Bruno Schulz
Encyclopedia
Bruno Schulz was a Polish
writer
, fine art
ist, literary critic
and art teacher
born to Jewish parents, and regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, in the province of Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent most of his life there. He was killed by a German Nazi officer.
.
After World War I
, the region of Galicia, which included Drohobycz, returned to Poland. Schulz taught drawing in a Polish school from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a teacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
Schulz developed his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities; a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish
, was fluent in German
, immersed in Jewish culture, yet 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; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland
, the Soviet Union
, and Nazi Germany
. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit, uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. However, his aspirations were refreshed 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 family and fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction. They were published as The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) in 1934. In English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles
, a title derived from one of its chapters. The Cinnamon Shops was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
(Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were illustrated by Schulz; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations were often left out or poorly reproduced. In 1936 he helped his fiancée, Józefina Szelińska, translate Franz Kafka
's The Trial
into Polish. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
In 1939, at the dawn of World War II
, Schulz was living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union
. He is known to have been working on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of the 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 was temporarily protected by Felix Landau
, a Nazi Gestapo
officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was walking home through the "Aryan quarter" with a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. Günther was a rival of Landau, who had killed Günther's "personal Jew", a dentist. Subsequently, Schultz' mural was painted over and forgotten.
Both books were featured in Penguin
's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s. Philip Roth
was the general editor, and the series included authors such as Danilo Kiš
, Tadeusz Borowski
, Jiří Weil
, and Milan Kundera
among others.
, German
, and later English
translations.
' The Hour-Glass Sanatorium
(1973
) draws from a dozen of his stories and recreates the dreamlike quality of his writings. A 21 minute, stop-motion, animated 1986
film, Street of Crocodiles
, by the Quay Brothers, was inspired by Schulz's writing.
in collaboration with the National Theatre
in London. A highly complex interweaving of image, movement, text, puppetry, object manipulation, naturalistic and stylised performance underscored by music from Alfred Schnittke, Vladimir Martynov drew on Schulz's stories, his letters and biography. It received six Olivier Award nominations (1992) after its initial run, and was revived four times in London in the years that followed influencing a whole generation of british theatre makers. It subsequently played to audiences and festivals all over the world such as Quebec (Prix du Festival 1994), Moscow, Munich (teatre der Welt 1994), Villnius and many other countries. It was last revived in 1998 when it played in New York (Lincoln Centre Festival) and other cities in the United States, Tokyo and Australia before returning the London to play an 8 week sell out season at the Queens Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. It has been published by Methuen, a UK publishing house, in a collection of plays by Complicite.
In 2006, as part of a site-specific series in an historic Minneapolis office building, Skewed Visions
created the multimedia performance/installation The Hidden Room. Combining aspects of Schulz's life with his writings and drawings, the piece depicted the complex stories of his life through movement, imagery and highly stylized manipulation of objects and puppets.
In 2007, physical theatre
company Double Edge Theatre
premiered a piece called Republic of Dreams, based on the life and works of Bruno Schulz.
In 2008, a play based on Cinnamon Shops, directed by Frank Soehnle and performed by the Puppet Theater from Białystok, was performed at the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków.
"From A Dream to A Dream", a performance based on the writings and art of Bruno Schulz, was created collaboratively by Hand2Mouth Theatre (Portland, Oregon
) and Teatr Stacja Szamocin (Szamocin
, Poland) under the direction of Luba Zarembinska between 2006–2008. The production premiered in Portland in 2008.
's 1987 novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, makes reference to Schulz's work. The story is of a Swedish man who's convinced that he's the son of Schulz, and comes into possession of what he believes to be a manuscript of Schulz's final project, The Messiah. Schulz's character appears again in Israeli novelist David Grossman
's 1989 novel See Under: Love. In a chapter entitled "Bruno," the narrator imagines Schulz embarking on a phantasmagoric sea voyage rather than remaining in Drohobycz to be killed.
