts. Such a text or archetypal metatext has been the work of Bruno Schulz and many others, born in the same area: Joseph Roth, Leopold Sacher-Masoch, Paul Celan, Stanisław Lem, Zbigniew Herbert, Rosa Ausländer, Gregor von Rezzori, Manès Sperber, Georg Drozdowski or Bogdan-Igor Antonych. The task of reconstructing the Regions of Great Heresy has been performed not just in Drogobych, but all over our part of the world – in Lviv, Vilnius, Gdańsk, Wrocław, and Tschernivtsi. We have been trying to heal the wounds inflicted by World War II, which will take long, is by no means simple, and meets much resistance. Like in Schulz’s stories, we have embarked on a long but interesting journey and much is still to be discovered.
The goal of the paper’s author is to identify the references to contemporary social reality that ... more The goal of the paper’s author is to identify the references to contemporary social reality that can be found in Schulz’s fiction. One of the reasons for which such an effort seems to make sense is the writer’s decision to join the Literary Collective “Przedmieście.” The author compares Schulz’s poetics and some motifs of his fiction with the program of that particular group of writers. She also analyzes the representations of social change in such stories as “Spring,” “The Street of Crocodiles,” and the cycle “Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies.” The most important to her are the cultural, political, and economic aspects of those representations. Besides, she points to some analogies between Schulz’s diagnoses and those presented by Oswald Spengler in “The Decline of the West.”
Among many people present in the social and professional milieu of Bruno Schulz, was Emil Zegadło... more Among many people present in the social and professional milieu of Bruno Schulz, was Emil Zegadłowicz (1888–1941), a writer who during the interwar period was famous mainly for his novels critical of Polish socio-political realities ("Zmory", "Motory"). The essay presents almost all the available evidence concerning the two writers’ mutual artistic inspirations, correspondence, and personal contacts that have survived to this day. Crucial for this reconstruction was a search in the family archive of Zegadłowicz. Unfortunately, even though he certainly did his best to document his literary connections, the traces of Bruno Schulz’s life and work in the archive are scarce. It was much easier to find there the evidence of Zegadłowicz’s recognition of Schulz and his work. For example, the name of the artist from Drogobych was found on the mailing list of the copies of Zegadłowicz’s works, and handwritten remarks were discovered on the published texts of Schulz’s stories. Also, a letter written by Schulz includes remarks on one of Zegadłowicz's novels. Among the archive’s holdings, particularly interesting is the documentation of the two writers’ only meeting which took place in Drogobych in February 1939 during Zegadłowicz's lecture tour, and the author’s analysis of Schulz’s artworks that Zegadłowicz received on that occasion, including his portraits. A description of the two writers’ meeting includes also contextual information about Schulz’s family and his professional relationships with Drogobych. Today, while some documents seem to suggest that in the late 1930s Zegadłowicz and Schulz were close friends, there is no good reason to believe that it was really so. After all, Zegadłowicz’s archive contains no relevant evidence in this respect.
The paper presents unknown details concerning Bruno Schulz, found in the memoirs of the Cracow cr... more The paper presents unknown details concerning Bruno Schulz, found in the memoirs of the Cracow critic, writer, and poet Henryk Vogler (1911–2005). Vogler wrote quite a long article, “Two Romantic Worlds. On Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz” [Dwa światy romantyczne. O Brunonie Schulzu i Witoldzie Gombrowiczu], published in 1938 in Skamander. Both writers thanked him in letters, which initiated their correspondence that continued till the outbreak of World War II. Schulz exchanged with his younger colleague opinions about literature, evaluated his attempts to write fiction, and described his dreams. They resumed writing letters to each other in 1940 during Vogler’s stay in Lviv – he actually invited Schulz to pay him a visit. Their meeting, however, never took place: already on his way, Schulz returned home. That situation may be considered in the contexts of similar events from Schulz’s life and an interpretation of his fiction and art proposed by Jerzy Jarzębski, who saw in both a “record of … an encounter realized in many different ways.” This encounter almost never brings about a harmonious connection, but instead leads to “pain, shame, comedy, and irony.” On his correspondence with Schulz, lost during the war, as well as on Schulz’s influence on his own work and the meeting in Lviv that did not take place, Vogler wrote in his “Self-Portrait from Memory“ [Autoportret z pamięci] – three volumes published in 1979–1981. In his autobiography Vogler also mentioned the first postwar publication of Schulz’s fiction in 1957 by Wydawnictwo Literackie, of which he was editor-in-chief. Still, his account does not explain the details of a conflict between Artur Sandauer and Jerzy Ficowski, which began on that occasion and continued for many years. The closing part of the paper focuses on the traces of Schulz in Vogler’s novel, "The Man Who Was Dreaming" [Człowiek, który śnił], written before the war but published with some revisions in 1960.
The aim of this paper is to answer the question why theatrical performances based on the literary... more The aim of this paper is to answer the question why theatrical performances based on the literary works of Bruno Schulz usually turn out disappointing. It was first posed by Jerzy Jarzębski 25 years ago. The author of the present paper discusses Jarzębski’s theses and proposes his own explanation. He disagrees with a claim that Schulz’s fiction is “unstageable” by nature. In the era of post-dramatic theatre, the idea of “unstageability” is evidently anachronistic. Therefore, the author demonstrates that there must be something wrong in the theater directors’ approaches to Schulz and his works. An analysis of several performances from the recent decade – directed by Petr Boháč, Robert Drobniuch, Konrad Dworakowski, Edyta Janusz-Ehrlich, Tomasz Kajdański, Jacek Krawczyk, Leszek Mądzik, Jan Szurmiej, Piotr Tomaszuk, Julia Wernio, Ingmar Villqist and Rudolf Zioło – leads to a conclusion that contemporary artists who deal with Schulz are unable to look at him from a distance and free themselves from his influence. They are simply too passive to create an autonomous theatrical vision in which Schulz’s literary world would be only a component and not the dominant substance. For this reason, their theatrical adaptations remain unsuccessful. In Polish theater there was only one artist who became a real partner for Schulz, strong enough to face his genius –Tadeusz Kantor. In his “Dead Class” (1975), Kantor managed to “utilize” the poetics of Schulz’s stories to create his own, original, and totally independent narrative. Since that time, each director who wants to stage Schulz’s literary works has had to struggle not only with the author of “The Cinnamon Shops”, but also with the leader of the Theater of Death. And this is, indeed, a very difficult task.
The starting point of the essay is a hypothesis that the concepts of time in Schulz’s fiction can... more The starting point of the essay is a hypothesis that the concepts of time in Schulz’s fiction can be approached more effectively and systematically than those of space. It is space that shows his inventiveness the best, comparable to his drawings. There are many studies of space in Schulz’s fiction, yet few of them address the basic problem: how is space actually created, what are the rules of its production? While a number of critics have pointed at the figure of the labyrinth and geopoetics has inevitably become a relevant method, less attention has been paid to the representations of phenomena from the border area of dream and wakefulness. Ernst Mach’s Analysis of Impressions, commonly read by Schulz’s peers, suggests many valuable clues. The proper frame of reference for such phenomena, close to spontaneous hallucinations, is language. It is its dynamic, with which Schulz collaborates in a disciplined way without reducing its artistic value, which generates analogies between linguistic operations and spatial forms. The shaping of space conditioned by language – verbal mimesis which renounces any other mimetic ambitions – is a very interesting aspect of Schulz’s writing. The essay includes analyses of the selected passages from Schulz’s stories – those dominated by a unique conditional mode signalized on various levels by verbal, adjectival, and adverbial phrases. Schulz’s tour de force in that respect is “The Gale.” The atmosphere of the story is uncanny and surreal, and, what is perhaps the most important, the sound effects are rich as in no other work of fiction by the Drogobych writer. “Spring” shows other strategies of creating spaces derived from words. It is important that the stories in both Schulz’s collections make the reader turn to the concepts related to the category of non-place.
Most Schulz experts assume that while working on The Booke of Idolatry, he did not start writing ... more Most Schulz experts assume that while working on The Booke of Idolatry, he did not start writing fiction yet. It has been generally believed that his literary talent surfaced rather late, although Jerzy Ficowski thought that Schulz might have tried writing some time earlier. In the critic’s opinion, the beginning of Schulz’s literary talent dated back to his correspondence with close friends in 1925–1926, but since all letters from that period have been lost there is no way to validate that claim. Jerzy Jarzębski supposes that Schulz’s fiction came into being rapidly, at once fully mature and perfect. Władysław Panas also points at Schulz’s magisterial literary debut, The Cinnamon Shops, when the author was already about forty years old. And yet, the present essay puts those hypotheses to test. Having searched the holdings of the Vasyl Stefanyk National Academic Library in Lviv, Ms. Khomych has demonstrated that Schulz made his debut in the early 1920s almost simultaneously in two fields: in art, with a one man show in the town of Boryslaw in 1921, which has been commonly known, and in literature in 1922. Ms Khomych discovered in the 25–26 no. (January 15, 1922) of the bi-weekly Świt, sponsored by the oil officials of Boryslaw, a short story titled “Undula,” signed with a penname “Marceli Weron.” A critical analysis of this story demonstrates a number of affinities both with Schulz’s art, and with his later fiction. The name of the title character, Undula, is the same as that of the main figure of the graphic works included in The Booke of Idolatry. Other similarities include masochistic eroticism and some characters and motifs typical of Schulz’s later stories: a child, a dream, a chambermaid named Adela, the Demiurge, a crab, and a cockroach. Moreover, the stylistic and lexical features of the text leave no doubt that Schulz must have been its author. Imitation by anyone is impossible since in the early 1920s none of his other literary works was available in print. Thus, one may assume that “Marceli Weron” was Schulz’s penname and “Undula” was his proper literary debut.
An unknown story by Bruno Schulz, titled “Undula,” published in 1922 in the fortnightly “Świt,” a... more An unknown story by Bruno Schulz, titled “Undula,” published in 1922 in the fortnightly “Świt,” a tribune of the oil industry officials from the town of Borysław, under a mysterious penname “Marceli Weron”.
The paper reports the global reception of Schulz in 2018 according to the record of activity of @... more The paper reports the global reception of Schulz in 2018 according to the record of activity of @brunoschulz.org on Facebook. It covers events, auctions, exhibitions, bibliography, Schulz studies, and theater.
The paper is an attempt to document and acknowledge the reproductions of individual graphic works... more The paper is an attempt to document and acknowledge the reproductions of individual graphic works from Schulz’s Booke of Idolatry. Its main point is that the Booke of Idolatry as we know is just a fantasy, a copy of the original isolated in the dark halls of the museum. It is known only from reproductions made by Schulz’s biographers and Schulz scholars. The reproductions of Schulz’s graphic works have been described in terms suggested by Walter Benjamin in his essay, „The Work of Art in the Age of Technical Reproduction.”
In the paper, the author presents the results of her research on the origins of two illustrations... more In the paper, the author presents the results of her research on the origins of two illustrations credited to Bruno Schulz. Illustrations decorate the covers of two different tango sheet music books from the 1930s – „Dziewczę me, wspomnij noc. Tango” („Oh Girl, Remember the Night. Tango”) and „Biały motyl” („White Butterfly”). One of the covers was found on a vintage auction, while the other remains only in the memory of the last owner and inheritor of the songwriter. The author interviews the last owner of the books, reconstructing the story of Schulz’s friendship with musicians and the history of lost illustrations.
The author disagrees with a popular belief the Schulz’s bookplates have been made with the cliché... more The author disagrees with a popular belief the Schulz’s bookplates have been made with the cliché-verre technique. He reconstructs the reasons for this misrecognition promoted by Jerzy Ficowski and Michał Kuna and the common association of Schulz’s graphic art with the Booke of Idolatry only, but in the first place makes a detailed analysis of the known bookplates, which allows him to claim that the techniques used were zincotype, drypoint, and heliogravure. The paper includes reproductions of four known bookplates by Schulz, with full descriptions made by the author.
Even though the present essay has been written in response to Piotr Sitkiewicz article „‘Yet penn... more Even though the present essay has been written in response to Piotr Sitkiewicz article „‘Yet penniless.’ Bruno Schulz’s Income and Living Standard,” it is not a polemic, but rather a different interpretation of some aspects of Schulz’s biography. A starting point is an analysis of the writer’s income – of what is known about it, what is not known yet, and what will probably never be known. The main goal is answering the question of Schulz’s condition as a human being painfully tried both by his personal life and by history. Małgorzata Ogonowska has not followed either of the two popular biographic narratives on the author of the Cinnamon Shops: she neither confirms the legend of Schulz as a helpless artist, unable to cope with everyday problems, nor challenges his own myth of himself. Analyzing the available sources, such as Schulz’s letters, school reports, and the local press, and placing them in social, economic, and political contexts, she is looking for some third way, trying to understand the ambiguities and multifacetedness of Schulz’s existence without passing judgement, condemning or idealizing.
The author makes an attempt to test a widespread opinion that Bruno Schulz had serious financial ... more The author makes an attempt to test a widespread opinion that Bruno Schulz had serious financial problems. This view, however, dating back to the writer’s own statement and then supported by such outstanding experts on his life and work as Jerzy Ficowski, seems to be rather untenable. Having analyzed Schulz’s income confirmed by his letters, as well as the income of other Polish writers in 1918–1939, Piotr Sitkiewicz has reached a conclusion that in fact his living standard in the 1930s was quite high, particularly if one takes into account the economic situation of Poland stricken by the crash of 1929 and its consequences. Schulz’s complaints on his teaching job and salary were not caused by objective estimation, but by his worldview which was influenced by chronic depression.
The paper focuses on the motifs characteristic of the experience of modernity, which appear in Br... more The paper focuses on the motifs characteristic of the experience of modernity, which appear in Bruno Schulz’s fiction – specifically, on those derived from modern economy and its influence on the individual’s reception of reality, such as metropolis, crowd, loneliness, commercial street, and commodity fetishism. The context includes the accounts of modernity proposed by Marx, Benjamin, Simmel, and Marshall Berman. In his description of the commercial street in “The Street of Crocodiles,” Schulz draws on the tradition of modernist literature, developing the traditional modes of description in terms of his own imagination and literary mythology. He approaches the economic modernity from a peripheral point of view, which allows his to perceive its aspects that are invisible in the center.
The aim of the paper was to interpret Bruno Schulz’s short story, „Cockroaches”, in the context o... more The aim of the paper was to interpret Bruno Schulz’s short story, „Cockroaches”, in the context of the phenomenon of repulsion. Disgust has been interpreted as an ontological, aesthetic, and epistemological determinant of modernist literature, as well as Schulz’s fiction. The experience of disgust has been interpreted in the terms proposed by Julia Kristeva, Mary Douglas, Walter Benjamin, and the non-anthropocentric humanities. It has been suggested that repulsion may be analyzed as the main element of the „topography” of Schulz’s universe: one of its main principles, both forming and destroying its matter.
The present essay is a personal, literary record of reading experience. The author does not pay m... more The present essay is a personal, literary record of reading experience. The author does not pay much attention to the scholarly context of Schulz studies in favor of the emotional aura of his stories. In her opinion, the most important components of Schulz’s fiction are its epiphanic character, the need for togetherness, and openness to the Other.
The Book is not only a crucial element of the fictional world of Schulz and Lem, but also a metap... more The Book is not only a crucial element of the fictional world of Schulz and Lem, but also a metaphor of creation. The poetic imagination of both writers is rooted in the mythical image of the ur-Book, the Authentic Scroll which makes the axis mundi of reality. The artistic task of Schulz was to reconstruct that lost idea, while Lem decided to abandon it in favor of a vision of enormous, overwhelming libraries. At any rate, the attitude toward the myth of the Book turns out to be a common element, if not a symbol characteristic of both Schulz’s and Lem’s fiction.
The author attempts at reconstructing the concept of cultural memory found in Bruno Schulz’ oeuvr... more The author attempts at reconstructing the concept of cultural memory found in Bruno Schulz’ oeuvre. The aim is to show that Schulz, not unlike Thomas Mann, anticipated some theoretical aspects of postmodern memory studies as pursued in Germany since the 1980s. On the one hand, there are striking affinities between Schulz and the art historian Aby Warburg whose ideas of “collective visual memory” and “pathos formulas”, developed until the 1920s, have only recently been rediscovered and acclaimed in the present-day cultural research. On the other hand, Schulz draws on Jung’s depth psychology by referring to the theory of archetypes and the common unconscious. Unlike Warburg’s, Jung’s ideas have been rejected in contemporary German memory studies because of their alleged biologistic flaw. Due to his affinities to both Warburg and Jung, Schulz suggests his own vision of individual and collective memory, which allows for reconciling the “biological” and the “culture-oriented” reflection on collective memory and may be a source of inspiration in today’s research.
The paper is a comparative analysis of the „schulzoid” and „contrapuntal” novels by Piotr Pazińsk... more The paper is a comparative analysis of the „schulzoid” and „contrapuntal” novels by Piotr Paziński (The Boarding House) and Erwin Mortier (Marcel). A comparison of the novels is, however, a pretext to approach a much more complex topic which is the representation of trauma by the third post-Holocaust generation, both from the point of view of the victims (Paziński), and that of the oppressors (Mortier). The author has identified characteristic Schulzian motifs which in The Boarding House and Marcel have different functions: the autobiographical setting, the child-narrator, the tension between harmony and discord of remembrance, fascination with trash, and interest in the myths of genesis. Schulz – both the style of his fiction and he himself as a Holocaust victim – has turned into a significant figure for a generation, connecting two seemingly diverse discourses of Paziński and Mortier.
The essay is an interpretation of the middle part of the “Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies.” The oppo... more The essay is an interpretation of the middle part of the “Treatise on Tailor’s Dummies.” The opposition of matter and form has been translated into the key opposition in Schulz’s fiction – the conflict of the sexes. The father represents in Schulz’s stories a patriarchal order. A vision of the father’s domination is the foundation of his lecture, which makes it different from the first part of the “Treatise,” where Jacob attempted to win the affection of the listening women by a praise of a heretic doctrine identified with matriarchate.
The starting point of the paper is Jacques Derrida’a reflection on the university today presented... more The starting point of the paper is Jacques Derrida’a reflection on the university today presented in his lecture on the „Unconditional University.” Then the author analyzes some passages from Thomas Mann’s „Magic Mountain” to demonstrate that the novel has been based on the picture of the university during the anti-positivist reaction. In Mann’s novel, the Sanatorium is an allegory of the University, while the protagonist, Hans Castorp, is a student seeking Mentors and the Truth. Schulz’s story, “Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass,” has been interpreted as inspired by “The Magic Mountain”, since arguably it includes some traces of the „sanatorium – university” parallel. The paper refers also to Paweł Huelle’s novel “Castorp”, which tells a story of Mann’s character during a period of his studies in Gdańsk, anticipating the events described in “The Magic Mountain”. All the three texts – by Mann, Schulz, and Huelle – are connected by the debates characteristic of the humanities before the Great War (Mann, Huelle) and before World War II and the Holocaust (Schulz).
The author considers the circumstances in which Kazimierz Wyka and Stefan Napierski, two respecte... more The author considers the circumstances in which Kazimierz Wyka and Stefan Napierski, two respected literary critics, published texts which criticized Bruno Schulz in the monthly magazine Ateneum (1939, no. 1). Schulz’s prose works were already widely known to be difficult, but there was no doubt as to their merit. The writer’s high position seemed indisputable, and yet Wyka and Napierski still consciously tried to destroy Schulz’s legacy. Their critical attack on Schulz is interpreted in the essay not as an isolated exploit, but as a model case of interpretational misunderstanding, which is not so much the effect of a lack of understanding, but of planned action and ill will of the critics. Wyka and Napierski did not want to understand, and with their dislike of the type of prose that Schulz wrote they programmed a certain type of reading and critical approach, which had many followers and determined reception. At the same time, however, their dismissal of Schulz turned out to have a positive value ‒ not for the history of criticism, but for Schulz studies as such.
When in 1947 Pierre Klossowski called the Marquis de Sade his „neighbor,” in fact he did it on be... more When in 1947 Pierre Klossowski called the Marquis de Sade his „neighbor,” in fact he did it on behalf of an entire generation of French intellectuals, writers, and artists, for whom the „divine Marquis” became emblematic both as a source of philosophical inspiration, and as an existential figure. Soon the author of „120 Days of Sodom” would be taken into consideration by Bataille, Blanchot, Camus, and de Beauvoir, and then by Barthes, Ricoeur, Lacan, Deleuze, and Kristeva, to mention only the French. Now, after several decades, it is clear that the twentieth-century humanities made his writings one of their permanent points of reference, either negative, or positive. Therefore, Sade became a neighbor of every one of them. Still, Klossowski did not only mean rational and “structural” kinship when he called the author of “Juliette” his “neighbor.” His statement seems to have reached much deeper, at something most intimate and dark that remains beyond the pale of reason – Schulz called it the “basic capital of imagination,” the “roots of individual spirit,” the “mythic core.” Just like de Sade, Schulz has many devotees – commentators who also are his “neighbors.” Schulz Studies stem from a statement by Jerzy Ficowski, “I have found the Authentic.” He was then followed by many scholars who were similarly dazzled and seduced, ready to „engage in discoveries.” There are more and more of them nowadays, but Schulz, like the „divine Marquis” in the 20th century, has become for us, overwhelmed by the less and less intelligible and more and more grotesque reality of the 21st century, also a point of reference and an emblem of a certain intellectual and aesthetic identity. With his new materialism, non-anthropocentrism, and the ethic of care, Schulz seems now a harbinger of a new paradigm of Polish culture, which is emerging under our eyes. Perhaps soon enough someone will claim on behalf of a whole generation of post-humanists: Schulz, our neighbor. Will it be true? For now, we are in abeyance, relying only on ourselves. In a trembling voice, with a premonition of something intimate and dark in ourselves, each of us repeats in his or her own name: Schulz, my neighbor.
