BRUNO SCHULZ

BRUNO SCHULZ

(1892-1942)

Born into a middle-class Jewish family in the insignificant little Eastern town of Drohobycz, Schulz's first language was in fact Polish, though he knew German and Yiddish. After attending the local gymnasium (1902-1910), he studied architecture at Lwów Politechnika from 1910 to 1913, and then painting in Vienna at the Akademie der Schonen Kunsten (1914-1915). After an uncertain period, he returned to his home town, to become an art teacher in the same gymnasium he had attended as a pupil (1924-1941). He died on November 19th 1942, shot by an SS officer.

Schulz did not begin writing until about 1925, when he was encouraged by W. Riff. His first known work is the story A Night in July (c.1928), which was not published until 1936 in the collection The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass (Sanatorium pod klepsydra) But it was first and foremost the enthusiasm for his work shown by Zofia Nalkowska that led Schulz, by nature a very timid person, to publish a slim volume of short stories entitled Cinnamon Shops, 1933 (in English translation published also as The Street of Crocodiles). Written in a highly sensitive, poetic Polish, its plot is in many ways secondary to the inherent logic of Schulz's language and imagination. It is his personal transformation of life in a small Galician town before the First World War into literary form. Based on a series of interludes written originally for his friend Debora Vogel, the evocative language and subject matter brought him immediate success with the reading public. As a result, he made many contacts in Warsaw, and became close to both Witkacy and Gombrowicz. Schulz's next book, published in 1936 and entitled The Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, was essentially of stories predating The Cinammon Shops. In general, Sanatorium is more dream-like, more extreme in the imaginative leaps and correspondences the author makes in his later work. From 1934, Schulz was working on a novel, due to be entitled The Messiah, of which two fragments, The Age of Genius) and The Book, went into Sanatorium. All of Schulz's paintings have been lost, though many of his drawings still survive, mostly as illustrations to his stories. He also illustrated Gombrowicz's Ferdydurke (1937).

Schulz's writing, it has been claimed, belongs to the Expressionist tradition, which sought to encapsulate fundamental issues and existential questions by means of myth and symbol, and in terms of psychological insight. For Schulz, myth is concentrated in memories from childhood, the 'age of genius', in which the original meaning of words is sought out. Metaphors explain the world as the narrator feels it to be, while the mechanisms of language allow him to transform the past at will. Thus the grotesque is made familiar and friendly, and the banal is changed into something dark and threatening. Underlying all the highly lyrical descriptions is a sense of profound unease, related to sexual suppression, a highly developed sense of guilt, and the narrator's inability to distinguish dream, fiction or reality.