Polish writer and critic Jerzy Ficowski
spent sixty years researching and uncovering the writings and drawings of Schulz. His study, Regions of the Great Heresy, was published in an English translation in 2003, containing two additional chapters to the Polish edition; one on Schulz's lost work, Messiah, the other on the rediscovery of Schulz's murals.
Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund refers to Bruno Schulz in two stories of his book, The Shoreline Mansions. The first story, "Trieste", tells the story of a man who studied drawing with Bruno Schulz, who, after the war, found Schulz's lost drawings and kept them for him. Another story in the book is "If Bruno Schulz Sat Here".
Characters in Nicole Krauss
' 2005 novel The History of Love
discuss The Street of Crocodiles. One of the main characters has a friend named Bruno who appears to be based on Schulz.
China Miéville
's 2009 novel The City & The City
begins with an epigraph from Schulz's Cinnamon Shops: "Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets". In addition to directly alluding to the dual nature of the cities in Miéville's titular novel, the epigraph also serves as a much subtler hint to the political implications of the book, since Schulz himself was murdered for appearing in the "wrong" quarter of the city.
In 2010 Jonathan Safran Foer
"wrote" his "Tree of Codes" by cutting into the pages of an English language edition of Schulz' "The Street of Crocodiles" thus creating a new story.
, the Israeli holocaust memorial, of the findings. In May of that year representatives of Yad Vashem went to Drohobycz to examine the mural. They removed five fragments of it and transported them to Jerusalem.
International controversy ensued. Yad Vashem said that parts of the mural were legally purchased, but the owner of the property said that no such agreement was made, and Yad Vashem did not obtain permission from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture despite legal requirements. The fragments left in place by Yad Vashem have since been restored and, after touring Polish museums, are now part of the collection at the Bruno Schulz Museum in Drohobycz.
This gesture by Yad Vashem instigated public outrage in Poland and Ukraine, where Schulz is a beloved figure.
The issue reached a settlement in 2008 when Israel recognized the works as "the property and cultural wealth" of Ukraine, and Ukraine's Drohobychyna Museum agreed to lend the works to Yad Vashem as a long-term loan. In February 2009, Yad Vashem opened to the public its display of the Schulz murals which it had removed from Drohobycz.
Poland
Poland , officially the Republic of Poland , is a country in Central Europe bordered by Germany to the west; the Czech Republic and Slovakia to the south; Ukraine, Belarus and Lithuania to the east; and the Baltic Sea and Kaliningrad Oblast, a Russian exclave, to the north...
writer
Writer
A writer is a person who produces literature, such as novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, poetry, or other literary art. Skilled writers are able to use language to portray ideas and images....
, fine art
Fine art
Fine art or the fine arts encompass art forms developed primarily for aesthetics and/or concept rather than practical application. Art is often a synonym for fine art, as employed in the term "art gallery"....
ist, literary critic
Literary criticism
Literary criticism is the study, evaluation, and interpretation of literature. Modern literary criticism is often informed by literary theory, which is the philosophical discussion of its methods and goals...
and art teacher
Art education
Art education is the area of learning that is based upon the visual, tangible arts—drawing, painting, sculpture, and design in jewelry, pottery, weaving, fabrics, etc. and design applied to more practical fields such as commercial graphics and home furnishings...
born to Jewish parents, and regarded as one of the great Polish-language prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, in the province of Galicia then part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and spent most of his life there. He was killed by a German Nazi officer.
Biography
Bruno Schulz was the son of cloth merchant Jakub and Henrietta Schulz, née Kuhmerker. At a very early age, he developed an interest in the arts. He attended school in Drohobycz from 1902 to 1910, after which he studied architecture at Lwow Polytechnic. His studies were interrupted by illness in 1911 but he resumed them in 1913 after two years of convalescence. In 1917 he briefly studied architecture in ViennaVienna
Vienna is the capital and largest city of the Republic of Austria and one of the nine states of Austria. Vienna is Austria's primary city, with a population of about 1.723 million , and is by far the largest city in Austria, as well as its cultural, economic, and political centre...
.