For the eighth time, the town of Drogobych hosted International Bruno Schulz Festival. The topic ... more For the eighth time, the town of Drogobych hosted International Bruno Schulz Festival. The topic was the place, approached by participants in a number of original and unique ways. The town itself was an important, but by no means the only place taken into consideration. During the festival, Drogobych became not just the site or background of many events, such as presentations, concerts, performances, and meetings with writers, but it was indeed much alive. The very fact that the participants could visit Schulz’s hometown must have been an extraordinary experience for them.
The period of July 31st-August 26th, 1938 Bruno Schulz spent in Paris. Suppressing his doubts, he... more The period of July 31st-August 26th, 1938 Bruno Schulz spent in Paris. Suppressing his doubts, he eventually decided to visit the French capital „to study literature and organize an exhibition of paintings.” The paper includes previously unknown documents which the author has found in the Lviv archives, together with their analysis. Some of them are manuscripts, supplemented by an unknown photo of Schulz.
The author points at some methodological problems connected with a dictionary of Bruno Schulz’s P... more The author points at some methodological problems connected with a dictionary of Bruno Schulz’s Polish, conditioned mostly by its implied audience. In comparison to other lexicographic projects, such a project would have to take into account the sources of the lexical items listed in dictionaries, their number in relation to the language as a sum total of such items, the ordering of Schulz’s vocabulary, and the meaning of words in his idiolect, compared to their commonly accepted meaning. The differences under consideration imply that even though the dictionary may prove useful in the research on common Polish – its history, linguistic norms, and semantics, in the first place it would meet the needs of both literary scholars and linguists specializing in Schulz. They would find in it well organized material to study the writer’s imagination, the linguistic world picture of his works, his style, his artistic inspirations, the ways of connecting ideas, and his linguistic mastery in general. Besides, such a dictionary would be helpful for common readers, as well as translators of Schulz into foreign languages and scholars from abroad. The theoretical assumptions and practical options involved will depend the primary goal of the project.
The long awaited publication of Madeline G. Levine’s retranslation of Schulz’s fiction has sparke... more The long awaited publication of Madeline G. Levine’s retranslation of Schulz’s fiction has sparked new interest in the reception of Schulz in English-speaking countries. In Poland, the general view seems to be that the author has not received the attention he deserves. Based largely on a review non-specialized periodicals from 1963–2018, the paper presents a strong and lasting trend in the reception of the English Schulz, namely the admiration of hosts of fellow authors: writers of high-brow and popular fiction, poets and playwrights from the whole anglophone world, form Australia to Canada. Examining their reviews of Schulz’s stories, interviews and articles promoting their own work, and intertextual references to Schulz which some of them employed, the paper adds some a new names to the small handful of Schulz-loving anglophone authors of whom Polish scholars have been aware so far.
The paper sheds light on the postwar reception of Schulz’s work and biography, usually underestim... more The paper sheds light on the postwar reception of Schulz’s work and biography, usually underestimated by scholars. It reveals that at the very beginning of that period Jerzy Ficowski cooperated closely with the Jewish Society for the Encouragement of Fine Arts and later Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw, although his collaboration was rather unofficial and relied on mutual information transfer. It also presents the results of research conducted in the Archives of the Jewish Historical Institute, particularly an analysis of the documents from the Ernestyna Podhorizer-Sandel and Józef Sandel files. These are mainly biographical notes on Bruno Schulz and other Polish-Jewish artists murdered by the Nazis during World War II that were to be included the monumental and unfinished Sandels’ Polish-Jewish Artists Lexicon. The main question is how the Holocaust narrative influenced Schulz’s mainstream reception in the future.
A fragment of Wacław Bojarski’s short story “Pożegnanie z mistrzem” [Farewell to the Master], pub... more A fragment of Wacław Bojarski’s short story “Pożegnanie z mistrzem” [Farewell to the Master], published under the penname of “Jan Marzec” in the underground periodical Sztuka i Naród (1943, nos 9–10). The story, which is an attempt to imitate Schulz’s style, is an interesting trace of his reception in the Polish patriotic-nationalist discourse.
The authors associated with the periodical Sztuka i Naród were highly critical of the art of the ... more The authors associated with the periodical Sztuka i Naród were highly critical of the art of the interwar period. In their common opinion, it was unpatriotic and limited to the worship of individualism, which proved to be disastrous for the state and its social structure. Still, Wacław Bojarski, the acting editor-in-chief, decided to honor Bruno Schulz with an obituary even though the writer had nothing to do with the nationalist ideology. Schulz did not write any “engaged” or “nationalist”, but for some reason the editors of Sztuka i Naród resolved to save his name and literary achievement from oblivion.
A short article published in Chwila (1935, no. 5921). The author, who must have known Schulz pers... more A short article published in Chwila (1935, no. 5921). The author, who must have known Schulz personally, interprets Cinnamon Shops in opposition to literature that was socially and politically engaged. Besides, the text includes a description of Schulz’s apartment.
The topic of the paper are descriptions of apartments pccupied by Bruno Schulz and his two friend... more The topic of the paper are descriptions of apartments pccupied by Bruno Schulz and his two friends, Emanuel Pilpel and Stanisław Weingarten, included in the letters written by eye-witnesses to Jerzy Ficowski. The perception of those interiors was ambivalent – some accounts stress the dark and unhealthy atmosphere of the house. Even though they come from Schulz’s friends, they prove that his otherness was not fully accepted by them. There are also descriptions made by open-minded young observers, mainly schoolboys, for whom Schulz’s den is a temple of goodness and art. The accounts of the apartments of Pilpel and Weingarten also show problems with accepting otherness. The analysis presented makes the reader realize the distance separating Schulz and his friends from the stereotypical bourgeois culture.
But which Drogobych? There are many of them. Certainly it is not the town which now belongs to Uk... more But which Drogobych? There are many of them. Certainly it is not the town which now belongs to Ukraine. One may easily go there for a tourist trip. What is at stake in this game – the game of aspects, views, and images – is not the Drogobych that is actually accessible, but the one that is probably gone forever no longer to be found. In that Drogobych, of the cinnamon shops, Schulz was born and lived. Can we still have any access to it? The safest and the shortest way to Drogobych runs through Cinnamon Shops. Schulz’s drawings and graphic works, where the town is always the setting, may be of some help, too. But there is also another way, through collecting documents and meticulous reconstructing of the place (and time). It is taken by these travelers who are passionate collectors of postcards and photos. Each town has its visual conventions beyond which it is hard to reach. The more often towns and cities are photographed – Paris is a good example – the more prevalent and permanent visual schemas become. The spectator must abandon them to see the place with an unprejudiced eye. Also the official photos of Drogobych from the early 20th century show some kind of excess of the visible. Yet it is enough to change perspective, reduce the distance or enlarge the background and suddenly the official locations may reveal their private atmosphere.
The paper begins with a reference to Franz Kafka’s unfinished long short story “The Burrow,” whic... more The paper begins with a reference to Franz Kafka’s unfinished long short story “The Burrow,” which has been chosen as a starting point of a series of intertextual associations focusing on futile efforts made by various modernist literary narrators and characters to find a sense of safety in some specific settings. The route from “The Burrow” runs through selected short stories by Martin Walser toward late fiction by Bruno Schulz, in particular “The Republic of Dreams” and “The Homeland,” revealing affinities connecting the Polish writer from Drogobych with two writers of the German language, who shared his fears and obsessions.
The paper proposes an approach to Schulz’s life in terms of biogeography. The author criticizes t... more The paper proposes an approach to Schulz’s life in terms of biogeography. The author criticizes the stereotype of Schulz’s biography as that of a settled, provincial man who hardly ever left his hometown, and when he did, he suffered from anxiety and the sense of failure. That stereotype was created by Jerzy Ficowski, who brought into being the figure of Schulz as a weak, shy, hypersensitive, and anxious artist, who in his art found shelter from everyday reality. The paper presents some aspects of Ficowski’s approach to Schulz’s spatial experience (decontextualization, negligence of social life and the urban experience) to show how a critique of that approach may lead to a new, biogeographical version of the writer’s life.
The paper is an analysis of the motif of glass in the fiction of Bruno Schulz. The writer’s fasci... more The paper is an analysis of the motif of glass in the fiction of Bruno Schulz. The writer’s fascination with this particular material is related to the experience of modernity, since glass served as the substance of permanent and repetitive phantasms. In this respect, Schulz’s writing can be read as an artistically processed testimony of fascination with one of the material dimensions of modernity, which was glass architecture. The author interprets the modernist oculocentrism in Schulz’s stories, focusing on transparency in the spatial figures of the author of Cinnamon Shops (including panoramas, glass balls, telescopes, etc.).
The paper focuses on the map which is a motif that organizes a large part or even the whole of “T... more The paper focuses on the map which is a motif that organizes a large part or even the whole of “The Street of Crocodiles,” a short story by Bruno Schulz. It is an analysis of a series of transformations of a map into an etching, a photo, an architectural drawing, and an icon, as well as the changes of its focalization and coloring. Inspirations have been drawn from critical cartography, the Deleuzian idea of the fold, studies by Svetlana Alpers and Georges Didi-Hubermana, Freudian psychoanalysis and its continuation by Torok and Abraham, and the theories of melancholy.
Two poems written in a café in Truskawiec during 7th International Bruno Schulz Festival in Drogo... more Two poems written in a café in Truskawiec during 7th International Bruno Schulz Festival in Drogobych.
Nowadays it is impossible to think about Schulz outside Drogobych. Wherever else he showed up, be... more Nowadays it is impossible to think about Schulz outside Drogobych. Wherever else he showed up, be it Vienna, Marienbad, Kudowa, Zakopane, Warsaw or Paris, he was a refugee, a patient, a visitor or a tourist – always a stranger. And he considered himself one, while others did the same. To an extent, it was his own fault. It could perhaps be otherwise if he did not so often write in his letters (and most likely said in conversations) that he was unable to live and work outside his hometown. But the words of the writer could only encourage others to contribute to a stereotype of a “modest schoolteacher from a small town.” The provincial status of Schulz, however, is not so obvious. At the end of the 19th century, thanks to oil Drogobych reached the end of centuries long stasis from which even the salt mines opened in the Middle Ages could not save it. Oil changed the life of many people in Galicia. Without leaving Drogobych, Schulz could actually watch and personally experience in doses which let him keep his independence and inner stability the rise of a metropolitan mentality described by Georg Simmel. Yet Paris was too much for him – after three weeks he escaped from the French capital with not a single word of commentary. To live in the capital of the 19th century, as Walter Benjamin called it, would have been a torture for him. Thus Schulz did not cancel the opposition of center and periphery, the capital and the provinces, but turned such distinctions upside down. Thanks to writing, the center of the world moved to his hometown so that perhaps Drogobych became the capital of the 20th century.
Schulz did not dwell in history. He lived apart from society, limiting his social contacts and gi... more Schulz did not dwell in history. He lived apart from society, limiting his social contacts and giving them ritual forms. Generations of Polish Schulz scholars have seen him predominantly as an artist, an exceptional, unique writer, a “master of the Polish language,” while the Jewish diaspora has been approaching him in a very different way, mainly as a “symbol of the Holocaust and the loss that it caused.” These conflicting points of view point to a gap between art (literature) and history (biography). Schulz brought both domains together. He attempted to find and adopt a form of living in history and art that would let him keep at least some independence from the former. He believed that in writing or drawing it was possible to start “from oneself.” His artistic and literary works reveal a continuous endeavor to escape from history, if only in art. Was that possible at all? Can an artist escape from history, resist the power of temporality?
From September 8, 1914 to December 16, 1915 – Refugee’s Chronicle is a description of several mon... more From September 8, 1914 to December 16, 1915 – Refugee’s Chronicle is a description of several months that Bruno Schulz and his family spent in Vienna, having left Drogobych because of military operations.
Bruno Schulz referred to Józef Piłsudski in three essays: “Powstają legendy” [How Legends Come in... more Bruno Schulz referred to Józef Piłsudski in three essays: “Powstają legendy” [How Legends Come into Being], “Wolność tragiczna” [Tragic Freedom], and “Pod Belwederem” [Near Belweder], but before they were written the author must have come across Piłsudski’s name on many occasions. Ogonowska chose out of them those which were, in her opinion, the most important as elements of the formative experience of Schulz’s generation and determined his attitude toward the Marshall. On the other hand, she demonstrates how Schulz could not fail to transgress the paradigm characteristic of Piłsudski’s official cult.
The author discusses hardly known drawings by Bruno Schulz, published in 1941 in the local Drogob... more The author discusses hardly known drawings by Bruno Schulz, published in 1941 in the local Drogobych paper Bolshevytska Pravda and provides some new information about his life under the first Soviet occupation. Focusing on a specific socialist-realist episode in Schulz’s artistic career, on the one hand Khomych writes about his survival techniques under the circumstances, while on the other she tries to find in the commissioned illustrations, mostly explicitly propagandist, some features of his style characteristic also of his earlier works.
There is a strong tradition of reading Schulz as an author who constantly (and intentionally) exp... more There is a strong tradition of reading Schulz as an author who constantly (and intentionally) expels death from his work. The author of this article, however, argues against such an opinion. On the contrary, his argument reveals those themes and figures, both in Schulz’s stories and drawings, that refer to the thanatic imagination, not literally though, but rather in a way described by the French philosopher and critic Michel Guiomar as an “obscure vicinity of death” evoked by the work of art. These are, for example, the elegiac-ironic convention of “Autumn” and “The Homecoming”, as well as the funeral mood and death symbols in “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” or in highly transgressive parts of “Spring”. The author also addresses questions concerning Schulz’s personal outlook on death and afterlife, which seems to link together the need for consolation and fascination with death. Although the paper was originally intended to be an entry for the future Schulz Dictionary, the official style of the opening section soon gives way to more general considerations on the thanatological discourse itself and Schulz’s idiosyncratic literary idiom.
After World War II, under the Marxist ideological pressure, the works of Bruno Schulz had no chan... more After World War II, under the Marxist ideological pressure, the works of Bruno Schulz had no chance to be included in Polish literature reading list at school. He was one of the writers referred to as “bourgeois,” escaping from reality to the world of fantasy. Following such premises, the author of the first textbook focusing on the literature of the interwar period accused Schulz of hating humanity and progress as well as too much stress on form. That tone became somewhat less aggressive in the next textbook, written by Ryszard Matuszewski, who continued the official line but on the other hand treated Schulz more apologetically.
The author focuses on the friendship of Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, discussed in the latt... more The author focuses on the friendship of Bruno Schulz and Witold Gombrowicz, discussed in the latter’s biography by Klementyna Suchanow. All the scattered traces of Schulz in Gombrowicz’s life have been brought together and supplemented with information and contexts which could not be taken in consideration by Suchanow due to her book’s limited length.
The main goal of the article is to demonstrate how Bruno Schulz’s biographical experience has bec... more The main goal of the article is to demonstrate how Bruno Schulz’s biographical experience has become a starting point for a revision of the structures of meaning in his fiction. Historical shocks let Schulz understand the variability of values in the world and realize the instability of the powers that ruled it. The article focuses on the correlation among categories such as peripherality, history, and interculturality in Schulz’s “Spring” and narrative points of view in the story. The author shows how historical, individual, fantastic, intercultural, and biological (micro- and macrocosmic) perspectives coexist in the text.
Devoted to the motif of hand in the literary and graphic works of Schulz, the article becomes a p... more Devoted to the motif of hand in the literary and graphic works of Schulz, the article becomes a pretext for a discussion on how Jakub, who is dead in his life, clings to the living Józef, who is supposed to reconstruct him – and on how Józef, having not fulfilled this peculiar testament, disappointed his father since he was unable to understand his actions and, in result, became only himself.
Records of the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies shed some new light on the “Black Thursday” of No... more Records of the Holocaust survivors’ testimonies shed some new light on the “Black Thursday” of November 19, 1942 and Bruno Schulz’s death. Most importantly, contrary to the well-known testimonies of Tadeusz Lubowiecki and Emil Górski, the Drogobych Jews claim that Schulz was not murdered by Karl Günther, but by another Gestapo officer, Friedrich Dengg.
A description of the schulzforum.pl website. The author briefly presents its most important featu... more A description of the schulzforum.pl website. The author briefly presents its most important features, both functional (home page, menu), and content-related (calendar, locations, persons, images, sources, paths, bibliography), to encourage the readers of Schulz/Forum to use the “Calendar of Life, Work, and Reception of Bruno Schulz.”
"Cinnamon Shops" (2014), directed by Robert Drobniuch, is a performance based on the technique of... more "Cinnamon Shops" (2014), directed by Robert Drobniuch, is a performance based on the technique of shadow theater. The stage is dark and empty – the actor playing Joseph lights his face with a powerful flashlight. In the back, one can see a paper curtain with moving phantom figures summoned by Joseph from his memory. His story is accompanied by live music (clarinet). The paper world created by Joseph consists of long past histories. The script, including passages from Schulz’s fiction and letters, focuses on two motifs: fascination with the Father and mythologization of childhood. The performance is not a complete, finished vision of Schulz’s universe, but a patchwork of fragments, glimpses, and images.
A short story, inspired by Jacek Dukaj’s story “Who Wrote Stanisław Lem?”, is a review of a non-e... more A short story, inspired by Jacek Dukaj’s story “Who Wrote Stanisław Lem?”, is a review of a non-existent study focused on the posthumous life of Bruno Schulz, reconstructed by computer scientists in the late 20th century.
The main motif of this issue of Schulz/Forum is Schulz’s presence in the world. The author himsel... more The main motif of this issue of Schulz/Forum is Schulz’s presence in the world. The author himself made an effort to become known outside the Polish language, however, only after his death artists, translators, critics, and researchers made him a world-famous writer. He became a property of everyone – with all its good and bad consequences.
The plot of the “Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass” resembles that of the mostfamous film... more The plot of the “Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass” resembles that of the mostfamous film of the German expressionism – The Cabinet of Doctor Caligari (1920) by Robert Wiene. In fact, similarities go beyond the plot and can be discovered also in theexpressionist manner of creating the presented world and characters, the mysterious atmosphere, and many important details discussed in the essay. Is it likely that Bruno Schulz saw the film about the demonic hypnotist and his medium, which inspired himto write the story about doctor Gotard’s sanatorium?
The publication of Cinnamon Shops precedes by just one year the Nobel Prize in medicine given to ... more The publication of Cinnamon Shops precedes by just one year the Nobel Prize in medicine given to Hans Sperman, who a few years later, in 1938, proposed a crucial experimentof removing from an unfertilized egg cell its nucleus and replacing it with the nucleus of a cell of an embryo. From our present point of view it is hard not to noticea prophetic bent of Schulz’s fiction even if Jacob’s experimental assumption does not quite correspond to the process of cloning as we know it. Also Father’s ornithological experiment is a key component of the narrative structure of the Cinnamon Shops asa kind of frame that consolidates particular stories. The mystical student of the matter does not renounce the discourse of science even though the order which he creates becomes more and more fantastic, while he suffers from the metaphysical and anthropological anxiety about the alien handicapped creatures.
Schulz’s fiction is methodologically as radical as writing on the boundary of the conscious and t... more Schulz’s fiction is methodologically as radical as writing on the boundary of the conscious and the unconscious can be. But does it make sense to talk about Schulz’s methodology? If the answer is yes, one may use for that purpose such concepts as metaphor, analogy, logos, oxymoron, and metamorphosis. They may help us discover the logic of Schulz’s stories, which is logic in a broad sense of the term, more the movement of the logos than a theory of making statements. The concepts mentioned above are not labels: they describe elegant and impressive ways of escaping from reason, taken with its help. All this can be etymologically motivated: the ancient Greek concept of logos refers to reason, speech, and discourse. It is ambiguous since the root verb légein means (1) toconnect, to bring together; (2) to select, to calculate.
Every year, The Public Domain Review website publishes a photomontage of artists and writers whos... more Every year, The Public Domain Review website publishes a photomontage of artists and writers whose works have just entered the public domain. The class of 2013 also includes Bruno Schulz.
Many theorists of literature and translation seem to suggest that the reception of BrunoSchulz in... more Many theorists of literature and translation seem to suggest that the reception of BrunoSchulz in English-speaking countries, including scholarly essays and works of art inspired by his works, has been based on a false version of his fiction provided by the translator, Celina Wieniewska. Is it true that the devoted readers of Wieniewska’s Schulz have been misled by a bad quality product? Or maybe the writer’s “signature” has notbeen completely erased in translation? The author does not agree in this respect with Michał Paweł Markowski and Brian Banks. Taking into consideration a broader context of Wieniewska’s translation and its long publishing history as well as the rules of reception,the author proves that in fact the “bad” translation has done for Schulz’s career abroad a lot of good.
The paper focuses on first scholarly articles devoted to Schulz’s works that were published in Am... more The paper focuses on first scholarly articles devoted to Schulz’s works that were published in American journals. Written by Henry Joseph Wegrocki in 1946, “Masochistic Motives in the Literary and Graphic Art of Bruno Schulz,” is a psychiatric analys of masochism and its traces in Schulz’s short stories and drawings. Olga Lukashevich’s “Bruno Schulz’s‘The Street of Crocodiles’. A Study in Creativity and Neurosis” (1968) suggests reading the first collection of short stories in the spirit of Otto Rank’s category of the artiste manqué. The last article, by Colleen M. Taylor, “Childhood Revisited: The Writings of Bruno Schulz” (1969), analyses the reasons why the writer leaves the real world behind to enter the world of childhood.
