Bruno Schulz was a Polish writer, fine artist, literary critic and art teacher of Jewish descent. He was regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century.
At a very early age, Schulz developed an interest in the arts. He studied at a gymnasium in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, and proceeded to study architecture at Lwów University. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in Vienna. After World War I, the region of Galicia which included Drohobycz became a Polish territory. In the postwar period, Schulz came to teach drawing in a Polish gymnasium, from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a schoolteacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish, was fluent in German, and immersed in Jewish culture though unfamiliar with the Yiddish language. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He preferred not to leave his provincial hometown, which over the course of his life belonged to four countries. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit: uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz seems to have become a writer by chance, as he was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. His aspirations were refreshed, however, when several letters that he wrote to a friend, in which he gave highly original accounts of his solitary life and the details of the lives of his fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction, and The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) was published in 1934; in English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles, a title derived from one of the chapters. This novel-memoir was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were fully illustrated by Schulz himself; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. He also helped his fiancée translate Franz Kafka's The Trial into Polish, in 1936. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
The outbreak of World War II in 1939 caught Schulz living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union. There are reports that he worked on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of this manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew he was forced to live in the ghetto of Drohobycz, but he was temporarily protected by Felix Landau, a Gestapo officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was bringing home a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by a German officer, Karl Günther, a rival of his protector (Landau had killed Günther's "personal Jew," a dentist). Over the years his mural was covered with paint and forgotten.
It's terribly strange reading Schulz, knowing he's about to die at the hand of the Nazis, and he seems completely caught up in his dreamy prose and meditations on Polish spring – and it is beautifully dreamy, I've adored his writing since I was in my teens. And you get an insight into his mind, his friendships, his failures, and his art, both literary and visual, including the odd claim that his drawings of beautiful waifs pressing stunted men (who look kinda like Schulz himself) beneath their dainty stocking feet are in no way pornographic (ahem).
Fascinating correspondence between Schulz and other members of Eastern Europe's artistic society, shadowed by the oncoming disaster of World War II: so many of the editorial annotations describing these letters and their writers end with some version of "Died in [name of concentration camp]" and "Shot by Ukrainian militia." Contains an eyewitness account of Schulz's murder in the Drogobych ghetto by a Nazi officer, because a rival Nazi officer liked Schulz's pen and ink drawings.
Also contains Schulz's ars poetica as well as his sublime "Republic of Dreams," an essay that lovingly captures his relationship to childhood, particularly as it nourishes his fiction.
Schulz had many pseudonyms and tracing his biographical life to the dead end is not easy. I like his writing, the letters reveal a man who had great capacity for a literary life and future. Amazing how he had so many gifts.
"The town had fallen into that wild luxuriance as into a sleep raised to the hundredth power, supine in a daze from the summer's heat and glare, in a thick maze of cobwebs and greenery, empty and shallow of breath."
- sentence from 'The Republic of Dreams' (short story included both in this volume and 'The Street of Crocodiles and Other Stories' in Celina Wieniewska's beautiful translation)
usually I don't rate the books I haven't read 100% of, but I think I've perused this and Ficowski's other book on Schulz enough to mark one as 'read'; I liked both & i think they're worth looking into for anyone interested in learning more about Schulz's life & world.
Although I read that in the countless letters he wrote prior to the publication of Cinammon Shops, that essentially became Cinammon Shops, (almost all destroyed in WWII) he'd made an artform out of letter-writing (the idea of which is so inspiring to me), that doesn't reflect much here- in this book I found the letters mostly underwhelming :/ The short philosophical essays/articles are much more interesting though; a few reminded me a of Fernando Pessoa's aphoristic style in The Book of Disquiet. My favorites of the essays are "Bruno Schulz: An Essay For S.I. Witkiewicz" and "The Mythologizing of Reality" - I scanned them both since they're short - (Imgur link) - for posterity/ anyone interested. This book is also full of his artwork - mostly drawings - which was interesting to see.
Jerzy Ficowski's aforementioned other book on Schulz, 'Regions of The Great Heresy: A Biographical Portrait', is worth finding a copy of even if just to read the last chapter on Ficowski's lifelong search for Schulz' lost final work, 'The Messiah' (speculated as his masterpiece, also speculated to have barely existed as a draft, the unfinished manuscript was lost in WWII). It's an intriguing and heartbreaking story of a search that continues to this day.
I read this in one sitting on the beach. It’s a staggering work that of surreal genius. It is so layered and rich and cleverly rendered. I am proud to be AH.