After World War I
World War I
World War I , which was predominantly called the World War or the Great War from its occurrence until 1939, and the First World War or World War I thereafter, was a major war centred in Europe that began on 28 July 1914 and lasted until 11 November 1918...
, the region of Galicia, which included Drohobycz, returned to Poland. Schulz taught drawing in a Polish school from 1924 to 1941. His employment kept him in his hometown, although he disliked his profession as a teacher, apparently maintaining it only because it was his sole means of income.
Schulz developed his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities; a Jew who thought and wrote in Polish
Polish language
Polish is a language of the Lechitic subgroup of West Slavic languages, used throughout Poland and by Polish minorities in other countries...
, was fluent in German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, immersed in Jewish culture, yet unfamiliar with the Yiddish language
Yiddish language
Yiddish is a High German language of Ashkenazi Jewish origin, spoken throughout the world. It developed as a fusion of German dialects with Hebrew, Aramaic, Slavic languages and traces of Romance languages...
. 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; the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Poland
Second Polish Republic
The Second Polish Republic, Second Commonwealth of Poland or interwar Poland refers to Poland between the two world wars; a period in Polish history in which Poland was restored as an independent state. Officially known as the Republic of Poland or the Commonwealth of Poland , the Polish state was...
, the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
, and Nazi Germany
Germany
Germany , officially the Federal Republic of Germany , is a federal parliamentary republic in Europe. The country consists of 16 states while the capital and largest city is Berlin. Germany covers an area of 357,021 km2 and has a largely temperate seasonal climate...
. His adult life was often perceived by outsiders as that of a hermit, uneventful and enclosed.
Schulz was discouraged by influential colleagues from publishing his first short stories. However, his aspirations were refreshed 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 family and fellow citizens, were brought to the attention of the novelist Zofia Nałkowska. She encouraged Schulz to have them published as short fiction. They were published as The Cinnamon Shops (Sklepy Cynamonowe) in 1934. In English-speaking countries, it is most often referred to as The Street of Crocodiles
The Street of Crocodiles
The Street of Crocodiles is a 1934 collection of short stories written by Bruno Schulz. First published in Polish, the collection was translated into English by Celina Wieniewska in 1963.-Origins and publication:...
, a title derived from one of its chapters. The Cinnamon Shops was followed three years later by Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass
Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass is the English title of Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, a novel by the Polish writer and painter Bruno Schulz, published in 1937.-Plot introduction:...
(Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą). The original publications were illustrated by Schulz; in later editions of his works, however, these illustrations were often left out or poorly reproduced. In 1936 he helped his fiancée, Józefina Szelińska, translate Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka
Franz Kafka was a culturally influential German-language author of short stories and novels. Contemporary critics and academics, including Vladimir Nabokov, regard Kafka as one of the best writers of the 20th century...
's The Trial
The Trial
The Trial is a novel by Franz Kafka, first published in 1925. One of Kafka's best-known works, it tells the story of a man arrested and prosecuted by a remote, inaccessible authority, with the nature of his crime revealed neither to him nor the reader.Like Kafka's other novels, The Trial was never...
into Polish. In 1938, he was awarded the Polish Academy of Literature's prestigious Golden Laurel award.
In 1939, at the dawn of World War II
World War II
World War II, or the Second World War , was a global conflict lasting from 1939 to 1945, involving most of the world's nations—including all of the great powers—eventually forming two opposing military alliances: the Allies and the Axis...
, Schulz was living in Drohobycz, which was occupied by the Soviet Union
Soviet Union
The Soviet Union , officially the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics , was a constitutionally socialist state that existed in Eurasia between 1922 and 1991....
. He is known to have been working on a novel called The Messiah, but no trace of the manuscript survived his death. Following the German invasion of the Soviet Union, as a Jew, he was forced to live in the ghetto
Ghetto
A ghetto is a section of a city predominantly occupied by a group who live there, especially because of social, economic, or legal issues.The term was originally used in Venice to describe the area where Jews were compelled to live. The term now refers to an overcrowded urban area often associated...
of Drohobycz, but was temporarily protected by Felix Landau
Felix Landau
Felix Landau , was a SS Hauptscharführer, a member of an Einsatzkommando during World War II, based first in Lwów, Poland , and later in Drohobycz. He was a "central figure in the Nazi program of the extermination of Galician Jews"...