Critics noticed that the short stories by Bruno Schulz show many colors when the writer was still... more Critics noticed that the short stories by Bruno Schulz show many colors when the writer was still alive, and then such opinions has been frequently confirmed. Yet, in spite of the differences among them, so far critical commentaries have failed to address an important problem of prototypical changes of semantic values which may take place in reference to particular color terms. Next to their cultural and symbolic features, assignificant elements of the “verbal world picture,” they imply a whole set of phenomenological questions.
The price of first editions of Schulz’s two collections of stories published in his lifetime is l... more The price of first editions of Schulz’s two collections of stories published in his lifetime is likely to vary depending on whether the original cover and especially the book jacket, which is a bibliophile’s rarity, are preserved. The book jacket of Cinnamon Shops has never been reproduced. Moreover, nobody has ever published the text that appeared on its flap. Probably not written by Schulz himself, it presents such features of his stories as the deformation of the described reality or the unusual plasticity of words. In theirreviews written before the war, critics unanimously stated that Schulz was a product of self-promotion, which was characterized by excessive self-complacency and an element of a too intensive advertising campaign that was supposed to promote an unknown author. It appears, however, that the advertising campaign of Schulz’s debut was not at all vigorous, quite the contrary – the author himself paved the road to fame, overcoming the considerable opposition of critics.
How to write about the Quay Brothers, their films, drawings frozen in frames, the spaces formed i... more How to write about the Quay Brothers, their films, drawings frozen in frames, the spaces formed in theatrical, ballet, and opera settings? Should one explain, analyze, replace images with words? Is it fair to “blur the picture,” as it often happens with the works of Bruno Schulz read by critics? The essay does not provide answers to these questions,but reconstructs a certain course of events, their traces, and consequences. Since the author has known the Quay Brothers in person, she can search for phenomena hidden under the surface of the visible. She tells the reader about what she has learned from many conversations with the Brothers, enjoying an unusual symbiotic relationship with them, contributing to their films and a book.
The spectators of Leszek Mądzik’s theater are used to silence in his wordless spectacles. Still, ... more The spectators of Leszek Mądzik’s theater are used to silence in his wordless spectacles. Still, in his 2013 performance Mirror (Lustro), after forty years he returned to words. This time it is not just one sentence but a text read out loud offstage: a fragment of Bruno Schulz’s short story “Loneliness,” read by Jerzy Radziwiłowicz. Yet Mirror is not an adaptation of the story. Mądzik created his own, personal vision inspired by the motif of the mirror, which, as the title suggests, is a crucial component of the show.
It is not necessary to go to Drohobych to see it. Drohobych, the Drohobych of Schulz,is everywher... more It is not necessary to go to Drohobych to see it. Drohobych, the Drohobych of Schulz,is everywhere – just look at the world through Schulz’s eyes. For more than forty years, Bogdan Konopka has been taking photographs of the world from Schulz’s perspective. Yet, they are neither inspired by Schulz’s stories nor constitute their illustrative material. The photographer follows a parallel path that is indeed a path of his own. Paradoxically, Shulz’s stories become a guide to the world photographed by Konopka and make usunderstand his works better.
The article describes three operas inspired by the works of Bruno Schulz: 1976 Demiurgos by Juliu... more The article describes three operas inspired by the works of Bruno Schulz: 1976 Demiurgos by Juliusz Łuciuk, Mannequins by Zbigniew Rudziński, premiered in 1981, and Tree of Codes, written by the Australian composer Liza Lim, premiered in 2016 in Germany. The fate of two Polish operas inspired by Schulz varies considerably – there has been no stage premiere of Demiurgos yet, and Mannequins have won world fame. Demiurgos is a sonorous opera in which the composer, through the relationship of the father and his son, presents his own musical philosophy – the coexistence of tradition and modernity. Rudziński is fascinated with Schulz’s language, which he believes can be translated into a musical language and which has its musical potential. Lim’s opera, composed after reading Jonathan Safran Foer’s Tree of Codes, presents a mythical place beyond time, a fluid reality in which boundaries are unstable, and characters undefined and hybrid.
So far the first opera inspired by the work of Bruno Schulz, Demiurgos by Juliusz Łuciuk, has bee... more So far the first opera inspired by the work of Bruno Schulz, Demiurgos by Juliusz Łuciuk, has been performed only as a concert. Its libretto is based on the selected fragments of Schulz’s fiction which, in combination with music, acquires new meanings. As a result, apparently unrelated scenes contribute to a coherent dramatic narrative. Such a close relationship between the literary and the musical material calls for an analysis of relations of the language of literature and the asemantic idiom of music, which let the audience respond to the meanings imposed on music by fiction. As it turns out, the musical narration is the most important for the dramatic quality of the opera as a coherent narrative presented on stage. The music not only comments and illustrates, but also creates dramatic suspense. Thanks to various techniques of composing, a unique dialog between the word and the music results in a new narrative rooted in the reality of Schulz’s stories.
The Nishioka siblings are a team of Japanese comic book writers and artists. Recently,they have b... more The Nishioka siblings are a team of Japanese comic book writers and artists. Recently,they have been working on comic books adapting literary texts, including those by Franz Kafka and Bruno Schulz. Encouraged by Yuichi Konno, editor of the Japanese subcultural artistic periodical Yasō, in 2009, in a special number of Yasō, focusing on „Monsters & Freaks”, they published a cycle called “A Record of Metamorphosis. Inspired by Bruno Schulz” (Henshin no kiroku. Burūno Shurutsu ni yoru) and in the following number, on Hans Bellmer and dolls, a comic strip “Tailors’ Dummies” (Manekin ningyō),based on four stories by Schulz from Cinnamon Shops. The Nishioka siblings quoted particular sentences from those stories, translated by Yukio Kudo. The essay presents their work to the Polish reader.
The subversive, anti-colonial potential of Bruno Schulz’s fiction may be one of the causesof the ... more The subversive, anti-colonial potential of Bruno Schulz’s fiction may be one of the causesof the recent more intense interest in his work on the southern hemisphere. LatinAmerica has been rediscovering Schulz. After the Brazilian publication of HenrykS iewierski’s translation (Bruno Schulz, Ficção completa, Cosac Naify, São Paulo 2012) ,last year a new Spanish translation of Cinnamon Shops by Henryk Mittelstaedt was published in Argentina. In April 2016, Agnieszka Hudzik interviewed him in Buenos Aires.
Bruno Schulz is not particularly well known in Greece. For the first time, his short stories were... more Bruno Schulz is not particularly well known in Greece. For the first time, his short stories were translated into Greek in the early 1980s, when Spiros Tsaknias, a poet, essayist, literary critic, and translator from Athens, translated for the To Dentro literary monthly “The Street of Crocodiles” (1980) and “The Gale” (1982). Most likely, both texts were translated not from Polish, but from English. More translations of Schulzinto Greek appeared in the late 1980s, and since then many have been published. The problems faced by the Greek translators of Schulz deserve a separate study.
A small collection of Bruno Schulz’s stories has inspired many artistic facts, from fictionthroug... more A small collection of Bruno Schulz’s stories has inspired many artistic facts, from fictionthrough non-fiction, animated films, and photo projects. All of them refer to the past which is still important and significant for the audience. On the contrary, Foer has made a ruin in which the past shows the present as an index, a footnote. The artist’s intention is exemplified by every hole in the book. As the recipient keeps reading, the removed fragments makes him or her remember the past, while the process of forgetting is incessantly going on before his/her eyes. The abandoned, empty holes point at a loss and simultaneously make one remember that the Wailing Wall still brings to mind the Jerusalem Temple and its significance for Jews. What is the significance of Schulz for this experimental prose?
The RPG game. The textual paragraph game. The gamebook. The very names of these genres sugges... more The RPG game. The textual paragraph game. The gamebook. The very names of these genres suggest their literary origin. No wonder, since many of them, particularly the RPG games, derive from the classics of fantasy (Middle Earth based on Tolkien’s fiction), s-f (Cyberpunk 2020, largely inspired by the novels of William Gibson and Philip K.Dick) or gothic horror (The Call of Cthulhu based on H.P. Lovecraft). That select company has been recently joined by Bałwochwał by Mariusz Pisarski and Marcin Bylak, inspired by the short stories of Bruno Schulz.
A web portal about Jerzy Ficowski is not intended to be the complete and ultimate source of infor... more A web portal about Jerzy Ficowski is not intended to be the complete and ultimate source of information about his life and work. It is rather a sort of draft project witha continuously edited current developments section and many links to interpretations,other portals, films, interviews, radio broadcasts, and other multimedia.
The term “schulzoids,” coined by Igor Klech to identify the admirers of Schulz’s fiction and grap... more The term “schulzoids,” coined by Igor Klech to identify the admirers of Schulz’s fiction and graphic art, who travel to Drogobych in search of the genuine cinnamon shops, has been accepted by the Schulz scholars as referring to those writers who follow the topics, vision of the world, and, in particular, the style and idiom of Schulz; who have chosen him as their patron saint and partner of discussion. The authors of the present, eighth issue of "Schulz/Forum", approach the Schulzean inspirations in a similar perspective.
The author of the paper presents a short history of the idea of plagiarism and concludes that tod... more The author of the paper presents a short history of the idea of plagiarism and concludes that today it should be interpreted as a unique, alternative, but still legitimate manner of writing, in which what matters most is memory – that of the author and that of the reader. Such an approach was proposed by members of the OuLiPo group (François Le Lionnais, Marcel Bénabou, and Pierre Bayard) as plagiarism by anticipation. Its features, such as obvious similarity of texts, discord between the plagiarized fragment and the rest of the work and other works from the same period, secrecy, and temporal inversion, in the era of widespread reproduction provoke to think about copies in terms of anticipation or falsification of the missing works. Will the Messiah come from that direction?
The main goal of the paper is to analyze Schulzean transtextual and contextual relations in Polis... more The main goal of the paper is to analyze Schulzean transtextual and contextual relations in Polish literature of the 20th and 21st century. Using the theories of Gérard Genette, the author focuses mostly on hypertextual references (such as parody, pastiche, and pamphlet), intertextual references (such as allusion, verbal incrustation, and quotation), paratexts (such as dedication, motto, title, and subtitle), architextual references (such as generic affinity) to the literary and artistic works of Bruno Schulz in fiction, poetry, drama, and picture books. The results of the analysis show that a biographical context of Schulz’s oeuvre was the most frequently invoked by Polish writers. Schulz’s fiction has also been a valuable reservoir of stylistic and compositional patterns for Polish artists.
The paper is an intertextual analysis of the selected works of three Polish modernist authors: Ro... more The paper is an intertextual analysis of the selected works of three Polish modernist authors: Roman Jaworski, Stefan Grabiński, and Bruno Schulz. The world of their fiction – all of them in one or another world were related to Galicia, the south-eastern part of the prewar Poland – shows significant affinities even though none of them was a realist. Their poetics was predominantly oneiric and fantastic, yet what connects their short stories are representations of railroads, central squares of small Galician towns, and gardens. Schulz was no doubt the most outstanding of them all, yet it can be legitimately argued that, on the other hand, he belonged to a company that shared certain representational devices, rhetoric, and in some cases style.
The paper focuses on the relationship between Schulz and Witkacy. According to Jerzy Ficowski, St... more The paper focuses on the relationship between Schulz and Witkacy. According to Jerzy Ficowski, Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz “was the first great enthusiast of Schulz’s fiction.” Conducting an in-depth interview with Schulz and publishing a critical essay on his poetics, Witkacy turns out to be a precursor-reader who anticipated the writer’s future fame. How did Witkacy read Schulz’s "Cinnamon Shops" and what did the beginning of the two authors’ friendship look like? Here, a short poem, To Schulz, written by Witkiewicz on December 31, 1934 in reference to an illustration from "The Booke of Idolatry", is a pretext to consider the fascination with boundary situations, which was common to both writers.
Danilo Kiš claimed that his favorite works of other writers not only contributed to his own books... more Danilo Kiš claimed that his favorite works of other writers not only contributed to his own books as their “ancestors,” but also became parts of his spiritual DNA. The author makes an attempt at finding the “Schulzean gene” in The Family Circus and reveal the invisible presence of Schulz in other works by Kiš. Schulz has not been mentioned there, but he remains “present through his absence,” just like Kiš’s father, the protagonist of Hourglass, called “a novel about absence.”
The paper is an attempt to analyze the literary relationship between Beksiński and Schulz. From s... more The paper is an attempt to analyze the literary relationship between Beksiński and Schulz. From spring 1963 till February 1964 the future painter Zdzisław Beksiński was trying to write fiction. At that time, he was writing short stories, fragments, and sketches, observing discipline which was supposed to help him become a writer. Suffering from the “anxiety of influence,” he made withering comments on the margins of manuscripts. One particular story by Beksiński, "Mannequins" [Manekiny], is a kind of ekphrasis referring to Schulz’s fiction. A struggle with Schulz’s style was one of the most intriguing episodes in Beksiński’s artistic biography.
The author takes into consideration themes that are common in the work of two Central European wr... more The author takes into consideration themes that are common in the work of two Central European writers: Bruno Schulz and Max Blecher. The list of related topics includes the mythology of illness and death, a strong emphasis on the body/flesh, similar idiom, comparable concepts of “ecstatic identity,” the philosophy of representation based upon the artificiality of existence, masochism, irony, oneirism, common “spaces of myth,” and geopoetics. The main aim of the article is to place the writing of Schulz and Blecher in the context of Central European modernism and describe the work of these writers in terms of the so-called “critical modernity” (a term coined by Michał Paweł Markowski).
The paper is a comparative study of two poems by Jerzy Ficowski in memory of Bruno Schulz. Cliché... more The paper is a comparative study of two poems by Jerzy Ficowski in memory of Bruno Schulz. Cliché-verre [glass printing plate cast] is a special technique used by the author of "The Cinnamon Shops" in his "Booke of Idolatry", unprecedented in the history of Polish graphic art. As an interpretation formula, it enables to track the poetic creation of the figure of Schulz from a disportrait (a negative exposition of his strong absence) to an apocryph (an expressive reconstruction, and, more specifically, re-creation of the artist beginning his artistic journey, presented in a light of a biographical context). The paper discusses the main connections between the works of both authors, philosophical assumptions of the master implemented by Ficowski, analogous mythological constructions, and references to the Jewish Kabbalah focused on the main motif of the Book.
Ina Söllner was one of Schulz’s young sitters. As an adult person, she discovered in her autograp... more Ina Söllner was one of Schulz’s young sitters. As an adult person, she discovered in her autograph book a portrait of her mother, Ina, made by Schulz. The drawing called "The King of Frogs" [Żabi król] and a dedication referring to her mother sitting provoke the author to analyze her family connections with Schulz. Even though she does not remember her meeting with the artist, she reconstructs Schulz’s place in her biography and the circumstances under which they might have met.
The paper focuses on three cases of pastiche and parody of Schulz’s fiction, published in the Pol... more The paper focuses on three cases of pastiche and parody of Schulz’s fiction, published in the Polish press in the 1930s. The author realizes that success in emulating was conditioned not so much by the imitation of Schulz’s style and referring to the main motifs of his short stories, but, above all else, by the application of Schulz’s creative method which consists, paradoxically, in a parodistic, “panironic” approach to reality.
An "Unemployed Father from the Winter Aid", the story allegedly written by Bruno Schulz, in respo... more An "Unemployed Father from the Winter Aid", the story allegedly written by Bruno Schulz, in response to a call for help in organizing the Polish Winterhilfe (Winter Aid). Originally published in Sygnały, 1937, no. 25 (January 1), p. 15.
An autobiography of a “macabre idiot” (or the title “psychostenic”) from the moment of birth thro... more An autobiography of a “macabre idiot” (or the title “psychostenic”) from the moment of birth through the murder of a sadistic nanny, attaining power over the world, and abolishing the positions of mothers, fathers, and nannies, as well as cradles, and death at the birth of cockroaches. The story was originally published in "Apel", 1937, no. 13 (supplement to "Kurier Poranny", no. 351 (December 19), pp. 9–10.
A pastiche of Schulz’s work focusing on a vision of the Father’s particularly important mission. ... more A pastiche of Schulz’s work focusing on a vision of the Father’s particularly important mission. The old Jacob, wearing his coat and hat, sits on a chamber pot to defend “with all his waning power and the remains of the dying buttocks” the order of things against the “coup d’etat which is being prepared in the depth of the matter.” Adela makes the element get out of control so that, flooding the room, the apartment, and the whole town, it carries the Father away. The text was originally published in "Chochoł", 1938, no. 1 (February 6), p. 3.
The paper focuses on the letter from Stefan Napierski to Kazimierz Wyka of November 15, 1938. It ... more The paper focuses on the letter from Stefan Napierski to Kazimierz Wyka of November 15, 1938. It sheds light on the publication of the notorious "Double Review" of "The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass" written by the two critics in "Ateneum". The author recapitulates the reception of the Double Review, which is now considered the most vicious attack on Schulz’s fiction before World War II and a great mistake of Wyka and Napierski. The letter proves that even though the “notorious squib” was not intended by the editior-in-chief, it resulted from his policy and articulated the views of both critics on contemporary literature.
A letter from Stefan Napierski to Kazimierz Wyka, which reveals the background of the notorious "... more A letter from Stefan Napierski to Kazimierz Wyka, which reveals the background of the notorious "Double Review" of Bruno Schulz. Napierski explicitly articulates his reaction to "The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass" and, responding to Wyka’s approach to the same text, concludes that “both reviews complement each other perfectly.” Moreover, the letter offers an insight into the financial conditions of the literary critics’ work.
The text written as a result of applying the S+7 method to the name of Bruno Schulz. The method c... more The text written as a result of applying the S+7 method to the name of Bruno Schulz. The method consists in replacing every noun in an already existing text by another noun listed seven entries below in a selected dictionary. Its inventor was Jean Lescure, a member of the OuLiPo (Ouvroir de Littérature Potentielle) – a group of writers who based their literary works on a number of mathematical constraints.
Mariusz Kubielas presents the underlying principles of his photographic pictures based on the mot... more Mariusz Kubielas presents the underlying principles of his photographic pictures based on the motifs from Bruno Schulz’s fiction and graphic works. The inspiration by the artist from Drogobych is indeed challenging since it requires a combination of opposite approaches to the world: ludic and melancholic, collective and individualistic. Although Kubielas’s pictures have been misinterpreted by the media and received by some spectators as scandalizing, his cooperation with curators, the audience, the sitters, and other Schulz buffs allowed him to realize a project which connects art and existence by visualizing Schulz’s fiction, saving unused things and places from oblivion, and recognizing oneself as the writer’s disciple.
Wojciech Żmudziński’s novel is another story of the lost manuscripts by Bruno Schulz. The author ... more Wojciech Żmudziński’s novel is another story of the lost manuscripts by Bruno Schulz. The author presents a surreal vision of the world in which the found "Messiah" is a guide for the perplexed and a prophecy about the coming Savior. Żmudziński adopted a number of Schulzean motifs, paraphrased fragments of "The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass", and created a new version of Schulz’s biography. Unfortunately, all those devices are just meaningless props and a backstage which the author needs to express his own worldview, thus presenting a false image of Schulz and his work.
The editorial opens with a firm statement that a single masochism does not exist, which can be pr... more The editorial opens with a firm statement that a single masochism does not exist, which can be proved by theories and works of such psychiatrists and philosophers as Freud, Reik, Lacan or Deleuze. It also presents how the masochism of Bruno Schulz has so far been discussed and interpreted by distinguished Schulzologists and underlines that a new reading of his works as well as testimonies made by the “hidden witnesses” of writer’s life is needed.
Masochizm Schulza i próg wstydu w słowie, Mar 1, 2016
Masochism is deeply irrational: the masochistic subject can attain sexual bliss only when s/he ha... more Masochism is deeply irrational: the masochistic subject can attain sexual bliss only when s/he has been tormented and humiliated. The essay reconstructs the sociohistorical context in which reflection on masochism has been developing. Drawing on psychoanalysis (Freud, Lacan, Žižek), the author makes a distinction between Schulz’s private masochism and that which is demonstrated in his fiction and graphic works. All the variants of Schulz’s masochism reflect the problems of Polish Jews with assimilation, parodic references to courtly love (fin’ amors), and those elements of the writer’s biography which foreground shame that he felt as he was writing.
The text consists of seven fragments which in different ways refer to a central category of separ... more The text consists of seven fragments which in different ways refer to a central category of separation; in particular to masochism, one of its manifestations. First, however, separation reveals itself in an imaginary act of self-castration (in a dream), described by Schulz in a letter. This act locates the writer beyond the sexes, symbolically excludes him from biological support of the stream of life and directs to art. Schulz considered that irreversible passage from biological reproduction to artistic creation a grave sin. The masochistic separation became a topic of many graphic works and drawings in which the artist, as an icon of himself, paid homage to “la belle dame sans merci.” His literary works are quite different – Schulz’s fiction is marked by shame. The present essay demonstrates how the literary discourse of the "Cinnamon Shops" generates meaningful gaps. Allusions and silence, all kinds of narrative suspension, were supplemented by Schulz with pictorial representations, according to a principle that what cannot be written about, may be drawn. Many of his graphic works are overt manifestoes of masochism. In the Booke of Idolatry these are emblematic representations, projections of the artist’s own phantasms, based on the visual idiom of the times, while in the compulsive drawings from the 1930s the boundary between fantasy and reality blurs. Schulz’s artistic operations are ostentatious. He never used any disguise, reporting on himself. He was a masochist, but what did it mean? Another fragment is an attempt to find out what it meant to be a masochist in Schulz’s times, and how he defined himself in that context, particularly in an explicit statement made in a letter to a certain psychiatrist: “Creatively, I express this perversion in its loftiest, philosophically interpreted form as a foundation determining the total Weltanschauung of an individual in all its ramifications.” The final fragment presents for the most part some hitherto unknown documents of Schulz’s life, such as a police certificate of decency, men’s second-hand reports on his masochism, and memories of women with whom the writer held various kinds of liaisons.