, a Nazi Gestapo
Gestapo
The Gestapo was the official secret police of Nazi Germany. Beginning on 20 April 1934, it was under the administration of the SS leader Heinrich Himmler in his position as Chief of German Police...
officer who admired his drawings. During the last weeks of his life, Schulz painted a mural in Landau's home in Drohobycz. Shortly after completing the work, Schulz was walking home through the "Aryan quarter" with a loaf of bread when he was shot and killed by another Gestapo officer, Karl Günther. Günther was a rival of Landau, who had killed Günther's "personal Jew", a dentist. Subsequently, Schultz' mural was painted over and forgotten.
Writings
Schulz's body of written work is small; The Street of Crocodiles, Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass and a few other compositions that the author did not add to the first edition of his short story collection. A collection of Schulz's letters was published in Polish in 1975, entitled The Book of Letters, as well as a number of critical essays that Schulz wrote for various newspapers. Several of Schulz's works have been lost, including short stories from the early 1940s that the author had sent to be published in magazines, and his final, unfinished novel, The Messiah.Both books were featured in Penguin
Penguin Books
Penguin Books is a publisher founded in 1935 by Sir Allen Lane and V.K. Krishna Menon. Penguin revolutionised publishing in the 1930s through its high quality, inexpensive paperbacks, sold through Woolworths and other high street stores for sixpence. Penguin's success demonstrated that large...
's series "Writers from the Other Europe" from the 1970s. Philip Roth
Philip Roth
Philip Milton Roth is an American novelist. He gained fame with the 1959 novella Goodbye, Columbus, an irreverent and humorous portrait of Jewish-American life that earned him a National Book Award...
was the general editor, and the series included authors such as Danilo Kiš
Danilo Kiš
Danilo Kiš was a Yugoslavian novelist, short story writer and poet who wrote in Serbo-Croatian. Kiš was influenced by Bruno Schulz, Vladimir Nabokov, Jorge Luis Borges and Ivo Andrić, among other authors...
, Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski
Tadeusz Borowski was a Polish writer and journalist. His wartime poetry and stories dealing with his experiences as a prisoner at Auschwitz are recognized as classics of Polish literature and had much influence in Central European society.- Early life :...
, Jiří Weil
Jirí Weil
Jiří Weil was a Czech writer. He was Jewish. His noted works include the two novels Life with a Star , and Mendelssohn Is on the Roof , as well as many short stories, and other novels....
, and Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera
Milan Kundera , born 1 April 1929, is a writer of Czech origin who has lived in exile in France since 1975, where he became a naturalized citizen in 1981. He is best known as the author of The Unbearable Lightness of Being, The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, and The Joke. Kundera has written in...
among others.
Translations
An edition of Schulz's stories was published in 1957, leading to FrenchFrench language
French is a Romance language spoken as a first language in France, the Romandy region in Switzerland, Wallonia and Brussels in Belgium, Monaco, the regions of Quebec and Acadia in Canada, and by various communities elsewhere. Second-language speakers of French are distributed throughout many parts...
, German
German language
German is a West Germanic language, related to and classified alongside English and Dutch. With an estimated 90 – 98 million native speakers, German is one of the world's major languages and is the most widely-spoken first language in the European Union....
, and later English
English language
English is a West Germanic language that arose in the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms of England and spread into what was to become south-east Scotland under the influence of the Anglian medieval kingdom of Northumbria...
translations.
- The Street of CrocodilesThe Street of CrocodilesThe Street of Crocodiles is a 1934 collection of short stories written by Bruno Schulz. First published in Polish, the collection was translated into English by Celina Wieniewska in 1963.-Origins and publication:...