Usually, Schulz’s masochism has been considered as an obvious component of his life and work. Suc... more Usually, Schulz’s masochism has been considered as an obvious component of his life and work. Such a diagnosis, triggering a series of conventional associations, ignores whatever the writer might have actually experienced in connection with sex, and concentrates on the deficit of masculinity defined in a conservative way, which transforms potential transgression into its opposite – an algorithm. Moreover, it identifies complex etiology of masochism with docility in contacts with women. But what if Schulz was just playing a game of masochism or even more: what if he used it as a disguise to conceal a much more serious disorder of which he was not fully aware?
Masochizm Schulza w ujęciu Ficowskiego, Mar 1, 2016
The author examines Jerzy Ficowski’s approach to Schulzian masochism. Examining few traces of Sch... more The author examines Jerzy Ficowski’s approach to Schulzian masochism. Examining few traces of Schulz’s sexuality in Ficowski’s study "Regions of the Great Heresy", he argues that his biographical portrait presents the writer as an eternal child, innocent and unspoiled by the dirty universe of sex. In Ficowski’s later studies dealing with Schulz’s masochism, the key issue is a connection of art and sexuality since the biographer claims that masochism is the deep, dark root of Schulz’s creative power.
Pierwszy polski przekład obszernych fragmentów klasycznego podręcznika Richarda von Krafft-Ebinga... more Pierwszy polski przekład obszernych fragmentów klasycznego podręcznika Richarda von Krafft-Ebinga do seksuologii.
Gilles Deleuze believed that Sacher-Masoch had a unique role to play. He recognized Sacher-Masoch... more Gilles Deleuze believed that Sacher-Masoch had a unique role to play. He recognized Sacher-Masoch as a great writer while masochism was for him a particularly important psychosocial feature of modernity – much more complex than a simple opposite of sadism. Reenacting and exposing his symbolic castration, the masochist subverts the traditional version of cultural identity since he shows that it comes from the Other and the Other gives it meaning. The essay places Deleuze reading Sacher-Masoch in the context of the literature of transgression and the twentieth-century changes in the understanding of masochism and human sexuality in general.
In „Strzępy wspomnień. Przyczynek do biografii zewnętrznej Brunona Schulza”, Regina Silberner wri... more In „Strzępy wspomnień. Przyczynek do biografii zewnętrznej Brunona Schulza”, Regina Silberner writes that the Polish-Jewish fiction writer Bruno Schulz exchanged correspondence with some psychiatrist from New York. The paper presents the latest findings concerning the life and work of Doctor Henry Joseph Wegrocki, the addressee of Schulz’s letter(s).
Motywy masochistyczne w prozie i rysunkach Brunona Schulza, Mar 1, 2016
The article by Doctor Henry Joseph Wegrocki was published for the first time in „Psychoanalytic R... more The article by Doctor Henry Joseph Wegrocki was published for the first time in „Psychoanalytic Review” in 1946. It is a psychiatric analysis of masochistic motives that are present in the short stories and drawings by Bruno Schulz. In the text, one can discover a rough pencil sketch of a droshky drawn especially for Wegrocki and an excerpt from Schulz’s letter, in which he writes explanatory comments upon his creativeness and perversion. The paper presents the Polish translation of the text.
Trzy listy Tadeusza Lubowieckiego (Izydora Friedmana) do Jerzego Ficowskiego z 1948 roku, Mar 1, 2016
Friedman, who was Schulz’s companion in his last days and a witness of his death, composes a pers... more Friedman, who was Schulz’s companion in his last days and a witness of his death, composes a personal portrait of his friend in which he clearly underlines the masochistic sphere of writer’s sexuality.
Ukryci świadkowie, czyli co pozostało (w książce Ficowskiego i w realnym świecie) po dwóch kolegach Brunona Schulza, Mar 1, 2016
Among the earliest witnesses of Bruno Schulz’s life known by Jerzy Ficowski were two lawyers from... more Among the earliest witnesses of Bruno Schulz’s life known by Jerzy Ficowski were two lawyers from Drohobych, Michał Chajes and Izydor Friedman (after the war Tadeusz Lubowiecki). Although they played a particularly large role in the early formation of knowledge about Schulz and gave a detailed characteristic of the writer, they were not mentioned by Jerzy Ficowski in his "Regions of the Great Heresy" and remained hidden witnesses. The reason lies deep in the realm of genre conventions of "Regions", conditioned by literary culture of Ficowski who, formed in the circle of the nineteenth-century novels, great realism and vie romancée, omitted quotes and references to other people’s testimonies and, therefore, eliminated the possibility of determining facts.
Nieletnia muza portrecisty Brunona Schulza. O fotografii Ireny Kejlinówny, Mar 1, 2016
The article focuses on the photography of eleven-year-old Irena Kejlinówna taken in 1921. Living ... more The article focuses on the photography of eleven-year-old Irena Kejlinówna taken in 1921. Living in Warsaw with her parents, Cecylia and Aleksander, the girl would meet Bruno Schulz in August 1922 during holidays that she spent with her mother in a spa resort in Kudowa (located then in Germany).
The article is a series of short notes about intertextual mysteries in Bruno Schulz’s literary wo... more The article is a series of short notes about intertextual mysteries in Bruno Schulz’s literary works. What is the origin of the enigmatic title "Street of Crocodiles"? Who exactly is the sceptic from Schulz’s essay on Aldous Huxley’s "Music at Night" – Thomas Huxley or maybe Henri Bouchet-Doumenq? Who is the inspiration for Schulz’s woman represented in his graphics – Manet or Edmond Bazire? Who did Stanisław Weingarten love except Schulz? Revelations presented by the authors are rather fragmentary, yet they can be a good starting point for developing them into longer stories.
In 1913, the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich published two-volume work, "Die Weiberherrs... more In 1913, the Albert Langen publishing house in Munich published two-volume work, "Die Weiberherrschaft in der Geschichte der Menschheit" (The Rule of Women in the History of Mankind). Compiling 665 reproductions of drawings, prints and paintings from the collection of Eduard Fuchs, this edition shows how the image of female domination and male submission was widespread in Europe from the Renaissance to the early 20th century. Due to some visual parallels, one can assume that Schulz, endowed with good visual memory, freely adapted graphic illustrations created by other authors in his own compositions, especially in those presented in "The Book of Idolatry". Perhaps he also drew inspiration from Fuchs’s famous collection?
“Schulz? I’ve written all about him,” Artur Sandauer allegedly declared in the 1970s.
Still, the ... more “Schulz? I’ve written all about him,” Artur Sandauer allegedly declared in the 1970s. Still, the critic did not put Schulz under lock and key, and no one else did later. Although the writer’s work has provoked hundreds of comments and interpretations, no one has found a key to open all the doors in his world, since he is always “elsewhere,” escaping his exegetes. That, however, should not discourage us from making new (private, idiosyncratic, and risky) attempts at interpretation. The reader will find some in the present issue. But there is also another way full of adventures – that of searches all over the world and archival research, which also promises success. The present issue includes an unpublished essay by Schulz on the works of the Jewish artist Maurycy (Ephraim Moses) Lilien, and a short review of an exhibition of Feliks Lachowicz. Besides, Schulz’s unknown pencil sketch, found on the underside of his well-knownsketch of a bookplate for Ella and Jakub Schulz, has been presented, as well as Schulz-the typographer. The introduction concludes with an appeal to visit Jerzy Ficowski’s archive. It certainly contains many unexplored traces and possibly a key to some door to Schulz’s world.
The Universal Schulz is Schulz whose work makes the reader face many ambivalences both as regards... more The Universal Schulz is Schulz whose work makes the reader face many ambivalences both as regards personal and artistic choices made by the writer. The author identifies, puts in order, and places in a wide context those ambivalences which so far have proved most inspiring for interpreting Schulz’s stories, letters, and essays. At first the same ambivalences created problems encountered by the early critical reception of his works. The most difficult was not just his unique fiction, but also its idiom. In the 1930 and 1940s Schulz’s language could be read as aberration or anachronism, which meant that to attract more readers it had to come at least a little closer to standard Polish. Since, however, the stories could not change, what had to were the standards defining “acceptable” prose. The style of Polish prose gradually approached Schulz’s idiom by becoming more open to stylistic idiosyncrasy and experiment.
The main idea of the present essay is considering Bruno Schulz’s own illustrations to his stories... more The main idea of the present essay is considering Bruno Schulz’s own illustrations to his stories as starting points for reconstruction of alternative plots. Schulz was an artist who used his drawings as stimuli to develop the plots and ideas of his narrative texts. Many drawings no doubt refer to a particular story, but they show a reality that is quite different from its details. Referring mainly to “Spring,” the author makes an attempt to describe and analyze such differences, trying to reconstruct whatever Schulz himself rejected in the process of writing.
In The "Cinnamon Shops" reader can find both echoes of the classic images of faces, referring to ... more In The "Cinnamon Shops" reader can find both echoes of the classic images of faces, referring to the tradition of physiognomy and tradition of portrait painting, as well as images of faces belonging to the species of antiportrait, scuffing the boundary between inside and outside. They can be treated as a treatments designed for breaking mimesis, as well as questioning the possibility of expression. Without the division on the interior and the exterior can not be said about extracting internal outside – what is after all the essence of expression. Sometimes treatments developed by Schulz can be perceived as a game of interpenetrating appearances, another time – as a sense of omnipresence of meaning.
There is only one published piece of evidence that Bruno Schulz read Taine: a note that he made i... more There is only one published piece of evidence that Bruno Schulz read Taine: a note that he made in reference to Taine’s "Philosophy of Art" (pages 51-71 of volume II of the Polish 1911 Lviv edition). The note has been discovered almost miraculously and briefly commented on by Jerzy Jarzębski in 1995. In the present essay, the author approaches the note once more, reading it together with Taine’s book and treating Schulz’s text as an intellectual map to reconstruct the actual moment of the writer’s reading. It seems that there is some mental kinship between the French philosopher and the Polish writer: common fascination with ancient Greece and skepticism about the prospects of modern European civilization. Both compared the ancient and modern ideas of art and ways of everyday life, as well as pagan and post-Christian beliefs about death and afterlife.
In his stories, Bruno Schulz told the history of animals or, rather, animalized humans or humaniz... more In his stories, Bruno Schulz told the history of animals or, rather, animalized humans or humanized animals. He multiplied similarities and differences, inquiring about the nature of their origin. His artistic imagination was replete with flies, cockroaches, horses, dogs, birds, etc. The accumulation of animal and animal-like characters is one of Schulz’s characteristic methods of creation. It is a method common for writers who appreciate independence and carefully reflect on detail in their writing. In such a context, the author finds similarities between Schulz’s and Rainer Maria Rilke’s work. In “Dodo", she identifies rhetorical devices that are typical for Schulz’s fiction, e.g., repetitions and animal similes. Those devices make the truth about relations between the characters quite complex – the “particularly privileged” Dodo of an extinct flightless species and the “heavy madman” Hieronim, a tawny owl.
Each and every biography is a challenge, but the biography of Bruno Schulz is a peculiar one. Fir... more Each and every biography is a challenge, but the biography of Bruno Schulz is a peculiar one. First of all because it is not easily accessible, hidden – just like its protagonist who concealed himself behind effigies produced to satisfy the needs of the others. The other reason is that history (Holocaust, Stalinism) deprived the writer of its major part.
Bruno Schulz’s essay on Ephraim Moses Lilien, a Jewish artist born in Drogobych, was published se... more Bruno Schulz’s essay on Ephraim Moses Lilien, a Jewish artist born in Drogobych, was published serially in 1937-1938 in "Przegląd Podkarpacia". Not only is it the only Schulz’s text on plastic arts, but also his only explicit statement on Jewish matters. In Schulz’s opinion, Lilien stimulated his interest in plastic arts and played an important role as a mythmaker of contemporary Zionism.
Although at first sight it is difficult to find clear connections between their art, in his
essay... more Although at first sight it is difficult to find clear connections between their art, in his essay Schulz expresses his admiration for Lilien’s work and prompts the reader how their respective imaginary worlds come together. The main reason for Schulz’s admiration is the myth of childhood, which the writer cherished so much. Besides, he perceived Lilien as an artist who in his works expressed important currents in the political thought of his times and changes in the collective identity of Jews creating their own state in the land of Israel after centuries of living in diaspora. Thus Lilien is a spokesman of his people, a kind of medium through which the spirit of the age and history can express itself. He is also a great mythmaker.
A review of an exhibition of the Drogobych artist, Feliks Lachowicz, published in
"Przegląd Podka... more A review of an exhibition of the Drogobych artist, Feliks Lachowicz, published in "Przegląd Podkarpacia". Schulz perceived in the works of Lachowicz, who made pictures referring to his hometown’s history, an unprecedented chronicle project, and believed that the artist had a talent of medieval illustrators. The text concludes with an appeal to the authorities to purchase Lachowicz’s works for the future municipal gallery housing the achievements of local artists.
Amateur painter, draughtsman, and sculptor, born in Drogobych. Fought in World War I, as a Russia... more Amateur painter, draughtsman, and sculptor, born in Drogobych. Fought in World War I, as a Russian POW sent to Siberia. Having returned to Poland, worked at “Galicja” refinery in Drogobych. In 1940, arrested by the NKVD and sentenced to 5 years in concentration camp. The circumstances of his death remain unknown. His most important works are two series of graphics showing his hometown: "History of the Town of Drogobych – For the Glory of Motherland and Hope of the Drogobych Burghers" (1933) and "Urycz in Legends. 14 Miniatures" (1938). Lachowicz created in his works a mythology of the town according to his own vision of the past. His art does not reach for the new, but returns to history to connect to the mystery of the bygone and the primeval. At this point, his and Schulz’s artistic paths converge.
The experts and admirers of Schulz’s plastic art have long known about his design of a bookplate ... more The experts and admirers of Schulz’s plastic art have long known about his design of a bookplate of Ella and Jakub Schulz, the children of Izydor, Schulz’s elder brother, made probably in 1930. A sheet of paper with a pencil sketch was glued to carton most likely by Schulz himself and then framed. In such a form, hiding the reverse, it was preserved for several decades. In 2015 it became an object of auction. During examination, the sheet was separated from its original background and it turned out that on the reverse there are some unknown sketches by Schulz. One of them is a portrait of the writer’s mother, the other shows a homage of an elderly man to a young woman. Many known drawings by the writer have been made on sheets where both the reverse and the obverse have been used, which implies that, first, all the undersides of Schulz’s works must be carefully examined since they may hide his works that are still unknown, and second, that Schulz’s pencil sketches must be treated as material wholes. Fragments of his works cannot be reproduced separately from their visual milieu. It is also undesirable to frame and publish his drawings in isolation, according to conventional genre categories, such as “portrait,” “self-portrait” or “nude.” Their publication should make a documentary foundation which will allow us to reveal the principles of a mysterious coexistence of disparate motifs, optical perspectives, and emotional tonalities.
Schulz’s occasional graphic designs which made the margin of his art included also a vignette of ... more Schulz’s occasional graphic designs which made the margin of his art included also a vignette of the "Przegląd Podkarpacia", drawn in 1937 and used for the first time in the periodical’s 70th number, dated October 17. Before that the vignette had been composed of accidentally chosen type letters available at the printer’s. Schulz preferred a modern type but he did not use the printer’s resources. His vignette was an ink drawing, which guaranteed him maximum liberty. The artist combined a picture of an oil well and a refinery with a letter logo. The first letter “P” was of a double size so that it belonged to both title words placed one under the other. The letters was close enough in style to art deco, yet the whole vignette did not follow any particular schema. The last number of the "Przegląd Podkarpacia" with Schulz’s vignette was published on July 23, 1939.
Criticizing the available translations of Bruno Schulz’s works into French, the author explains w... more Criticizing the available translations of Bruno Schulz’s works into French, the author explains why still another translation was necessary. Several years after writing a play about Schulz’s life and work ("Bruno or, A Great Heresy") van Crugten decided to submit for publication by L’Âge d’Homme a new translation of Schulz’s stories. Schulz has been translated into so many languages that he became a literary superstar, which – paradoxically – resulted in a number of controversial translating strategies. Sometimes four or five translators were working on a single volume so that the effect of their efforts could not be coherent. The French reader knows Schulz’s texts in translations which are only approximate. For forty or fifty years, translators have been making the same mistakes, simplifying and omitting difficult passages.
In September 2012, Pedagogical University in Drogobych, Ukraine, hosted 5th
International Bruno S... more In September 2012, Pedagogical University in Drogobych, Ukraine, hosted 5th International Bruno Schulz Festival. The Festival’s topic was “Bruno Schulz as Philosopher and Literary Theorist.” In 2014, thanks to financial support of the Polish Institute in Kyiv, a four-language volume was published, including all the academic papers delivered during the festival conference. The opening section of the collection includes four statements by special guests: the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik, the noted Israeli fiction writer David Grossman, the Ukrainian writer Taras Prokhasko, and the Russian writer Victor Yerofeev. The remaining sections focus on new interpretations of Schulz’s works, various comparative contexts, and the history of the town of Drogobych, where Schulz was born and finally killed by the Nazis.
This is a report from a visit to the exhibition, Mannequin d’artiste, mannequin fétiche, presente... more This is a report from a visit to the exhibition, Mannequin d’artiste, mannequin fétiche, presented at the Paris Musée Bourdelle in April 1-July 12 2015. In the first place, the show was intended to be a story about the mannequin in the history of artistic practices. In such a context, the mannequin turns out to have been a great enemy of two currents: first, romanticism, which in his conception of creative genius rejected the idea of representing reality, and second, all the anti-mimetic tendencies in modern art in which the question of adequate representation of the body can only be a negative point of reference. That double rejection of the mannequin was compensated by its position within realism, for which it remained indispensable, and surrealism, for which the mannequin (particularly the tailor’s dummy) was a value in its own right: aesthetic, oneiric, philosophical, and erotic (see the most famous works of de Chirico and Bellmer).
"Emeryty" is an interdisciplinary continuation of an earlier project by Kaszuba-Dębska – "Heels" ... more "Emeryty" is an interdisciplinary continuation of an earlier project by Kaszuba-Dębska – "Heels" – and the reference to the Kantor’s Theatre Informel, where the actor is aligned with the object and subjected to chance. Kantor’s actors are “bags, people in the cabinet conformed to the clothes hung there, deprived of their own free will, chattering their own nonsense”. Emeryt is an actor-subject, the alter ego of a specific person related to the environment Kantor, mainly artists gathered around Cracow Group, or a person living today. In this way, a new community of dummies, combined with the same idea of passing, is forming installation in urban space. Through QR codes placed on tags sewn into mannequins, the viewer interacts not only with the real object of art, but by scanning the code can also see the video, which recognizes real alter ego of the dummy.
The editorial articulates a suspicion that had Schulz lived long enough, possibly even until toda... more The editorial articulates a suspicion that had Schulz lived long enough, possibly even until today, he would have been greatly surprised by his growing fame abroad, like perhaps many other twentieth-century schlemiel-heroes of literature and the humanities, such as Kafka, de Saussure, Propp or Bakhtin. The present number of "Schulz/Forum" is then introduced as a collective testimony of his popularity outside the Polish language.
Usually Schulz’s fiction is not interpreted with reference to the Holocaust and massive ethnic cl... more Usually Schulz’s fiction is not interpreted with reference to the Holocaust and massive ethnic cleansing in East-Central Europe during World War II. The present paper is rooted in a belief that some of his later stories can actually be treated as “prophetic" when placed in a sequence consisting of the works by Schulz and other Polish writers from Galicia: Ida Fink, a Holocaust survivor, Zygmunt Haupt, an émigré in the United States, and Leopold Buczkowski, after the war in Poland. Schulz’s followers, at least in a chronological sense, seem to have been inspired by the metaphorical energy of his fiction, though in the stories by Fink and Haupt, as well as the early novels by Buczkowski, the Schulzean metaphor is replaced by metonymy – a figure of death, and allegory – in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a post mortem mask of history stigmatized by violence. Arguably, Fink, Haupt, and Buczkowski recorded in their fiction the fulfillment of Schulz’s catastrophic prophecy.
The paper is an attempt to analyze Schulz’s fiction in terms of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s idea of m... more The paper is an attempt to analyze Schulz’s fiction in terms of Johann Jakob Bachofen’s idea of matriarchy. Particular emphasis has been put on “August,” the opening story of "Cinnamon Shops". In “August,” which begins his “spiritual autobiography,” Schulz created a world whose center is constituted by three women, portrayed as if they had been archaic deities. By the same token, the beginning of Schulz’s private mythology seems parallel to the archaic core of the socio-religious order of Europe, i.e. matriarchy.