. New York: Walker and Company, 1963. (A translation by Celina Wieniewska of Sklepy Cynamonowe (Cinnamon Shops).) - Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass New York: Penguin, 1988. (A translation by Celina Wieniewska of Sanatorium Pod Klepsydrą, with an introduction by John UpdikeJohn UpdikeJohn Hoyer Updike was an American novelist, poet, short story writer, art critic, and literary critic....
.) ISBN 0-14-005272-0 - The Complete Fiction of Bruno Schulz. New York: Walker and Company, 1989. (Combination of the prior two collections.) ISBN 0-8027-1091-3
Film adaptations
Schulz's work has provided the basis for two films. Wojciech HasWojciech Has
Wojciech Jerzy Has was a Polish film director, screenwriter and film producer.-Early Life & Studies:...
' The Hour-Glass Sanatorium
The Hour-Glass Sanatorium
The Hour-Glass Sanatorium is a 1973 Polish film directed by Wojciech Jerzy Has, starring Jan Nowicki, Tadeusz Kondrat, Mieczysław Voit, Halina Kowalska and Gustaw Holoubek. It is also known as The Sandglass in English speaking countries. The story follows a man who visits his father in a mystical...
(1973
1973 in film
The year 1973 in film involved some significant events.-Events:*The Marx Brothers' Zeppo Marx divorces his second wife, Barbara Blakely. Blakely would later marry actor/singer Frank Sinatra....
) draws from a dozen of his stories and recreates the dreamlike quality of his writings. A 21 minute, stop-motion, animated 1986
1986 in film
-Events:*April 12 - Actor Morgan Mason marries The Go-Go's Belinda Carlisle.*April 26 - Actor Arnold Schwarzenegger marries television journalist Maria Shriver.*May - Actress Heather Locklear marries Mötley Crüe drummer Tommy Lee....
film, Street of Crocodiles
Street Of Crocodiles
Street of Crocodiles is a 21-minute-long stop-motion animation short subject directed and produced by the Brothers Quay and released in 1986....
, by the Quay Brothers, was inspired by Schulz's writing.
Theatrical adaptations
In 1992, an experimental theatre piece based on The Street of Crocodiles was conceived and directed by Simon McBurney and produced by Theatre de CompliciteComplicite
The British theatre company Complicite was founded in 1983 by Simon McBurney, Annabel Arden, and Marcello Magni. Its original name was Théâtre de Complicité. "The Company's inimitable style of visual and devised theatre [has] an emphasis on strong, corporeal, poetic and surrealist image supporting...
in collaboration with the National Theatre
Royal National Theatre
The Royal National Theatre in London is one of the United Kingdom's two most prominent publicly funded theatre companies, alongside the Royal Shakespeare Company...
in London. A highly complex interweaving of image, movement, text, puppetry, object manipulation, naturalistic and stylised performance underscored by music from Alfred Schnittke, Vladimir Martynov drew on Schulz's stories, his letters and biography. It received six Olivier Award nominations (1992) after its initial run, and was revived four times in London in the years that followed influencing a whole generation of british theatre makers. It subsequently played to audiences and festivals all over the world such as Quebec (Prix du Festival 1994), Moscow, Munich (teatre der Welt 1994), Villnius and many other countries. It was last revived in 1998 when it played in New York (Lincoln Centre Festival) and other cities in the United States, Tokyo and Australia before returning the London to play an 8 week sell out season at the Queens Theatre on Shaftesbury Avenue. It has been published by Methuen, a UK publishing house, in a collection of plays by Complicite.
In 2006, as part of a site-specific series in an historic Minneapolis office building, Skewed Visions
Skewed Visions
Skewed Visions is an arts company headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota which produces site-specific performances and other multimedia works. Formed in 1996 by the artists Charles Campbell, Gülgün Kayim and Sean Kelley-Pegg, the group produces site-specific works that have sometimes been seen as...
created the multimedia performance/installation The Hidden Room. Combining aspects of Schulz's life with his writings and drawings, the piece depicted the complex stories of his life through movement, imagery and highly stylized manipulation of objects and puppets.
In 2007, physical theatre
Physical theatre
Physical theatre is used to describe any mode of performance that pursues storytelling or drama through primarily and secondarily physical and mental means. There are several quite distinct but indistinct traditions of performance which all describe themselves using the term "physical theatre",...
company Double Edge Theatre
Double Edge Theatre
Double Edge Theatre is a physical theatre company located in Ashfield, Massachusetts. Artistic Director Stacy Klein co-founded the theater with designer Carroll Durrand in 1982 while at Tufts University. The company uses physical training and improvisation to create original performances...
premiered a piece called Republic of Dreams, based on the life and works of Bruno Schulz.
In 2008, a play based on Cinnamon Shops, directed by Frank Soehnle and performed by the Puppet Theater from Białystok, was performed at the Jewish Culture Festival in Kraków.
"From A Dream to A Dream", a performance based on the writings and art of Bruno Schulz, was created collaboratively by Hand2Mouth Theatre (Portland, Oregon
Portland, Oregon
Portland is a city located in the Pacific Northwest, near the confluence of the Willamette and Columbia rivers in the U.S. state of Oregon. As of the 2010 Census, it had a population of 583,776, making it the 29th most populous city in the United States...
) and Teatr Stacja Szamocin (Szamocin
Szamocin
Szamocin is a city in Chodzież County, Greater Poland Voivodeship, Poland.During the Partitions of Poland the town belonged to Kreis Kolmar in Posen.-External links:* http://www.szamocin.umig.gov.pl/...
, Poland) under the direction of Luba Zarembinska between 2006–2008. The production premiered in Portland in 2008.
Literary references and biography
Cynthia OzickCynthia Ozick
Cynthia Ozick is an American short story writer, novelist, and essayist. She is the niece of the Hebraist Abraham Regelson.-Background:Cynthia Shoshana Ozick was born in New York City, the second of two children...
's 1987 novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, makes reference to Schulz's work. The story is of a Swedish man who's convinced that he's the son of Schulz, and comes into possession of what he believes to be a manuscript of Schulz's final project, The Messiah. Schulz's character appears again in Israeli novelist David Grossman
David Grossman
David Grossman is an Israeli author. His books have been translated into more than 30 languages, and have won numerous prizes.He is also a noted activist and critic of Israeli policy toward Palestinians. The Yellow Wind, his non-fiction study of the life of Palestinians in the Israeli-occupied...
's 1989 novel See Under: Love. In a chapter entitled "Bruno," the narrator imagines Schulz embarking on a phantasmagoric sea voyage rather than remaining in Drohobycz to be killed.
Polish writer and critic Jerzy Ficowski
Jerzy Ficowski
Jerzy Ficowski was a Polish poet, writer and translator .- Biography and works :During the German occupation of Poland in World War II, Ficowski who lived in Włochy near Warsaw was a member of the Polish resistance...
spent sixty years researching and uncovering the writings and drawings of Schulz. His study, Regions of the Great Heresy, was published in an English translation in 2003, containing two additional chapters to the Polish edition; one on Schulz's lost work, Messiah, the other on the rediscovery of Schulz's murals.
Israeli writer Amir Gutfreund refers to Bruno Schulz in two stories of his book, The Shoreline Mansions. The first story, "Trieste", tells the story of a man who studied drawing with Bruno Schulz, who, after the war, found Schulz's lost drawings and kept them for him. Another story in the book is "If Bruno Schulz Sat Here".
Characters in Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss
Nicole Krauss is an American author best known for her novels Man Walks Into a Room , The History of Love and, most recently, Great House...
' 2005 novel The History of Love
The History of Love
The History of Love: A Novel is the second novel by the American writer Nicole Krauss, published in 2005. The book was a 2006 finalist for the Orange Prize for Fiction.-Plot:...
discuss The Street of Crocodiles. One of the main characters has a friend named Bruno who appears to be based on Schulz.