Schulz was particularly predisposed to intertextuality, since his hometown was genuinely multilin... more Schulz was particularly predisposed to intertextuality, since his hometown was genuinely multilingual, with Polish and Yiddish as dominants. German, as the official language of the Austro-Hungarian administration and that of Lessing, Moses Mendelssohn, Goethe, Schiller, and Heine, was especially attractive to the educated Eastern European Jews, which applied also to Schulz’s mother who taught him Goethe’s ballad, “The Erlking.” On the other hand, such centers of modernism as Vienna, Lviv, Cracow, and Warsaw, which affected the young Schulz in his student years, were also francophilic so that the works of Flaubert, Baudelaire, Zola, Proust, Huysmans, Claudel, and Gide, as well as the philosophical writings of Bergson, must have influenced him, too.
The French critic reveals a whole extensive network of affinities which connect Schulz’s oneiric ... more The French critic reveals a whole extensive network of affinities which connect Schulz’s oneiric fiction with that of Alfred Kubin, E.T.A. Hoffmann, Max Blecher, and – perhaps not surprisingly – Franz Kafka. Selecting from the world of Schulz three specific motifs: the city, the mannequin, and the metaphysical machine, he demonstrates that the writer from Drogobych joined, for the most part unawares, the mainstream of European modernism both in its literary and artistic varieties, including the self-reflexive art of Marcel Duchamp.
The texts referring to Bruno Schulz can be divided into two groups: first, those featuring a prot... more The texts referring to Bruno Schulz can be divided into two groups: first, those featuring a protagonist of that name, connected with the events from the writer’s life, and second, those in which there reader can recognize some motifs from his fiction or the Schulzean model of the fictional world. The former includes works by the Serbian fiction writers Jovic Acin and Mikhailo Pantic and the Croatian poet Damir Sodan, the latter those by the Croatian poets Ivan Samia and Delimir Resicki, and the Serbian poet Dragan Boskovic. The Serbian writer’s Mirko Demic’s novel, "Amber, Honey, and Sorb", belongs to both groups. In the works of those authors one can find descriptions of Schulz’s death and the following metamorphoses, similar to those experienced by the characters from his short stories. Few writers have been interested in Schulz’s life before World War II– his legend came into being at the moment of his death. Tatarenko presents and explains the creative responses to Schulz’s oeuvre and his bio- and necrography by the authors from the former Yugoslavia.
When one compares the lots of two great European authors of the first half of the 20th century – ... more When one compares the lots of two great European authors of the first half of the 20th century – the German poet Gottfried Benn (1886–1956) and the Polish-Jewish fiction writer Bruno Schulz (1892–1942) – at first sight their lives seem quite different and incomparable. Still, it is enough to reach under the surface of the so-called historical facts to realize that in some respects the two writers are indeed close to each other. As regards politics and history, a common denominator of their biographies was Nazism as an emanation of pure evil from provincial East-Central Europe, and its belief that human nature may be improved which the historical process makes it possible to develop great geopolitical systems, even at the cost of suspending all ethical principles. A starting point for that daemonic parochial activism is mostly the “provincial spirit of utopia” or, to be precise, its irresistible “realistic nihilism,” to borrow a term coined by the Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinovic.
In the age of technological reproductibility the original of "The Booke of Idolatry" has disappea... more In the age of technological reproductibility the original of "The Booke of Idolatry" has disappeared under more and more replicas. We have been talking and writing about reproductions which are more and more distant from the original: reflections, reflexes, copies, representations, and effigies. Until today, the whole cycle of Schulz’s cliché-verres has not been published in an adequate form – there are only more successful reproductions of particular graphics. At any rate, the identity of The Booke has always been precarious and ambiguous. It has always been a work in motion – flickering, unstable, composed in various ways since particular graphics have appeared in different authorial configurations (files) each of which lead its own, independent life. Thus "The Booke of Idolatry" has its multiple history and no “hard” ontology. As a whole, it is not available.
For the last several decades Schulz’s oeuvre has been a kind of “work in progress.” Although he h... more For the last several decades Schulz’s oeuvre has been a kind of “work in progress.” Although he has been long dead, more and more of his texts, drawings, and paintings seem to come down to us from the hereafter – both known from more or less credible testimonies, and quite unexpected and never before acknowledged. Certainly the most impressive findings of the recent years are Schulz’s frescoes from Landau’s villa in Drogobych, discovered by the German filmmaker, Benjamin Geissler, in 2001 and then partly removed to Israel to cause an international scandal. As it turns out, however, to find new traces of Schulz’s life and work one does not have to penetrate into inaccessible archives or count on a miracle. In the Poznań newspaper "Nowy Kurier", an interview with Schulz and a review of his "Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass" have been just found, both never reprinted or commented upon. The present paper changes this state of affairs.
Joanna Sass: Schulzowska party tura. O niemieckich przekładach opowiadań Bruno Schulz podejmował... more Joanna Sass: Schulzowska party tura. O niemieckich przekładach opowiadań Bruno Schulz podejmował liczne, aczkolwiek bezskuteczne starania o wydanie Sklepów cynamonowych poza granicami kraju. Niestabilna sytuacja polityczna lat trzydziestych nie sprzyjała przedsięwzięciom tego typu, sprawy nie ułatwiał też oryginalny styl poetyckiej prozy. Nie pomogło ani przygotowane po niemiecku exposé, ani zaangażowanie wyznawców talentu pisarza. Nie powiodły się próby opublikowania opowiadań we Włoszech i we Francji. W kraju Mussoliniego wydawcy, wątpiąc w sukces handlowy książki, nie podjęli nawet ryzyka przekładu na podstawie oryginału, a przetłumaczone na francuski opowiadanie Sierpień nie zostało opublikowane 1. Nie inaczej wyglądała sytuacja z translacjami prozy na język niemiecki. Mieszkający w Wiedniu adwokat dr Mendel Neugrölsch prawdopodobnie podjąłby się przekładu na prośbę Schulza, gdyby w roku 1938 nie trafił do obozu koncentracyjnego w Dachau 2. Opowiadania w tłumaczeniu Doroty Wygard nie spotkały się zaś z uznaniem cenionego przez drohobyckiego twórcę Josepha Rotha 3. Austriacki pisarz zdołał wprawdzie przekonać do dal-szych tłumaczeń Saula Fryszmana, jednak pomysł nie został zrealizowany. Fryszman emigruje wkrótce do Palestyny, zarzucając pracę nad przekładem, 1 Zob. List Georga Pinettego do Schulza, w: B. Schulz, Księga listów, wybrał i przygotował do druku J. Ficowski, Gdańsk 2002, s. 281. 2 Zob. J. Ficowski, Regiony wielkiej herezji i okolice. Bruno Schulz i jego mitologia, Sejny 2002, s. 159. 3 Ibidem, s. 162.
Cynthia Ozick’s 1987 novel, "The Messiah of Stockholm", has been reviewed all over the world. In ... more Cynthia Ozick’s 1987 novel, "The Messiah of Stockholm", has been reviewed all over the world. In the United States, where Ozick is considered a major writer, it has been received very well, while in Europe it has been acknowledged mainly thanks to its connection to Bruno Schulz. It was a clever marketing move, a part of Ozick’s creative writing strategy. Even though her novel has provoked many objections (poor content and form, lack of authenticity, empty generalizing), it has a certain charm which is quite difficult to resist. The present review is an attempt to shed some light on that specific feature of Ozick’s writing.
Edward Mielniczek’s novel, as unattractive in many respects as it is, surprises the reader with B... more Edward Mielniczek’s novel, as unattractive in many respects as it is, surprises the reader with Bruno Schulz as its protagonist. The author presents the last weeks of Schulz’s life, stressing no so much his tragic lot, but his efforts to keep his personal identity under the Nazi occupation. The narration, rooted in the tradition of a psychological thriller, denies the received portrayal of Schulz and his vicissitudes as material for “reflective” or “philosophical” discourses. In spite of its many weaknesses – simplistic language, scanty descriptions, and unnatural dialogs – Mielniczek’s forgotten deserves to be reintroduced among texts focusing on the writer from Drogobych.
The fourth issue of “Schulz/Forum” is an opportunity to draw conclusions, but also to correct the... more The fourth issue of “Schulz/Forum” is an opportunity to draw conclusions, but also to correct the originally chosen approach. Its dominant are Jewish motifs in Schulz’s life and fiction. Besides, it contains a new rubric, “Horizon of Reading.” The future numbers will focus not so much on Schulz himself, but on various problems related to his oeuvre. We are planning to publish special thematic issues on Schulz’s women, his literary and artistic followers, the literature of Galicia, masochism, and Schulz’s manuscripts. Besides, “Schulz/Forum Library” and an annotated edition of Schulz’s complete writings and drawings will be initiated this year, too. Therefore, interpretations, analyses, reviews, and archival materials related to the above are welcome.
The absence of the Drogobych synagogue in Bruno Schulz’s fiction suggests his strategy of erasing... more The absence of the Drogobych synagogue in Bruno Schulz’s fiction suggests his strategy of erasing all the traces of his cultural identity. Next to that absence, one can notice his significant choice of names – to realize that, it is enough to compare Schulz’s short stories with Julian Stryjkowski’s novel, Austeria. Apparently, Schulz eliminated from his represented world all Jewish connotations. His use of foreign words, borrowed from different languages, may be explained as an effort to make his fiction as cosmopolitan as possible. This refers not just to the represented reality, but to the very structure of Schulz’s imagination and his linguistic sensibility. The writer did not renounce his Jewishness, but wanted it to be only one component of his fiction. Biblical references and the paraphernalia of the Jewish culture were to be just one piece in a multicultural narrative mosaic which tended toward universality.
It has been a long time since Bruno Schulz was recognized as a model figure of the multicultural ... more It has been a long time since Bruno Schulz was recognized as a model figure of the multicultural borderland. During the fifty years of his life, his hometown belonged to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, the short-lived Western Ukrainian People’s Republic, the Second Polish Republic, the Soviet Union, and finally the Nazi General Gouvernement. Marian Hemar made an oft-quoted remark that in Schulz’s lifetime Drogobych was a “town and a half ”: half-Polish, half-Jewish, and half-Ukrainian. Schulz himself was an assimilated Jew who wrote in Polish and had much in common with the German literary culture. No wonder then that fifty years after genocide, ethnic cleansing, and mass deportations in the 1940s he has recently become a patron figure of various initiatives intended to build bridges connecting different ethnic groups and their respective versions of history. The problem is that Schulz’s oeuvre is not a good instrument of cultural diplomacy. The author makes an attempt to present briefly Schulz’s possible (or impossible) contribution to such projects. Besides, he suggests a few promising approaches to be tested in further research.
A list of the main magic realists includes Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, J... more A list of the main magic realists includes Isabel Allende, Jorge Luis Borges, Alejo Carpentier, Julio Cortàzar, Günter Grass, Gabriel García Màrquez, and Salman Rushdie, and among Polish authors, Stanisław Lem, Olga Tokarczuk, and sometimes Witold Gombrowicz. Can Bruno Schulz be called a magic realist as well? Magic realists attempt in their works to grasp the essence of the things, phenomena, situations or relations which they refer to. The way he or she does it cannot be determined by philosophy, but must be based on some specific idea of literature. In the case of Schulz, narration combines together radically different dimensions of reality, which allows the author to call him a magic realist, too. Woleński places the classic elements of Schulz’s fiction, such as experiments with time and the mythicization of reality, with the magic realism and phenomenology as its philosophical underpinning. The final question asked in the text is how would Schulz have described the Shoah, if he had a chance to survive it.
In the first part of the essay, Tuszyńska introduces Józefina Szelińska, “Juna,” and presents the... more In the first part of the essay, Tuszyńska introduces Józefina Szelińska, “Juna,” and presents the circumstances of discovering an unknown manuscript of Bruno Schulz – an application for a sick leave that he wrote for his partner to the Main Statistical Office in Warsaw. The file with the document was kept for several decades in the Office archive to be preserved in the times of the Second World War and the communist regime. The other part is an attempt to present the relationship of Schulz and Szelińska in the form of a literary reportage or a biographical sketch. The difficult liaison of the writer and the most mysterious of his mistresses – both of them suffered from depression and could hardly communicate with each other – is an opportunity to make references to the politics and social life of the prewar Poland. The essay is a part of a book that will soon be published by Wydawnictwo Literackie.
Schulz’s work has reached us in fragments. We do not know a large part of what he wrote and drew.... more Schulz’s work has reached us in fragments. We do not know a large part of what he wrote and drew. But Schulz is also a “writer without an archive,” which is why he seems to be so mature and accomplished from the very outset of his career – with no “at first” and “then,” no beginning and end. In such a context, all his available manuscripts are particularly important. The present essay is an attempt to examine/describe Schulz’s writing (écriture) on the basis of the manuscript of “A Second Autumn.” Its six pages, compared with a version published in Kamena and the one included in "Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass", must stand for the whole lost archive. An analysis of the changes and corrections allows us to reveal the actual process of writing. Thanks to Schulz’s comments, we may place it in his biography: he has just gained success and knows that another book should follow, but in his letters he keeps complaining on a writer’s block. The only way out is to publish something already written, and fortunately there is something in store. Thus Schulz begins to work on the texts penned in the 1920s. He must only, as he puts it, “choose, finish, edit, and rewrite” them. The manuscript of “A Second Autumn” is a document of rewriting – in a way, the author is a parasite on his own work. Still, working on his old texts, Schulz believes that he is a traitor not only of himself, but also of the original inspiration. Once inspired, he must become a writer and becomes one, though he must change his method. A return to the innocence and disinterestedness of the 1920s is impossible. Under the pressure of external circumstances, Schulz begins a new epoch in his writing. The lost "Messiah" was probably intended as its center. Some of Schulz’s essays from that period reveal a poetics that is different from his original one. That other, different poetics may be called a poetics of “making the myth real,” of a “biological semantics.” The manuscript of “A Second Autumn” demonstrates the decline of the former way of writing.
The essay focuses on Bruno Schulz’s drawing, "Three Figures" 1935 (cardboard, pencil, black water... more The essay focuses on Bruno Schulz’s drawing, "Three Figures" 1935 (cardboard, pencil, black watercolor, 31.5 × 32 cm), preserved in the collection of the Art Museum at the Ein Harod kibbutz in Israel. For many years, Schulz specialists have not taken it into consideration. The drawing is a first-rate finished composition, signed and dated by the artist. The conversation of three characters may be an illustration to the short story “Spring” [Wiosna], showing Photographer, Father, and Joseph, or perhaps some unknown Schulz’s acquaintances. The drawing was donated to the museum at Ein Harod by the lawyer, Dr. Michał Chajes, in 1957. Thanks to Marla Raucher-Osborn’s help, some facts from Chajes’s biography have been established. Born in Drogobych, he was Schulz’s friend since their youth. He survived the Holocaust and after the Second World War lived in Cracow, collecting works of Jewish artists, some of which are now in the holdings of the Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The drawing in question should be added to the catalogue raisonneé of Schulz’s works, while the activity of Chajes as a collector deserves further investigation.
Henri Lewi’s book, "Bruno Schulz or Messianic Strategies", published in 1989 in Paris, is an atte... more Henri Lewi’s book, "Bruno Schulz or Messianic Strategies", published in 1989 in Paris, is an attempt to read the fiction and correspondence of Schulz as a record of his individual lot and the collective condition of Jews in the pre-Second World War Poland. The author interprets Schulz’s writings, in which the writer resorted to myths and metaphors and avoided direct autobiographical confessions, as a disguised presentation of his personal experience. Lewi tries to prove that even though Schulz did not openly refer to his Jewishness, he drew from the Judaic tradition and his most important myths are deeply rooted in the Old Testament.
Henri Lewi’s book, "Bruno Schulz or Messianic Strategies", published in 1989 in Paris, is an atte... more Henri Lewi’s book, "Bruno Schulz or Messianic Strategies", published in 1989 in Paris, is an attempt to read the fiction and correspondence of Schulz as a record of his individual lot and the collective condition of Jews in the pre-Second World War Poland. The author interprets Schulz’s writings, in which the writer resorted to myths and metaphors and avoided direct autobiographical confessions, as a disguised presentation of his personal experience. Lewi tries to prove that even though Schulz did not openly refer to his Jewishness, he drew from the Judaic tradition and his most important myths are deeply rooted in the Old Testament.
In Izabela Czermakowa’s memory, Bruno Schulz appears to be a writer that attracted people’s atten... more In Izabela Czermakowa’s memory, Bruno Schulz appears to be a writer that attracted people’s attention and had many occasions to socialize with the “high society,” not only in Drogobych. Yet he was so shy that those who met him could not understand either him or his work. “I have bought Cinnamon Shops by your friend Schulz. Honestly, I cannot understand anything of it. Why should anyone write like this and for whom? I have no idea why Warsaw is so enchanted, perhaps it’s just snobbery?” This commentary by an engineer who invited Schulz to dinner organized for a group of friends was not a spontaneous reaction to Schulz’s fiction, but a belated complaint on the author’s behavior since he was unable to reciprocate the appreciation of those who knew him and accidental readers.
The essay is a review of Jan Gondowicz’s most recent book, "Trans-Autentyk. Nie-czyste formy Brun... more The essay is a review of Jan Gondowicz’s most recent book, "Trans-Autentyk. Nie-czyste formy Brunona Schulza" [Trans-Authentic. Bruno Schulz’s Im-pure Forms]. Most of the texts included in the volume focus on Schulz’s graphics and drawings. Gondowicz, a highly unconventional Schulz scholar, believes that they convey the cipher of the writer’s mythology by referring to a secret society from Drogobych, called “Kalleia,” which aimed to revive an ancient cult based on the sacred value of eroticism. This is the central hypothesis to be found in Gondowicz’s masterful essays, informing also his interpretations of some of Schulz’s short stories. Analyzing Schulz’s drawings, Gondowicz discovers in them traces of a crisis of the ineffable and their epiphanic potential, later articulated in fiction.
Assuming that his readers know nothing about Bruno Schulz, François Coadou believes that he shoul... more Assuming that his readers know nothing about Bruno Schulz, François Coadou believes that he should start from the basics, although it seems that he would really like to con centrate on more specific problems. The second part of his book is an attempt to present an original interpretation of Schulz’s fiction. Coadou precedes it with a subchapter titled, “Presentation of Bruno Schulz,” which seems neutral, but in the French context is quite unusual, referring to Gilles Deleuze’s "Présentation de Sacher-Masoch", since the author of "Venus in Furs" provides one of the issues under scrutiny. Coadou approaches Schulz’s fiction as an open work in the tradition of Cervantes, Sterne or Joyce, claiming that in his analysis of the decomposition of the world and subjectivity the Polish writer proved more penetrating than the author of "Ulysses". Next to such daring, controversial, and sometimes simply doubtful proposals, one may find in Coadou’s brief study a metacritical reflection criticizing the schematism of Schulz’s reception, continuously referring to the same biographical facts and psychological diagnoses. "L’inquiétude de la matière" is an interesting attempt to approach the Polish writer from the outside, but on the other hand, it is also disappointing because of its interpretive and stylistic faults.
"A Guide to Bruno Schulz" [Bruno Schulz. Przewodnik], published by Krytyka Polityczna, could be a... more "A Guide to Bruno Schulz" [Bruno Schulz. Przewodnik], published by Krytyka Polityczna, could be an opportunity to shed some new light on the writer’s work, but it turns out a failure. Even though the publisher believes that Schulz’s fiction and drawings are a challenge to the human sciences, the essays included in the volume are superficial and disappointing. The reviewer analyzes particular elements of the collection – interpretive essays on Schulz’s fiction, film studies, and short stories and comics based on Schulz’s works – to conclude that they are inadequate and, as regards the comics and short stories, quite expendable.
Schulz studies were born of rapture. In 1943 Jerzy Ficowski wrote a short study on Bruno Schulz, ... more Schulz studies were born of rapture. In 1943 Jerzy Ficowski wrote a short study on Bruno Schulz, bound it, and titled it Regions of Great Heresy. That event can be now called the founding act of Schulz studies. Commenting on his work many years later, Ficowski realized that its permanent element was his rapture and the title to be assigned to more and more comprehensive versions of his early study.
I have been here already: it is as though I had been hit, pierced by the arrow of his words. Pier... more I have been here already: it is as though I had been hit, pierced by the arrow of his words. Piercing/together of times and spaces: I have also been summoned, we are doing the same. There are no more differences,I have been here already everything is happening now. Walking into the unknown, I am following footsteps. I know this state, this rapture: I have been here already. We are separated by bottomless precipices, and yet we are close, there is an exchange of power and words. Silence becomes music, loneliness aims at the stars. Certainly, I will soon be taken over by boredom, by captivity and emptiness, but a particle of splendor has already clung to the spokes of my destiny.
Even though Bruno Schulz repeatedly criticized psychoanalysis, one may discover in his fiction ma... more Even though Bruno Schulz repeatedly criticized psychoanalysis, one may discover in his fiction many traces of Freud’s theory. The writer from Drogobych not only proposed his own version of the Oedipal drama, but also explored perversions and fetishism as well as various forms of compensation within a family based on radically different personalities of the father and mother. Dybel comes up with a psychoanalytic reading of “August,” the opening story of "Cinnamon Shops". He approaches it not just as a starting point of Schulz’s fiction, deeply rooted in the writer’s correspondence with Debora Vogel and others, but as its climax, at least as far as the libidinal power of nature embodied by women is concerned. Schulz presents in “August” five portraits of womanhood – from still innocent Lucia to monstrously fertile Agata – which constitute the female Superego and Id, and even go beyond this division. By contrast, Dybel’s psychoanalytic interpretation includes also weak or absent men from whom the protagonist, whether he likes it or not, must learn about life and complete his rite of passage.
The fundamental premise of Bruno Schulz’s theory of interpretation is an assumption that reality ... more The fundamental premise of Bruno Schulz’s theory of interpretation is an assumption that reality has some meaning. This meaning is an intentional object which must be discovered in a process of creative interpretation. In Schulz’s fiction, Józef fails to become a true artist because he cannot be or does not dare to be a successful interpreter of the reality of Drogobych. The central text of Schulz’s phenomenological hermeneutics, approached by Meniok in the context of the Husserlian and Ingardenian tradition, is his programmatic essay "Mythicization of Reality" [Mityzacja rzeczywistości], where he stressed the potential of literature to activate myth as a component of reality. Thus, the writer’s task is both to endow reality with myth and to interpret myth – and consequently reality – in a creative manner.
In Schulz’s short story “Spring” the interest in stamps and a stamp album, which plays the role o... more In Schulz’s short story “Spring” the interest in stamps and a stamp album, which plays the role of a quasi-mystical Book, equals fascination with distant, exotic realms located outside the familiar. It is also a praise of imagination, since in Rudolf’s hands a collection of stamps was nothing but a mere collection, while in Joseph’s hands it acquired its peculiar extra meaning. The author adds new meanings to the story by considering the stamp album in the context of Walter Benjamin’s understanding of time and the task of the historian. Using Benjamin’s concepts of the “homogeneously empty time,” the nonlinear “historical time,” and the distinction between two types of the “present,” Łysik succeeds in revealing the reasons why Schulz chose for his story an unusual narrative strategy related to the activity of the historian according to Benjamin. The passage from stamps to fiction is successful, but will the protagonists manage to make what they saw in the stamp album come true? The answer must remain ambiguous, just like Benjamin’s thought between translating "The Paris Peasant" by Aragon and writing "One-Way Street".
According to the title, the author makes an attempt to reconstruct and analyze the rhetoric of Je... more According to the title, the author makes an attempt to reconstruct and analyze the rhetoric of Jerzy Ficowski’s works on Schulz. Since rhetoric is understood here as a way of articulating the text, in many cases it overlaps with poetics. The author’s intention is to approach "Regions of Great Heresy" as a careful reader of both Schulz and Ficowski to show ideological and stylistic affinities between them. An important part of the essay are many statements by Ficowski himself, drawn from his private correspondence (including letters sent to Schulz) and poetry (particularly his first book of poems, "Lead Soldiers" of 1948, very significant in the context of his Schulz studies). Supplemented by Kandziora’s commentary, Ficowski’s statements shed new light on the methods of critical research on an author whose biography is incomplete, while his manuscripts, letters, and works of art have been either destroyed or scattered. Thus, Ficowski alternates biography and interpretation, trying to reintegrate the entire output of Schulz. The essay belongs to a research project supported by Narodowe Centrum Nauki.
In Bruno Schulz’s short stories, full of motifs taken from alchemy and the "Book of Genesis", one... more In Bruno Schulz’s short stories, full of motifs taken from alchemy and the "Book of Genesis", one can find many homunculi – artificial human beings that were one of the goals of alchemists’ experiments. In Schulz’s fiction, this figure is a symbol of artificial life which is empty, sterile, and unable to create. This artificial life is represented by mannequins, wax figures, idols, dummies, marionettes, golems, and dolls. In Schulz’s carnivalesque reality, such forms can be only temporary disguises, parts, and grotesque masks that have nothing to do with the creative soul. Consequently, each of them must be treated separately, since it is an automaton or a stuffed dummy only to an extent, similarly to dolls and plaster statues which may be partly human. The present essay is an attempt to put all such creatures together and interpret them in different contexts, ranging from the biblical creation and medieval alchemy to the twentieth-century science fiction. As it turns out, the most important are their faces – fixed, incomplete, and dead – which are disguises worn by protean individuals.
Łazorak’s article focuses on the life and career of Izydor Schulz, Bruno’s elder brother, educate... more Łazorak’s article focuses on the life and career of Izydor Schulz, Bruno’s elder brother, educated at the Lvov Polytechnic, where he earned a degree of construction engineer. After a Roman Catholic baptism, Izydor Schulz became an important member of the municipal board of Drogobych, cooperating with the Mayor Rajmund Jarosz. At that time, still before World War I, he designed and constructed a number of large ground oil containers, much needed during the oil boom in Borislav and the neighboring villages. Between the world wars, Izydor Schulz was one of the top managers in the Polish oil industry, interested also in the cinema. He regularly supported his parents and younger brother who stayed in Drogobych and found a teacher’s job at the local grammar school for boys. Without Izydor’s help, Bruno Schulz would not have published his first collection of short stories, "Cinnamon Shops". After his brother’s sudden and premature death, he remembered him dearly in his letters to friends and acquaintances.
In 1989 the author edited a volume of Schulz’s fiction for the series of “Biblioteka Narodowa.” H... more In 1989 the author edited a volume of Schulz’s fiction for the series of “Biblioteka Narodowa.” He immediately sent a copy to Jerzy Ficowski who soon responded with a long letter of March 10, 1990, including detailed remarks and opinions about the book. In the present essay, Ficowski’s letter has been quoted in full. After many years, the author is ready to agree with most Ficowski’s observations, with one exception concerning a still undecided issue that is one of the most difficult tasks of the editor, namely the choice of words which must be explained in footnotes.
The author makes a general statement that writers such as Bruno Schulz, who do not help their aud... more The author makes a general statement that writers such as Bruno Schulz, who do not help their audience interpret their texts, require commentary that is potentially boundless. Referring to the tradition of Polish editorship and textual studies, he specifies the list of tasks of the commentator – in this case the commentator of Schulz’s fiction – which includes explaining not only the meaning(s) of particular lexical items of cultural allusions, but also all the potential ambiguities at the level of interpretation. This is why, according to Rosiek, commentary occupies the space between “lexicon and interpretation,” and there are no rules that may help a particular editor find his or her way about there. The most important universal directive it to explain virtually everything since the continuity of culture, connecting different generations is no longer a fact, if it ever was one.
The artist Tomasz Lec has done one of the most original graphic designs referring to Bruno Schulz... more The artist Tomasz Lec has done one of the most original graphic designs referring to Bruno Schulz. It is a cover of "The Regions of Great Heresy and Environs" by Jerzy Ficowski, the founding father of Schulz studies. The black cover shows a page from a stamp album with nineteenth- and twentieth-century stamps. This idea is a direct reference to Rudolf ’s stamp album from the short story “Spring” which includes the motif of the Book, fundamental for Schulz’s fiction. All the stamps have been supplemented by Lec with a graphic motif connected with Schulz (e.g., a panorama of Drogobych, the writer’s self-portrait or an illustration from "The Book of Idolatry"). According to Lec, each of the fourteen stamps is supposed to be an allusion to a specific chapter of "The Regions of Great Heresy". At the end of the essay there is an short guide to his stamp album by Tomasz Lec. The artist has identified in it both the stamps that he used and the Schulzian graphic motifs he added in his both symbolic and humorous collage.
The artist Tomasz Lec has done one of the most original graphic designs referring to Bruno Schulz... more The artist Tomasz Lec has done one of the most original graphic designs referring to Bruno Schulz. It is a cover of "The Regions of Great Heresy and Environs" by Jerzy Ficowski, the founding father of Schulz studies. The black cover shows a page from a stamp album with nineteenth- and twentieth-century stamps. This idea is a direct reference to Rudolf ’s stamp album from the short story “Spring” which includes the motif of the Book, fundamental for Schulz’s fiction. All the stamps have been supplemented by Lec with a graphic motif connected with Schulz (e.g., a panorama of Drogobych, the writer’s self-portrait or an illustration from The Book of Idolatry). According to Lec, each of the fourteen stamps is supposed to be an allusion to a specific chapter of "The Regions of Great Heresy". At the end of the essay there is an short guide to his stamp album by Tomasz Lec. The artist has identified in it both the stamps that he used and the Schulzian graphic motifs he added in his both symbolic and humorous collage.
Bruno Schulz visited Paris in August 1938. He wanted to organize there an exhibition of his works... more Bruno Schulz visited Paris in August 1938. He wanted to organize there an exhibition of his works of art and for that reason he met, among others, Ludwik Lille, a graphic artist and a painter, member of an avant-garde group called “Artes.” In Lille’s archive, now held in the Polish Library in Paris, there are several texts written for the Polish Section of the French Radio. One of them is titled “On Bruno Schulz, a Poet and a Painter.” The entire text, which was presented on the radio, has been included in the present essay as an appendix. The other appendix is a reproduction of a photocopy of Mieczysław Joszt’s portrait drawn by Schulz, which is now also in the holdings of the Paris Polish Library. The drawing was mistakenly published in 1969 by “Oficyna Poetów” and Schulz’s portrait drawn by Lille.
"Labirynty Brunona Schulza" is an attempt to look at the writer’s output through the prism of occ... more "Labirynty Brunona Schulza" is an attempt to look at the writer’s output through the prism of occult knowledge, particularly the works of Aleister Crowley. Adam Wosiak searches in Schulz’s fiction for the images of a world that is degraded and based on opposites, to compare them with similar pictures drawn from ancient myths, the Internet, and esoteric knowledge. The reviewer considers such an attempt as an natural stage in Schulz’s reception. Writers who, like the author of "Cinnamon Shops", give the reader much interpretive liberty sooner or later must be interpreted in strange and extravagant ways. Labirynty is not only a superficial, but also a surprisingly arbitrary reading of Schulz. The text, illustrations, and bibliography make a collage of accidental elements which add little or nothing to the understanding of Schulz’s fiction.
The full title of Michał Paweł Markowski’s book includes four elements: Universal Promiscuity. Sc... more The full title of Michał Paweł Markowski’s book includes four elements: Universal Promiscuity. Schulz, Existence, Literature. Also the list of contents has four segments. The term “existence,” used both in the title and in the list of contents, reveals the author’s emphasis. Markowski remembers Walter Benjamin’s dream of writing a book made exclusively of quotations and uses a similar method. His point is to show a close connection between the “key idea of Schulz’s world” and “Schulz’s language.” Markowski claims, “The present book is about Schulz and about his own existence inscribed in literature which has become an existence of the second degree.” By “bio-graphy” he understands “existential analysis” and in this respect his book is about “Schulz as a philosopher” and the “philosophy of Schulz.” The composition of the book corresponds to its title – it includes a large number of mostly very short chapters of which the reader has not been informed in advance. That is why the present review contains a necessary supplement.
The author is interested in the results of reading a writer’s bibliography. She approached a chro... more The author is interested in the results of reading a writer’s bibliography. She approached a chronological record of publications in an unusual way. As a rule, bibliographies are made for those readers of a given writer’s output, who are interested in his/her career and look for less known works. Still, reading a chronological register which focuses on cause-and-effect links connecting publications, one may discover in a writer’s career fascinating facts. Jerzy Ficowski’s bibliography also reveals a number of interesting questions. A meticulously ordered list shows a number of his avatars – those of a Schulz scholar, a poet, an expert on the Gypsy culture, and a social and political activist.
This is a memorial for Professor Małgorzta Kitowska-Łysiak, an eminent art historian and the most... more This is a memorial for Professor Małgorzta Kitowska-Łysiak, an eminent art historian and the most outstanding expert on Bruno Schulz’s achievement in the visual arts. The author, Jerzy Jarzębski, writes: “There are people, just like Schulz, who balance their physical meagerness, sometimes combined with a disease and suffering, with some unusual inner tension, a spiritual quality of the highest measure. They are radiant and uniquely good. In such individuals the spirit, which seems to be imprisoned in the cage of the feeble body once and for all, manages to overcome its conditioning and resist bitterness, sustaining the need to give, an affirmation of the world and existence.”
Bruno Schulz has been one of the most important Polish philosophers. It is not because one can fi... more Bruno Schulz has been one of the most important Polish philosophers. It is not because one can find in his works many traces of reading philosophy or that they convey any specific philosophical ideas, but because the form of his world is one of the most interesting world forms found in Polish in the 20th century. What is the meaning of this form? Our life tends to assume fixed shapes whose durability denies it since there is a radical assymetry between the matter of life and the forms it adopts. We need these forms to deny formless chaos but we should not accept them as ultimate. Our nature knows no peace but adopts many disguises and roles to find the best possible shelter, which never ends with success. Human life is permanently incomplete because it always shows us its “eternal otherness.” Never will we realize our potential in full, which does not mean that we should limit ourselves in advance. On the contrary – the more options we have, the better our life is. If reality is a sum of realized potentialities, the more of them become real, the more meaning reality will acquire. And the more meaning it has, the more effort must be put in its interpretation. Thus human existence can be defined as interpreting. Interpretation adds more possibilities to being since it is not a way of knowing the world, but that of being in it.
Bruno Schulz used in his critical essays metaphors and imagery which created a uniquely organized... more Bruno Schulz used in his critical essays metaphors and imagery which created a uniquely organized world. Its elements and their arrangement, just as those of his stories, always have some value and exist in time, which means that they have an inner dynamic and contribute to a mythic history. Therefore Schulz’s critical idiom should be studied in terms of its mythological overtones.
This paper treats Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops as a depiction of two entirely different models o... more This paper treats Bruno Schulz’s Cinnamon Shops as a depiction of two entirely different models of writing: the first disturbingly real for Schulz, and the second more idealized, or even nostalgic. The first model presents writing as a process of constantly deferred meaning, as a wandering through a labyrinth of shifting city streets or human signs, whose “configuration,” as the story’s narrator observes, “fails to match the expected image.” The second, more idealized model was described by Schulz himself in his famous 1935 essay for Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as the proper goal or aspiration of art: “Its role is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus registering processes in the depths, where value is formed.”
Both Bruno Schulz and Aflred Kubin moved freely between image and word. In their artistic quests ... more Both Bruno Schulz and Aflred Kubin moved freely between image and word. In their artistic quests they first turned toward the iconic and only then chose the verbal art. In Schulz’s work, the relationship between woman and man is reduced to adoration. Schulz’s man knows that the beauty he admires is beyond his reach, while Kubin reaches further. For him, the sexual act means loss of masculinity. The Austrian draughtsman approaches sexual desire as difficult to control, sometimes animal in its forms, while for Schulz desire is subtler and more sublimated. Both Schulz and Kubin addressed the problem of limited and imperfect reality which sustains the artist’s imagination while he tries to improve it. Both also surprised the audience with their teriomorphic ideas. In the age when most painters preferred chromatic richness, both Kubin and Schulz chose drawing and etching. They preferred techinques which stressed the realtionship of light and color. White and black, making an ascetic combination, let them achieve the maximum of expression. Their works are visions of somnambulists.
The present essay is an attempt to consider the status of rubbish, debris, remains, cuttings, and... more The present essay is an attempt to consider the status of rubbish, debris, remains, cuttings, and scrap paper, so often to be found in Schulz’s fiction. Such apparently useless trash seem to be the main substance that organized Schulz’s reality. Sometimes it makes a significant substitute for more complex or sophisticated forms of the material world, on other occasions it point to the general condition of modern culture. In Schulz’s stories, waste is almost never just useless excess of ready-made forms, but very often it makes the main component of more complex structures – both strictly physical, material, and linguistic, whenever it inspires an imaginary search, triggers metaphors or provides a core around which the language of description can start growing. The formlessness and potentiality of such forms, just as the “porousness” or “plasticity” of matter as such, seduce the artist and tempt him to shape them, to make an epistemological and creative effort.
Most likely, Schulz’s sketchbook comes from 1907-1908, when he was fifteen or sixteen-years old. ... more Most likely, Schulz’s sketchbook comes from 1907-1908, when he was fifteen or sixteen-years old. Scholars claim that the drawings in the sketchbook are of no high artistic value. Certainly, in the context of Schulz’s canonical works, they are only attempts and anticipations of the future. Still, these early sketches deserve some more attention not only as part of a Great Artist’s heritage. Schulz’s sketchbook is not just a collection of drafts but, on the contrary, a set of final versions – final in the first phase of the artist’s formative evolution. On the other hand, the frescoes painted by Schulz in Landau’s villa are, to our present knowledge, his last work done under unusual circumstances – under pressure. We will never find out whether Schulz, doing his final job, had any artistic ambitions, but we can assume that it was not just a ransom he had to pay to live. At any rate, he followed his main principle of combining the real and the imaginary, in that case the motifs from fairy tales.
The “High Heels” project is an interdisciplinary and intermedia action of an international range.... more The “High Heels” project is an interdisciplinary and intermedia action of an international range. It has been inspired by the graphic art of Bruno Schulz and a Ph.D. dissertation, "Schulz’s Women" [Kobiety z kręgu Schulza], completed by the artist at the Academy of Fine Arts in Warsaw.
Joseph saw Bianca for the first time when “she was wearing a white dress, slender and calligraphi... more Joseph saw Bianca for the first time when “she was wearing a white dress, slender and calligraphic as if the had been out of the Zodiac.” Then he had no way out – he could not stop dreaming about meeting her once more. His dreams came true but not as a typical love story, but the moment when one says “the sweetest, quietest, and saddest things” and after that there is no consolation but the falling dusk. Joseph begins to study Bianca’s secret with insistence and despair, and his effort resembles studying a spring dusk. Who was Bianca and what is this dusk which falls inevitably whenever she starts talking about something most important?
The essay is an attempt to describe and interpret three recently discovered photographs taken on ... more The essay is an attempt to describe and interpret three recently discovered photographs taken on October 2, 1938 during the so-called “anti-aircraft and anti-gas defense week” organized by the paramilitary League for Anti-Aircraft and Anti-Gas Defense. In each of the photos one can hardly notice Bruno Schulz hidden among about a dozen people.
In "Trans-Pacifc Transcendence. Translating Bruno Schulz into Chinese", the Taiwanese poet and tr... more In "Trans-Pacifc Transcendence. Translating Bruno Schulz into Chinese", the Taiwanese poet and translator Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka writes about her journey into The Age of Genius – how she fell in love with Bruno Schulz’s book when she read "The Book" in London, how she decided to come to Poland to learn Polish just to translate his works from the original, and how she finally managed to cross the geographical/linguistic/cultural boundaries to reach the “root” and bring out “spring” out of Schulz’s work and make it flourish fluently, freely, and feverishly in her native language, i.e. traditional Chinese. So far Wei-Yun Lin-Górecka has translated Schulz’s "Cinammon Shops", been published under the title "Street of Crocodiles" by Unitas Publishing Co., one of the leading publishing companies in Taiwan. Her translation of "Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass" will be published in the fall of 2013.
In "Białe plamy w schulzologii" [The Blind Spots of Schulzology], a collection edited by Małgorza... more In "Białe plamy w schulzologii" [The Blind Spots of Schulzology], a collection edited by Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak (2010), contributors focus on the relationship between Schulz’s fiction and his paintings, the problems of ethnicity and sexuality, and some newly discovered details of the writer’s life. In his discussion of the book, the reviewer stresses the increasing role of psychoanalytic, feminist and ethnicity-centered approaches, as well as the importance of the “iconic turn” for the study Schulz. The collection includes articles by Ewa Kuryluk, Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, Shalom Lindenbaum, Ariko Kato, Jan Gondowicz, and Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg.
A periodical devoted exclusively to Bruno Schulz – his life and work – should have been founded l... more A periodical devoted exclusively to Bruno Schulz – his life and work – should have been founded long ago. This Polish language writer of Jewish descent, born in now Ukrainian Drohobych, has been easily crossing the barriers of more and more languages. Seventy years after his death, Schulz keeps attracting more and more readers, connecting generations internationally. It is indeed high time for the expanding “international” of professional Schulz buffs to have their forum that will provide a congenial meeting place and a space of continuing dialogue. There is no reason for the global debate about Schulz to go on according to the rhythm of anniversaries. Continuous cooperation of Schulz experts may result in several joint projects. Such a collective effort is now necessary.
The essay is a textological fantasy based on a suggestion, which is implied in Schulz’s fiction, ... more The essay is a textological fantasy based on a suggestion, which is implied in Schulz’s fiction, that its protagonist, the Father, is not so much a merchant from the olden days as a self-appointed magician. Still, the Father’s magic interference with reality usually ends in failure. Evidence for this can be found in the story called “Birds,” in which the birds hatched by the Father, obnoxious and annoying to the family, are expelled by Adela, the maidservant. When in another story, “The Night of the Great Season,” the reader comes across a flock of strange birds, they seem to be the descendants of the one described in “Birds.”
The essay is an interpretation of a story from "The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass". I... more The essay is an interpretation of a story from "The Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass". Its most important frame of reference is the history of European culture, since apparently Schulz parodied in his text two key currents of the Mediterranean tradition: the heritage of the Greek philosophy and the Judeo-Christian thought. What seems to prompt such a hypothesis is the language convention used to present the two male protagonists of the story. The handicapped title hero, Dodo, is introduced as if he were an ancient philosopher, while Uncle Jerome, mentally ill, resembles the heroes of saints’ lives. Such a choice of the conventions appears to serve the purpose of parodying the European tradition, particularly that both protagonists are male. The target of the parody may be the patriarchal model of culture on which both pillars of the Old Continent heritage actually rest. This idea stands in tune with the avant-garde tendencies of the early 20th century, particularly the Dadaist program of rejecting the whole tradition of European culture.