China Miéville
China Miéville
China Tom Miéville is an award-winning English fantasy fiction writer. He is fond of describing his work as "weird fiction" , and belongs to a loose group of writers sometimes called New Weird. He is also active in left-wing politics as a member of the Socialist Workers Party...
's 2009 novel The City & The City
The City & the City
The City & the City is a fantasy/weird fiction novel by British author China Miéville. It was published by Macmillan on 15 May 2009. In the US it was published by Del Rey Books on 26 May 2009. Also in 2009, a signed, limited edition of 500 numbered and 26 lettered copies was published in the US by...
begins with an epigraph from Schulz's Cinnamon Shops: "Deep inside the town there open up, so to speak, double streets, doppelgänger streets, mendacious and delusive streets". In addition to directly alluding to the dual nature of the cities in Miéville's titular novel, the epigraph also serves as a much subtler hint to the political implications of the book, since Schulz himself was murdered for appearing in the "wrong" quarter of the city.
In 2010 Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer
Jonathan Safran Foer is an American author best known for his novels Everything Is Illuminated and Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close...
"wrote" his "Tree of Codes" by cutting into the pages of an English language edition of Schulz' "The Street of Crocodiles" thus creating a new story.
Mural controversy
In February 2001, Benjamin Geissler, a German documentary filmmaker, discovered the mural that Schulz had created for Landau. The meticulous task of restoration by Polish conservation workers had begun, who informed Yad VashemYad Vashem
Yad Vashem is Israel's official memorial to the Jewish victims of the Holocaust, established in 1953 through the Yad Vashem Law passed by the Knesset, Israel's parliament....
, the Israeli holocaust memorial, of the findings. In May of that year representatives of Yad Vashem went to Drohobycz to examine the mural. They removed five fragments of it and transported them to Jerusalem.
International controversy ensued. Yad Vashem said that parts of the mural were legally purchased, but the owner of the property said that no such agreement was made, and Yad Vashem did not obtain permission from the Ukrainian Ministry of Culture despite legal requirements. The fragments left in place by Yad Vashem have since been restored and, after touring Polish museums, are now part of the collection at the Bruno Schulz Museum in Drohobycz.
This gesture by Yad Vashem instigated public outrage in Poland and Ukraine, where Schulz is a beloved figure.
The issue reached a settlement in 2008 when Israel recognized the works as "the property and cultural wealth" of Ukraine, and Ukraine's Drohobychyna Museum agreed to lend the works to Yad Vashem as a long-term loan. In February 2009, Yad Vashem opened to the public its display of the Schulz murals which it had removed from Drohobycz.
Further reading
- Banks, Brian R. (2006) Muse & Messiah: The Life, Imagination & Legacy of Bruno Schulz. Inkermen Press, UK
- Mortkowicz-Olczakowa, Hanna (1961). Bunt wspomnień. Państwowy Instytut Wydawniczy.
- Adam ZagajewskiAdam ZagajewskiAdam Zagajewski is a Polish poet, novelist, translator and essayist.In 1982 he emigrated to Paris, but in 2002 he returned to Poland, and resides in Kraków. His poem "Try To Praise The Mutilated World", printed in The New Yorker, became famous after the 11 September attacks...
. (2007) Polish Writers on Writing featuring Czeslaw Milosz. San Antonio: Trinity University Press. - JM Coetzee, Inner Workings: Literary Essays, 2000–2005 New York: Penguin, 2007
External links
(in the original Polish)- Translations by John Curran Davis
- The Art of Bruno Schulz
- Bruno Schulz's drawing and graphic works at malarze.com
- Bruno Schulz - BrunoSchulz.com
- Biography and Bibliography
- Bruno Schulz's Poetics: Quotes from his Letters and Other Writings
- A Journey into the Underworld: An essay on the film The Hour-Glass Sanatorium
- The Street of Crocodiles an animated film by the Brothers QuayBrothers QuayStephen and Timothy Quay are American identical twin brothers better known as the Brothers Quay or Quay Brothers. They are influential stop-motion animators...
. - Photo - Find A Grave