In Bruno Schulz’s fiction one can find surprisingly many images of falling asleep, snoozing, and ... more In Bruno Schulz’s fiction one can find surprisingly many images of falling asleep, snoozing, and tossing oneself around between the sheets “damp with sleep.” Starting with an analysis of comic descriptions of “wandering in the unexplored realm of dreaming,” the author makes an attempt to reconstruct Schulz’s idea of the mode of existence of the sleeping subject. While the dreaming “I” usually visits spheres beyond human reach, the sleeping body rests in filth. The sheets are dirty, the mouth open, with saliva dripping from the corners. Even the perfect body of Adela is crossed by the “wandering bed-bugs.” The main theoretical inspiration of the essay is Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. Sleep as the sphere of abjection blurs the boundary between the subject and the object to become the Kristevan abject. In Schulz’s imagination, sleeping and dreaming are the processes of self-purification, getting rid of the unwanted attributes of the “I.” In this, his approach resembles a much later theory of “unlearning,” proposed by Critch and Mitchison, according to which we sleep to forget.
The article is devoted to Schulz’s connections to the cinema, both as a viewer and as a writer. S... more The article is devoted to Schulz’s connections to the cinema, both as a viewer and as a writer. Since we do not know much about his experiences as a moviegoer from his art or letters, the author tries to recreate it on the basis of the collective experience of Schulz’s generation which was often heavily influenced by the cinema. The second part of the article focuses on Schulz’s cinematic writing. The author tries to prove that Schulz’s peculiar literary imagination which, according to many scholars and critics, takes its root in the image, not the word, was to some extent inspired by the early cinema or the cinema of attractions. The conclusion is that the interpreter of Schulz’s work has the right to treat his older brother’s movie theater in Drohobych as an important part of Schulz’s private mythology.
The paper focuses on the affinities between the short stories of Bruno Schulz and the fiction of ... more The paper focuses on the affinities between the short stories of Bruno Schulz and the fiction of two American writers from the 1930s: Djuna Barnes, known mainly for her masterpiece "Nightwwod" (1936), and Nathanael West, author of "Miss Lonelyhearts" (1933) and "The Day of the Locust" (1939). The background of a comparative reading of Schulz and the writers who most likely did not have a chance even to hear about him, is the poetics of masochistic fiction developed by Gilles Deleuze in his study of the work of Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, translated into English as "Coldness and Cruelty". The present interpretation is not rooted in Artur Sandauer’s hasty claim about the masochistic aspect of Schulz’s fiction, but takes into consideration some common features of the poetics of Schulz, Barnes, and West, surprisingly akin to that of Sacher-Masoch’s once scandalizing novels.
With the use of examples selected from various writings by Bruno Schulz, the article aims at trac... more With the use of examples selected from various writings by Bruno Schulz, the article aims at tracing connections between the writer’s solitude and his imagination. The author claims that Schulz’s seclusion in Drohobych resembles the confinement in reality that is not bountiful enough to fulfil the writer’s sensual needs. Schulz, separated from the Warsaw art scene and longing for a kindred spirit, replaces the realistic picture of his hometown with a fantastic scenery. He uses plain material to test the possibility of carrying out a similar operation on a large scale. Projecting a vision that is supposed to substitute for reality, the writer reveals some hidden aspects of his personality: the necessity to dominate or even sadistic impulses. The approach adopted emphasizes also Schulz’s narcissism and his need of amusement, the mischievous play with the realities of a provincial town. Many characters, the Father in particular, experience ailments resembling pains. Schulz himself had to bear them , losing the real world and living in its spectre he created instead.
The title Nameless One is Józefina Szelińska, Bruno Schulz’s fiancé who, however, never became hi... more The title Nameless One is Józefina Szelińska, Bruno Schulz’s fiancé who, however, never became his wife. The author reconstructs the history of their relationship, from their first meeting in 1933 through a period of friendship, marital plans, contradictory ideas about the future, and the ultimate breakup in 1937. The essay is also an attempt to account for the later life of Szelińska and draw a psychological portrait of the mysterious woman, hiding in all publications behind the initial „J.” Little has been known about her so far. The author relies on Szelińska’s letters to Jerzy Ficowski. Their correspondence began in 1948 with Szelińska’s response to Ficowski’s appeal for any information about Schulz, published in "Przekrój". The exchange of letters continued for forty years until the woman committed suicide in 1991. In almost eighty letters written by her to Ficowski, one can find the rhythm of her destiny, a cryptic cardiogram of her exiled memory, a record of the past that cannot be traced on the surface.
The article aims to present a critical project of publishing the literary and artistic works by B... more The article aims to present a critical project of publishing the literary and artistic works by Bruno Schulz in a uniform edition. Few readers realize that Schulz’s fiction exists in two editorial versions: the anonymous Cracow edition (published several times since 1957) and the Wrocław edition (prepared by Jerzy Jarzębski for the National Library series in 1989). The differences between them are not essential, but they call for a critical intervention which is not an easy task. The choice of all Schulz’s editors are is in fact limited to the first editions from the 1930s since the manuscripts of the stories have been lost. No proper editorial basis makes it difficult to verify texts published in the book versions.
The article describes the project of an exhibition which is being prepared on the occasion of the... more The article describes the project of an exhibition which is being prepared on the occasion of the 120th anniversary of Bruno Schulz’s birth and 70th anniversary of his death. For the first time, Schulz’s art will be presented in the context of the Polish art between the world wars, placing it, according to Joanna Pollakówna, with the “painting of displaced reality”: the magic realism, grotesque, and expressionism. Consequently, it will be possible to situate Schulz’s artistic achievement in his times, and transgress the prevailing conventions of its interpretation.
Bruno Schulz placed both of his collections of short stories with “Rój” Publishers. Its 1938 cata... more Bruno Schulz placed both of his collections of short stories with “Rój” Publishers. Its 1938 catalogue, designed by Mieczysław Berman (some of the “Schulz” pages are reproduced in the present issue), sums up the publishing achievement of “Rój” as a kind of the press’ last self-portrait. Next to notes on the published books, it includes many illustrations – drawings and photos – as well as portraits of authors, whose arrangement reveals the contemporary literary hierarchy.
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Katarzyna Warska sprawdza, co to jest „dzieciństwo pisarza”
Zbigniew Milczarek czyta przedwojenne zdjęcie – z Schulzem lub bez niego
Aleksandra Skrzypczyk rekonstruuje doświadczenia audialne autora „Sklepów”
Tymoteusz Skiba śledzi równoległe biografie Schulza i Gombrowicza
Robert Dion i Frédéric Regard odwołują „śmierć autora”
Christian Klein porządkuje założenia zwrotu biograficznego
Marcin Romanowski recenzuje książkę Anny Kaszuby-Dębskiej „Bruno. Epoka genialna”
Agata Tuszyńska w swoim stylu o relacji Józefiny Szelińskiej i Jerzego Ficowskiego
Piotr Millati nareszcie odnalazł „Mesjasza”
Zbigniew Maszewski w czułym schulzowskim pastiszu wspomina dzieje „Katalogu Bibljoteki Stanisława Weingartena”
Ponadto blok tekstów wokół Debory Vogel:
Esej Debory Vogel o Brunonie Schulzu
Teksty programowe redakcji „Cusztajera”
Adam Stepnowski o Galicji jako o jidyszlandzie
Wiedeńskie i lwowskie ślady Debory Vogel w opracowaniu Piotra Szalszy
Piotr Sitkiewicz sprawdza stopień pokrewieństwa między Schulzem a Kafką,
Zofia Ziemann śledzi losy „polskiego Kafki” za granicą,
Piotr Millati zadaje niestosowne pytanie, czy Bruno Schulz był pisarzem.
W bloku [Kafka] publikujemy po raz pierwszy w języku polskim:
„Kartki konwersacyjne” Franza Kafki w przekładzie Łukasza Musiała,
„Przedmowę” i rok „1917” z kalendarium Reinera Stacha „Kafka dzień po dniu” oraz
sześć fragmentów z jego książki „Czy to Kafka?” w przekładzie Tadeusza Zatorskiego.
W bloku [czy to Schulz?] prezentujemy dwa niemieckojęzyczne opowiadania Brunona Schulza z lat 1917 i 1918:
„Der Pfennig mit dem Auge” / „Fenig z okiem” oraz
„Du bist Staub. Kriegsskizze” / „Prochem jesteś. Szkic wojenny” w przekładzie Marka Szalszy,
krótki komentarz ich znalazcy – Piotra Szalszy,
ankietę redakcji, w której poprosiliśmy pięcioro schulzologów o pierwszą filologiczną ekspertyzę, a także
esej Stanisława Rośka o tożsamości literackiej i potencjalnych sobowtórach drohobyckiego Schulza.
Drugą część zeszytu, poświęconą wizerunkom Schulza, otwiera niepublikowany dotąd w języku polskim esej Jeana-Luca Nancy’ego i Federica Ferrariego „Portret autora sam(ego) w sobie” (w przekładzie Pauliny Tarasewicz); Katarzyna Warska pyta, jak uczniowie odmalowali nauczyciela Brunona Schulza; Małgorzata Ogonowska odsłania stereotypy męskości, w cieniu których powstawała legenda Schulza; Jakub Orzeszek tanatologicznie o pośmiertnym ciele (i kulcie) pisarza; Stanisław Rosiek w archiwalnym wspomnieniu Mariana Jachimowicza wskazuje na niepokojące opisy cielesności; Zofia Ziemann tłumaczy i komentuje wstęp Celiny Wieniewskiej do pierwszego anglojęzycznego wydania Schulza.
Szczególną uwagę zwracamy na dwa teksty Georga Groddecka, przełożone przez Tadeusza Zatorskiego i opatrzone komentarzem Agnieszki Więckiewicz, które wprowadzają tego „dzikiego psychoanalityka” i pisarza do literatury polskojęzycznej.
Ponadto Piotr Millati na marginesach książki „Gombrowicz. Ja, geniusz” (Klementyna Suchanow, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2017), Żaneta Nalewajk o „Wiośnie” w kontekście interkulturowym, Filip Szałasek na nowo o relacjach ojciec-syn w Schulzowskiej prozie, protokoły relacji z zagłady Żydów drohobyckich, Małgorzata Groth o portalu schulzforum.pl, Balbina Hoppe o spektaklu Robert Drobniucha „Sklepy cynamonowe” (Teatr Lalki i Aktora "Kubuś" w Kielcach), Tymoteusz Skiba jak Jacek Dukaj w schulzologicznym sci-fi.
Małgorzata Sady o drodze braci Quay do Schulza, Balbina Hoppe o „Lustrze” Leszka Mądzika, Stanisław Rosiek o schulzopodobnych fotografiach Bogdana Konopki. Aleksandra Skrzypczyk i Piotr Maksymowicz o Schulzu w operze. Agnieszka Hudzik rozmawia z Henrykiem Mittelstaedtem, tłumaczem Schulza na argentyński, Sotiris Karageorgos o greckim odbiorze Schulza, Irena Chawrilska o Schulzu według Jonathana Foera, Paweł Łapiński o grze tekstowej „Bałwochwał”, Tymoteusz Skiba o nowej stronie www o Jerzym Ficowskim.
Ina Söllner wspomina jak portretował ją Schulz, Piotr Sitkiewicz pisze o parodiach i pastiszach Schulza w międzywojniu (prezentujemy trzy najzabawniejsze), Maciej Urbanowski komentuje korespondencję Napierskiego z Wyką, której fragment prezentujemy. Ponadto Celestyna Schuman o sposobach na samouspokojenie, wiersz Łukasza Kamińskiego o spotkaniu przy kawie z cynamonem, recenzje trzech książek schulzologicznych (Aleksandra Wołkowicz o „Martwym sezonie” Łukasza Wojnarowskiego, Tymoteusz Skiba o „Mesjaszu” Wojciecha Żmudzińskiego, Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska o „Brunie. Chłopcu, który nauczył się latać” duetu Nadia Terranova–Ofra Amit) oraz analiza odpowiedzi w ankiecie Andrzeja Pietruszki „Czy Schulz znany jest w Drohobyczu?”.
Paweł Dybel wyznacza Schulzowski próg wstydu, Stanisław Rosiek i Filip Szałasek reinterpretują sen o kastracji z listu do Szumana, Marcin Romanowski pisze o poglądach Ficowskiego na masochizm, Jerzy Kandziora o kolegach Schulza i o tym, co z nich zostało. Prezentujemy nieletnią muzę Schulza-portrecisty – Irenę Kejlinównę, a także trzy listy Tadeusza Lubowieckiego (Izydora Friedmana) do biografa Schulza i fotograficzne przykłady metatropizmu/masochizmu. Jan Gondowicz oraz Eliza Kącka wikłają się w nierozwiązane zagadki schulzologii, a Ariko Kato szuka podobieństw między Schulzem i Eduardem Fuchsem.
Ponadto Jerzy Jarzębski o Schulzu uniwersalnym, Piotr Millati o fabułach, które Schulz odrzucił, ale których możemy się domyślać, Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska o antyportrecie w wersji literackiej, Stanisław Rosiek o biografii Schulza jako wyzwaniu rzuconym historii, Jakub Orzeszek o notatce Schulza z lektury Taine’a, Magdalena Jarnotowska o zwierzętach i wyobraźni, Alain van Crugten o przekładzie Schulza na francuski, Tomasz Swoboda o paryskiej wystawie „Mannequin d’artiste, mannequin fétiche”, Marek Wilczyński o V Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Brunona Schulza w Drohobyczu, Anna Kaszuba-Dębska o projekcie „Emeryty”.
Katarzyna Warska sprawdza, co to jest „dzieciństwo pisarza”
Zbigniew Milczarek czyta przedwojenne zdjęcie – z Schulzem lub bez niego
Aleksandra Skrzypczyk rekonstruuje doświadczenia audialne autora „Sklepów”
Tymoteusz Skiba śledzi równoległe biografie Schulza i Gombrowicza
Robert Dion i Frédéric Regard odwołują „śmierć autora”
Christian Klein porządkuje założenia zwrotu biograficznego
Marcin Romanowski recenzuje książkę Anny Kaszuby-Dębskiej „Bruno. Epoka genialna”
Agata Tuszyńska w swoim stylu o relacji Józefiny Szelińskiej i Jerzego Ficowskiego
Piotr Millati nareszcie odnalazł „Mesjasza”
Zbigniew Maszewski w czułym schulzowskim pastiszu wspomina dzieje „Katalogu Bibljoteki Stanisława Weingartena”
Ponadto blok tekstów wokół Debory Vogel:
Esej Debory Vogel o Brunonie Schulzu
Teksty programowe redakcji „Cusztajera”
Adam Stepnowski o Galicji jako o jidyszlandzie
Wiedeńskie i lwowskie ślady Debory Vogel w opracowaniu Piotra Szalszy
Piotr Sitkiewicz sprawdza stopień pokrewieństwa między Schulzem a Kafką,
Zofia Ziemann śledzi losy „polskiego Kafki” za granicą,
Piotr Millati zadaje niestosowne pytanie, czy Bruno Schulz był pisarzem.
W bloku [Kafka] publikujemy po raz pierwszy w języku polskim:
„Kartki konwersacyjne” Franza Kafki w przekładzie Łukasza Musiała,
„Przedmowę” i rok „1917” z kalendarium Reinera Stacha „Kafka dzień po dniu” oraz
sześć fragmentów z jego książki „Czy to Kafka?” w przekładzie Tadeusza Zatorskiego.
W bloku [czy to Schulz?] prezentujemy dwa niemieckojęzyczne opowiadania Brunona Schulza z lat 1917 i 1918:
„Der Pfennig mit dem Auge” / „Fenig z okiem” oraz
„Du bist Staub. Kriegsskizze” / „Prochem jesteś. Szkic wojenny” w przekładzie Marka Szalszy,
krótki komentarz ich znalazcy – Piotra Szalszy,
ankietę redakcji, w której poprosiliśmy pięcioro schulzologów o pierwszą filologiczną ekspertyzę, a także
esej Stanisława Rośka o tożsamości literackiej i potencjalnych sobowtórach drohobyckiego Schulza.
Drugą część zeszytu, poświęconą wizerunkom Schulza, otwiera niepublikowany dotąd w języku polskim esej Jeana-Luca Nancy’ego i Federica Ferrariego „Portret autora sam(ego) w sobie” (w przekładzie Pauliny Tarasewicz); Katarzyna Warska pyta, jak uczniowie odmalowali nauczyciela Brunona Schulza; Małgorzata Ogonowska odsłania stereotypy męskości, w cieniu których powstawała legenda Schulza; Jakub Orzeszek tanatologicznie o pośmiertnym ciele (i kulcie) pisarza; Stanisław Rosiek w archiwalnym wspomnieniu Mariana Jachimowicza wskazuje na niepokojące opisy cielesności; Zofia Ziemann tłumaczy i komentuje wstęp Celiny Wieniewskiej do pierwszego anglojęzycznego wydania Schulza.
Szczególną uwagę zwracamy na dwa teksty Georga Groddecka, przełożone przez Tadeusza Zatorskiego i opatrzone komentarzem Agnieszki Więckiewicz, które wprowadzają tego „dzikiego psychoanalityka” i pisarza do literatury polskojęzycznej.
Ponadto Piotr Millati na marginesach książki „Gombrowicz. Ja, geniusz” (Klementyna Suchanow, Wydawnictwo Czarne, 2017), Żaneta Nalewajk o „Wiośnie” w kontekście interkulturowym, Filip Szałasek na nowo o relacjach ojciec-syn w Schulzowskiej prozie, protokoły relacji z zagłady Żydów drohobyckich, Małgorzata Groth o portalu schulzforum.pl, Balbina Hoppe o spektaklu Robert Drobniucha „Sklepy cynamonowe” (Teatr Lalki i Aktora "Kubuś" w Kielcach), Tymoteusz Skiba jak Jacek Dukaj w schulzologicznym sci-fi.
Małgorzata Sady o drodze braci Quay do Schulza, Balbina Hoppe o „Lustrze” Leszka Mądzika, Stanisław Rosiek o schulzopodobnych fotografiach Bogdana Konopki. Aleksandra Skrzypczyk i Piotr Maksymowicz o Schulzu w operze. Agnieszka Hudzik rozmawia z Henrykiem Mittelstaedtem, tłumaczem Schulza na argentyński, Sotiris Karageorgos o greckim odbiorze Schulza, Irena Chawrilska o Schulzu według Jonathana Foera, Paweł Łapiński o grze tekstowej „Bałwochwał”, Tymoteusz Skiba o nowej stronie www o Jerzym Ficowskim.
Ina Söllner wspomina jak portretował ją Schulz, Piotr Sitkiewicz pisze o parodiach i pastiszach Schulza w międzywojniu (prezentujemy trzy najzabawniejsze), Maciej Urbanowski komentuje korespondencję Napierskiego z Wyką, której fragment prezentujemy. Ponadto Celestyna Schuman o sposobach na samouspokojenie, wiersz Łukasza Kamińskiego o spotkaniu przy kawie z cynamonem, recenzje trzech książek schulzologicznych (Aleksandra Wołkowicz o „Martwym sezonie” Łukasza Wojnarowskiego, Tymoteusz Skiba o „Mesjaszu” Wojciecha Żmudzińskiego, Hanna Dymel-Trzebiatowska o „Brunie. Chłopcu, który nauczył się latać” duetu Nadia Terranova–Ofra Amit) oraz analiza odpowiedzi w ankiecie Andrzeja Pietruszki „Czy Schulz znany jest w Drohobyczu?”.
Paweł Dybel wyznacza Schulzowski próg wstydu, Stanisław Rosiek i Filip Szałasek reinterpretują sen o kastracji z listu do Szumana, Marcin Romanowski pisze o poglądach Ficowskiego na masochizm, Jerzy Kandziora o kolegach Schulza i o tym, co z nich zostało. Prezentujemy nieletnią muzę Schulza-portrecisty – Irenę Kejlinównę, a także trzy listy Tadeusza Lubowieckiego (Izydora Friedmana) do biografa Schulza i fotograficzne przykłady metatropizmu/masochizmu. Jan Gondowicz oraz Eliza Kącka wikłają się w nierozwiązane zagadki schulzologii, a Ariko Kato szuka podobieństw między Schulzem i Eduardem Fuchsem.
Ponadto Jerzy Jarzębski o Schulzu uniwersalnym, Piotr Millati o fabułach, które Schulz odrzucił, ale których możemy się domyślać, Anna Szyjkowska-Piotrowska o antyportrecie w wersji literackiej, Stanisław Rosiek o biografii Schulza jako wyzwaniu rzuconym historii, Jakub Orzeszek o notatce Schulza z lektury Taine’a, Magdalena Jarnotowska o zwierzętach i wyobraźni, Alain van Crugten o przekładzie Schulza na francuski, Tomasz Swoboda o paryskiej wystawie „Mannequin d’artiste, mannequin fétiche”, Marek Wilczyński o V Międzynarodowym Festiwalu Brunona Schulza w Drohobyczu, Anna Kaszuba-Dębska o projekcie „Emeryty”.
mainly as a “symbol of the Holocaust and the loss that it caused.” These conflicting points of view point to a gap between art (literature) and history (biography). Schulz brought both domains together. He attempted to find and adopt a form of living in history and art that would let him keep at least some independence from the former. He believed that in writing or drawing it was possible to start “from oneself.” His artistic and literary works reveal a continuous endeavor to escape from history, if only in art. Was that possible at all? Can an artist escape from history, resist the power of temporality?
Schulz’s generation and determined his attitude toward the Marshall. On the other hand, she demonstrates how Schulz could not fail to transgress the paradigm characteristic of Piłsudski’s official cult.
illustrations, mostly explicitly propagandist, some features of his style characteristic also of his earlier works.
an “obscure vicinity of death” evoked by the work of art. These are, for example, the elegiac-ironic convention of “Autumn” and “The Homecoming”, as well as the funeral mood and death symbols in “The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass” or in highly transgressive parts of “Spring”. The author also addresses questions concerning
Schulz’s personal outlook on death and afterlife, which seems to link together the need for consolation and fascination with death. Although the paper was originally intended to be an entry for the future Schulz Dictionary, the official style of the opening section soon gives way to more general considerations on the thanatological discourse itself and Schulz’s idiosyncratic literary idiom.
categories such as peripherality, history, and interculturality in Schulz’s “Spring” and narrative points of view in the story. The author shows how historical, individual, fantastic, intercultural, and biological (micro- and macrocosmic) perspectives coexist in the text.
by live music (clarinet). The paper world created by Joseph consists of long past histories. The script, including passages from Schulz’s fiction and letters, focuses on two motifs: fascination with the Father and mythologization of childhood. The performance is not a complete, finished vision of Schulz’s universe, but a patchwork of fragments,
glimpses, and images.
Lionnais, Marcel Bénabou, and Pierre Bayard) as plagiarism by anticipation. Its features, such as obvious similarity of texts, discord between the plagiarized fragment and the rest of the work and other works from the same period, secrecy, and temporal inversion, in the era of widespread reproduction provoke to think about copies in terms of anticipation or falsification of the missing works. Will the Messiah come from that direction?
of Schulz’s oeuvre was the most frequently invoked by Polish writers. Schulz’s fiction has also been a valuable reservoir of stylistic and compositional patterns for Polish artists.
Their poetics was predominantly oneiric and fantastic, yet what connects their short stories are representations of railroads, central squares of small Galician towns, and gardens. Schulz was no doubt the most outstanding of them all, yet it can be legitimately argued that, on the other hand, he belonged to a company that shared certain representational devices, rhetoric, and in some cases style.
fascination with boundary situations, which was common to both writers.
but he remains “present through his absence,” just like Kiš’s father, the protagonist of Hourglass, called “a novel about absence.”
the “anxiety of influence,” he made withering comments on the margins of manuscripts. One particular story by Beksiński, "Mannequins" [Manekiny], is a kind of ekphrasis referring to Schulz’s fiction. A struggle with Schulz’s style was one of the most intriguing episodes in Beksiński’s artistic biography.
the artificiality of existence, masochism, irony, oneirism, common “spaces of myth,” and geopoetics. The main aim of the article is to place the writing of Schulz and Blecher in the context of Central European modernism and describe the work of these writers in terms of the so-called “critical modernity” (a term coined by Michał Paweł Markowski).
figure of Schulz from a disportrait (a negative exposition of his strong absence) to an apocryph (an expressive reconstruction, and, more specifically, re-creation of the artist beginning his artistic journey, presented in a light of a biographical context). The paper discusses the main connections between the works of both authors, philosophical
assumptions of the master implemented by Ficowski, analogous mythological constructions,
and references to the Jewish Kabbalah focused on the main motif of the
Book.
her meeting with the artist, she reconstructs Schulz’s place in her biography and the circumstances under which they might have met.
Kubielas’s pictures have been misinterpreted by the media and received by some spectators as scandalizing, his cooperation with curators, the audience, the sitters, and other Schulz buffs allowed him to realize a project which connects art and existence by visualizing Schulz’s fiction, saving unused things and places from oblivion, and recognizing oneself as the writer’s disciple.
(Freud, Lacan, Žižek), the author makes a distinction between Schulz’s private masochism and that which is demonstrated in his fiction and graphic works. All the variants of Schulz’s masochism reflect the problems of Polish Jews with assimilation, parodic references to courtly love (fin’ amors), and those elements of the writer’s biography
which foreground shame that he felt as he was writing.
written about, may be drawn. Many of his graphic works are overt manifestoes of masochism.
In the Booke of Idolatry these are emblematic representations, projections of the
artist’s own phantasms, based on the visual idiom of the times, while in the compulsive
drawings from the 1930s the boundary between fantasy and reality blurs. Schulz’s artistic
operations are ostentatious. He never used any disguise, reporting on himself. He was
a masochist, but what did it mean? Another fragment is an attempt to find out what it
meant to be a masochist in Schulz’s times, and how he defined himself in that context,
particularly in an explicit statement made in a letter to a certain psychiatrist: “Creatively,
I express this perversion in its loftiest, philosophically interpreted form as a foundation
determining the total Weltanschauung of an individual in all its ramifications.”
The final fragment presents for the most part some hitherto unknown documents
of Schulz’s life, such as a police certificate of decency, men’s second-hand reports
on his masochism, and memories of women with whom the writer held various
kinds of liaisons.
potential transgression into its opposite – an algorithm. Moreover, it identifies complex etiology of masochism with docility in contacts with women. But what if Schulz was just playing a game of masochism or even more: what if he used it as a disguise to conceal a much more serious disorder of which he was not fully aware?
by the dirty universe of sex. In Ficowski’s later studies dealing with Schulz’s masochism, the key issue is a connection of art and sexuality since the biographer claims that masochism is the deep, dark root of Schulz’s creative power.
traditional version of cultural identity since he shows that it comes from the Other and the Other gives it meaning. The essay places Deleuze reading Sacher-Masoch in the context of the literature of transgression and the twentieth-century changes in the understanding
of masochism and human sexuality in general.
letter(s).
mentioned by Jerzy Ficowski in his "Regions of the Great Heresy" and remained hidden witnesses. The reason lies deep in the realm of genre conventions of "Regions", conditioned by literary culture of Ficowski who, formed in the circle of the nineteenth-century novels, great realism and vie romancée, omitted quotes and references to other people’s
testimonies and, therefore, eliminated the possibility of determining facts.
maybe Henri Bouchet-Doumenq? Who is the inspiration for Schulz’s woman represented in his graphics – Manet or Edmond Bazire? Who did Stanisław Weingarten love except Schulz? Revelations presented by the authors are rather fragmentary, yet they can be a good starting point for developing them into longer stories.
in his own compositions, especially in those presented in "The Book of Idolatry". Perhaps he also drew inspiration from Fuchs’s famous collection?
Still, the critic did not put Schulz under lock and key, and no one else did later.
Although the writer’s work has provoked hundreds of comments and interpretations, no one has found a key to open all the doors in his world, since he is always “elsewhere,” escaping his exegetes. That, however, should not discourage us from making new (private, idiosyncratic, and risky) attempts at interpretation. The reader will find some in the present issue. But there is also another way full of adventures – that of searches all over the world and archival research, which also promises success. The present issue includes an unpublished essay by Schulz on the works of the Jewish artist Maurycy (Ephraim Moses) Lilien, and a short review of an exhibition of Feliks Lachowicz. Besides, Schulz’s unknown pencil sketch, found on the underside of his well-knownsketch of a bookplate for Ella and Jakub Schulz, has been presented, as well as Schulz-the typographer. The introduction concludes with an appeal to visit Jerzy Ficowski’s archive. It certainly contains many unexplored traces and possibly a key to some door to Schulz’s world.
more open to stylistic idiosyncrasy and experiment.
essay Schulz expresses his admiration for Lilien’s work and prompts the reader how their respective imaginary worlds come together. The main reason for Schulz’s admiration is the myth of childhood, which the writer cherished so much. Besides, he perceived Lilien as an artist who in his works expressed important currents in the political thought of his times and changes in the collective identity of Jews creating their own state in the land of Israel after centuries of living in diaspora. Thus Lilien is a spokesman of his people, a kind of medium through which the spirit of the age and history can express itself. He is also a great mythmaker.
"Przegląd Podkarpacia". Schulz perceived in the works of Lachowicz, who made pictures referring to his hometown’s history, an unprecedented chronicle project, and believed that the artist had a talent of medieval illustrators. The text concludes with an appeal to the authorities to purchase Lachowicz’s works for the future municipal gallery housing the achievements of local artists.
International Bruno Schulz Festival. The Festival’s topic was “Bruno Schulz as
Philosopher and Literary Theorist.” In 2014, thanks to financial support of the Polish Institute in Kyiv, a four-language volume was published, including all the academic papers delivered during the festival conference. The opening section of the collection includes four statements by special guests: the Polish intellectual Adam Michnik, the noted Israeli fiction writer David Grossman, the Ukrainian writer Taras Prokhasko, and the Russian writer Victor Yerofeev. The remaining sections focus on new interpretations of Schulz’s works, various comparative contexts, and the history of the town of Drogobych, where Schulz was born and finally killed by the Nazis.
is then introduced as a collective testimony of his popularity outside the Polish language.
from Galicia: Ida Fink, a Holocaust survivor, Zygmunt Haupt, an émigré in the United States, and Leopold Buczkowski, after the war in Poland. Schulz’s followers, at least in a chronological sense, seem to have been inspired by the metaphorical energy of his fiction, though in the stories by Fink and Haupt, as well as the early novels by Buczkowski, the Schulzean metaphor is replaced by metonymy – a figure of death, and allegory – in Walter Benjamin’s terms, a post mortem mask of history stigmatized by violence. Arguably, Fink, Haupt, and Buczkowski recorded in their fiction the fulfillment of Schulz’s catastrophic prophecy.
archaic deities. By the same token, the beginning of Schulz’s private mythology seems parallel to the archaic core of the socio-religious order of Europe, i.e. matriarchy.
the creative responses to Schulz’s oeuvre and his bio- and necrography by the authors from the former Yugoslavia.
incomparable. Still, it is enough to reach under the surface of the so-called historical facts to realize that in some respects the two writers are indeed close to each other. As regards politics and history, a common denominator of their biographies was Nazism as an emanation of pure evil from provincial East-Central Europe, and its belief that human nature may be improved which the historical process makes it possible to develop great geopolitical systems, even at the cost of suspending all ethical principles. A starting point for that daemonic parochial activism is mostly the “provincial spirit of utopia” or, to be precise, its irresistible “realistic nihilism,” to borrow a term coined by the Serbian philosopher Radomir Konstantinovic.
has not been published in an adequate form – there are only more successful reproductions of particular graphics. At any rate, the identity of The Booke has always been precarious and ambiguous. It has always been a work in motion – flickering, unstable, composed in various ways since particular graphics have appeared in different authorial configurations (files) each of which lead its own, independent life. Thus "The Booke of Idolatry" has its multiple history and no “hard” ontology. As a whole, it is not available.
quite unexpected and never before acknowledged. Certainly the most impressive findings of the recent years are Schulz’s frescoes from Landau’s villa in Drogobych, discovered by the German filmmaker, Benjamin Geissler, in 2001 and then partly removed to Israel to cause an international scandal. As it turns out, however, to find new traces of Schulz’s life and work one does not have to penetrate into inaccessible archives or count on a miracle. In the Poznań newspaper "Nowy Kurier", an interview with Schulz and a review of his "Sanatorium under the Sign of the Hourglass" have been just found, both never reprinted or
commented upon. The present paper changes this state of affairs.
among texts focusing on the writer from Drogobych.
will focus not so much on Schulz himself, but on various problems related to his oeuvre. We are planning to publish special thematic issues on Schulz’s women, his literary and artistic followers, the literature of Galicia, masochism, and Schulz’s manuscripts. Besides,
“Schulz/Forum Library” and an annotated edition of Schulz’s complete writings and drawings will be initiated this year, too. Therefore, interpretations, analyses, reviews, and archival materials related to the above are welcome.
intended to build bridges connecting different ethnic groups and their respective versions of history. The problem is that Schulz’s oeuvre is not a good instrument of cultural diplomacy. The author makes an attempt to present briefly Schulz’s possible (or impossible) contribution to such projects. Besides, he suggests a few promising approaches to be tested in further research.
book should follow, but in his letters he keeps complaining on a writer’s block. The only way out is to publish something already written, and fortunately there is something in store. Thus Schulz begins to work on the texts penned in the 1920s. He must only, as he puts it, “choose, finish, edit, and rewrite” them. The manuscript of “A Second Autumn”
is a document of rewriting – in a way, the author is a parasite on his own work. Still, working on his old texts, Schulz believes that he is a traitor not only of himself, but also of the original inspiration. Once inspired, he must become a writer and becomes one, though he must change his method. A return to the innocence and disinterestedness of
the 1920s is impossible. Under the pressure of external circumstances, Schulz begins a new epoch in his writing. The lost "Messiah" was probably intended as its center. Some of Schulz’s essays from that period reveal a poetics that is different from his original one. That other, different poetics may be called a poetics of “making the myth real,” of a “biological semantics.” The manuscript of “A Second Autumn” demonstrates the decline of the former way of writing.
Jewish Historical Institute in Warsaw. The drawing in question should be added to the catalogue raisonneé of Schulz’s works, while the activity of Chajes as a collector deserves further investigation.
and avoided direct autobiographical confessions, as a disguised presentation of his personal experience. Lewi tries to prove that even though Schulz did not openly refer to his Jewishness, he drew from the Judaic tradition and his most important myths are deeply rooted in the Old Testament.
and avoided direct autobiographical confessions, as a disguised presentation of his personal experience. Lewi tries to prove that even though Schulz did not openly refer to his Jewishness, he drew from the Judaic tradition and his most important myths are deeply rooted in the Old Testament.
behavior since he was unable to reciprocate the appreciation of those who knew him and accidental readers.
an original interpretation of Schulz’s fiction. Coadou precedes it with a subchapter titled, “Presentation of Bruno Schulz,” which seems neutral, but in the French context is quite unusual, referring to Gilles Deleuze’s "Présentation de Sacher-Masoch", since the author of "Venus in Furs" provides one of the issues under scrutiny. Coadou approaches Schulz’s fiction as an open work in the tradition of Cervantes, Sterne or Joyce, claiming that in his analysis of the decomposition of the world and subjectivity the Polish writer proved more penetrating than the author of "Ulysses". Next to such daring, controversial, and sometimes simply doubtful proposals, one may find in Coadou’s brief study a metacritical reflection criticizing the schematism of Schulz’s reception, continuously referring to the same biographical facts and psychological diagnoses. "L’inquiétude de la matière" is an interesting
attempt to approach the Polish writer from the outside, but on the other hand, it is also disappointing because of its interpretive and stylistic faults.
expendable.
state, this rapture: I have been here already. We are separated by bottomless precipices, and yet we are close, there is an exchange of power and words. Silence becomes music, loneliness aims at the stars. Certainly, I will soon be taken over by boredom, by captivity and emptiness, but a particle of splendor has already clung to the spokes of my destiny.
“historical time,” and the distinction between two types of the “present,” Łysik succeeds in revealing the reasons why Schulz chose for his story an unusual narrative strategy related to the activity of the historian according to Benjamin. The passage from stamps to fiction is successful, but will the protagonists manage to make what they saw
in the stamp album come true? The answer must remain ambiguous, just like Benjamin’s thought between translating "The Paris Peasant" by Aragon and writing "One-Way Street".
mannequins, wax figures, idols, dummies, marionettes, golems, and dolls. In Schulz’s carnivalesque reality, such forms can be only temporary disguises, parts, and grotesque masks that have nothing to do with the creative soul. Consequently, each of them must be treated separately, since it is an automaton or a stuffed dummy only to an extent, similarly to dolls and plaster statues which may be partly human. The present essay is an attempt to put all such creatures together and interpret them in different contexts, ranging from the biblical creation and medieval alchemy to the twentieth-century
science fiction. As it turns out, the most important are their faces – fixed, incomplete, and dead – which are disguises worn by protean individuals.
younger brother who stayed in Drogobych and found a teacher’s job at the local grammar school for boys. Without Izydor’s help, Bruno Schulz would not have published his first collection of short stories, "Cinnamon Shops". After his brother’s sudden and premature death, he remembered him dearly in his letters to friends and acquaintances.
concerning a still undecided issue that is one of the most difficult tasks of the editor, namely the choice of words which must be explained in footnotes.
Section of the French Radio. One of them is titled “On Bruno Schulz, a Poet and a Painter.” The entire text, which was presented on the radio, has been included in the present essay as an appendix. The other appendix is a reproduction of a photocopy of Mieczysław Joszt’s portrait drawn by Schulz, which is now also in the holdings of the Paris Polish Library. The drawing was mistakenly published in 1969 by “Oficyna Poetów” and Schulz’s portrait drawn by Lille.
reading of Schulz. The text, illustrations, and bibliography make a collage of accidental elements which add little or nothing to the understanding of Schulz’s fiction.
on cause-and-effect links connecting publications, one may discover in a writer’s career fascinating facts. Jerzy Ficowski’s bibliography also reveals a number of interesting questions. A meticulously ordered list shows a number of his avatars – those of a Schulz scholar, a poet, an expert on the Gypsy culture, and a social and political activist.
physical meagerness, sometimes combined with a disease and suffering, with some unusual inner tension, a spiritual quality of the highest measure. They are radiant and uniquely good. In such individuals the spirit, which seems to be imprisoned in the cage of the feeble body once and for all, manages to overcome its conditioning and resist bitterness, sustaining the need to give, an affirmation of the world and existence.”
more possibilities to being since it is not a way of knowing the world, but that of being in it.
be studied in terms of its mythological overtones.
signs, whose “configuration,” as the story’s narrator observes, “fails to match the expected image.” The second, more idealized model was described by Schulz himself in his famous 1935 essay for Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz as the proper goal or aspiration of art: “Its role is to be a probe sunk into the nameless. The artist is an apparatus
registering processes in the depths, where value is formed.”
the maximum of expression. Their works are visions of somnambulists.
not only as part of a Great Artist’s heritage. Schulz’s sketchbook is not just a collection of drafts but, on the contrary, a set of final versions – final in the first phase of the artist’s formative evolution.
On the other hand, the frescoes painted by Schulz in Landau’s villa are, to our present knowledge, his last work done under unusual circumstances – under pressure. We will never find out whether Schulz, doing his final job, had any artistic ambitions, but we can assume that it was not just a ransom he had to pay to live. At any rate, he followed
his main principle of combining the real and the imaginary, in that case the motifs from fairy tales.
things” and after that there is no consolation but the falling dusk. Joseph begins to study Bianca’s secret with insistence and despair, and his effort resembles studying a spring dusk. Who was Bianca and what is this dusk which falls inevitably whenever she starts talking about something most important?
been published under the title "Street of Crocodiles" by Unitas Publishing Co., one of the leading publishing companies in Taiwan. Her translation of "Sanatorium under the Sign of an Hourglass" will be published in the fall of 2013.
stresses the increasing role of psychoanalytic, feminist and ethnicity-centered approaches, as well as the importance of the “iconic turn” for the study Schulz. The collection includes articles by Ewa Kuryluk, Małgorzata Kitowska-Łysiak, Shalom Lindenbaum, Ariko Kato, Jan Gondowicz, and Małgorzata Smorąg-Goldberg.
birds hatched by the Father, obnoxious and annoying to the family, are expelled by Adela, the maidservant. When in another story, “The Night of the Great Season,” the reader comes across a flock of strange birds, they seem to be the descendants of the one described in “Birds.”
prompt such a hypothesis is the language convention used to present the two male protagonists of the story. The handicapped title hero, Dodo, is introduced as if he were an ancient philosopher, while Uncle Jerome, mentally ill, resembles the heroes of saints’ lives. Such a choice of the conventions appears to serve the purpose of parodying the European tradition, particularly that both protagonists are male. The target of the parody may be the patriarchal model of culture on which both pillars of the Old Continent heritage actually rest. This idea stands in tune with the avant-garde tendencies of the early 20th century, particularly the Dadaist program of rejecting the whole tradition of European culture.
author makes an attempt to reconstruct Schulz’s idea of the mode of existence of the sleeping subject. While the dreaming “I” usually visits spheres beyond human reach, the sleeping body rests in filth. The sheets are dirty, the mouth open, with saliva dripping from the corners. Even the perfect body of Adela is crossed by the “wandering bed-bugs.”
The main theoretical inspiration of the essay is Julia Kristeva’s concept of abjection. Sleep as the sphere of abjection blurs the boundary between the subject and the object to become the Kristevan abject. In Schulz’s imagination, sleeping and dreaming are the processes of self-purification, getting rid of the unwanted attributes of the “I.” In this, his approach resembles a much later theory of “unlearning,” proposed by Critch and Mitchison, according to which we sleep to forget.
generation which was often heavily influenced by the cinema. The second part of the article focuses on Schulz’s cinematic writing. The author tries to prove that Schulz’s peculiar literary imagination which, according to many scholars and critics, takes its root in the image, not the word, was to some extent inspired by the early cinema or the cinema of attractions. The conclusion is that the interpreter of Schulz’s work has the right to treat his older brother’s movie theater in Drohobych as an important part of Schulz’s private mythology.
novels.
bountiful enough to fulfil the writer’s sensual needs. Schulz, separated from the Warsaw art scene and longing for a kindred spirit, replaces the realistic picture of his hometown with a fantastic scenery. He uses plain material to test the possibility of carrying out a similar operation on a large scale. Projecting a vision that is supposed to substitute for
reality, the writer reveals some hidden aspects of his personality: the necessity to dominate or even sadistic impulses. The approach adopted emphasizes also Schulz’s narcissism and his need of amusement, the mischievous play with the realities of a provincial town. Many characters, the Father in particular, experience ailments resembling pains. Schulz himself had to bear them , losing the real world and living in its spectre he created instead.
1948 with Szelińska’s response to Ficowski’s appeal for any information about Schulz, published in "Przekrój". The exchange of letters continued for forty years until the woman committed suicide in 1991. In almost eighty letters written by her to Ficowski, one can find the rhythm of her destiny, a cryptic cardiogram of her exiled memory, a record of the past that cannot be traced on the surface.
illustrations – drawings and photos – as well as portraits of authors, whose arrangement reveals the contemporary literary hierarchy.