The Genius of Drohobycz

...Today Drohobycz is part of the Soviet Union...

...It is hardly worth regretting that artists' own explanations of their art are, as a rule, inadequate to their actual practice...

...You wanted contact with a poet," he wrote to Romana Halpern, a well-connected woman in the art world of prewar Warsaw who was murdered by the Nazis in 1944, "and what you find is a man absorbed in the most mundane of concrete matters...

...It is the material world that reinscribes itself at the heart of Schulz' letters and drawings...

...Economic metaphors, for instance, circulate in Schulz' prose...

...And this striving of the word toward its matrix, its yearning for primeval home of words, we call poetry...

...the word strives for its former connections, wants to complete itself with Sense...

...In "Autumn," another of the miniature stories, he compares the summer to a seemingly sound financial firm that reneges on its commitments and is liquidated by the coming of autumn...

...Reviewed by Michael Kott Free-lance writer, translator Since the publication in Poland before World War II of his only two extant novels, The Street of Crocodiles and Sanatorium Under the Sign of the Hourglass, Bruno Schulz' international reputation has been growing steadily...

...Lost, for example, is the correspondence to his mistress (also killed by the Nazis) that had become the basis of The Street of Crocodiles— which immediately drew the attention of Warsaw's literati to the provincial art teacher...

...Schulz might as well have been speaking about himself...

...Wefeel an interest, Schulz writes, "in witnessing the bankruptcy of reality...

...But these are invoked here, on the eve of World War II, to point to a different threat posed to the artist...

...What is truly transcendental and most moving in his prose, what constitutes the "iron capital" of his art—all his proclamations to the contrary notwithstanding—is its realistic surface and its singular code of gestures, now consigned to an already mythical prewar past...

...The shadow of this death," writes Adam Zagajewski in his superb Preface, "falls across his entire life.' The shadow of death also fell on Schulz' postromantic or symbolist faith in art's ability to restore or invent a discourse powerful enough to fill, rather than to merely chronicle, the spiritual vacuum of an increasingly mechanized and laicized world...

...he is speaking of all that in his view is irremediably opposed to poetry, his everyday cares and duties, and especially the teaching job he despised...

...This was mocked by Gombrowicz, who in a delightful letter advised him: "Get back down here on earth...

...Schulz' letters obsessively return to his struggle to fight off depression and fence off his inner self from " the vermin of ordinary cares" and the "indescribable prosiness" of life about him...

...And while the poetic world Schulz created often seems poised on the edge of disaster, nowhere in these letters, not even in those written during the German occupation, is the War or fascism ever mentioned...

...Dance with an ordinary woman...

...He then tells us: "Such images amount to an agenda, establish an iron capital of the spirit, profferred to us very early in the form of forebodings and half-conscious experiences...

...This deftly translated volume—designed to look like a scrapbook, with photographs and drawings extending into the margins—includes three miniature stories as well as Schulz' most important statements about his work...

...When I am obliged to prepare a lecture for the next day or buy supplies in the lumberyard, I lose the whole afternoon and evening...

...They make the scrap they touched nauseating to me...

...Hesuffers, he says, from a "paradoxical fastidiousness, the fixed idea of virginity of time...

...Schulz, the son of a merchant, squeezed poetry out of the tawdry small-town existence of shopkeepers, dark- and redhaired clerks, overdressed aunts, and cheap glittery merchandise...

...I can't stand people laying claim to my time...

...In David Grossman's forthcoming novel, See Under: Love, he appears as a mythical sea creature...

...Schulz was shot by an SS man when he ventured into the Aryan section of his hometown to buy groceries...

...For Schulz it is the sacrosanct realm of art that is perpetually in danger of contamination...

...Gone are its cinammon shops, its rabbis and cobblers, its horse-drawn cabs, its old bibles—all captured in Schulz' luminous prose...

...Striking in the letters is Schulz' reliance on metaphors of infection, familiar from anti-Semitic literature where Jews were routinely likened to a virus...

...Still others, like Zofia Nalkowska, managed to become prominent as members of the literary establishment in postwar Poland...

...He thus preserved the now extinct universe of his native Drohobycz, a Jewish-PolishUkrainian shtetl in the Polish province of the Austro-Hungarian Empire...

...The life of the word consists in tensing and stretching itself toward a thousand connections, like the cut-up snake in the legend whose pieces search for each other in the dark...

...The selection was," in the words of its editor, Jerzy Ficowski, "made by indifferent fortune...

...But when Schulz says "reality," hedoesnotmean the catastrophe that was about to befall Europe...

...Others, like Witold Gombrowicz, emigrated...

...All or nothing, that'smy maxim...

...In "The Mythologizing Reality," an essay explicating his poetics, he writes: "...But if for some cause the restrictions of pragmatic reality loosen their grip, if the word, released from their restraint, is left to itself and restored to its own laws, then a regression, a reversal of current, occurs...

...Despite his rhetoric of mythopoesis, his prose restores not so much some primal matrix of meaning, but the smells, sounds, shapes, and colors of the real, if destroyed, prewar Galician shtetl...

...Many of Schulz' correspondents subsequently died in the War...

...One, the eccentric Polish dramatist and painter of the interwar period, Stanislaw Ignacy Witkiewicz, committed suicide when the Soviets invaded Poland in 1939...

...Both books have been issued here in the "Writers from the Other Europe" series, where Philip Roth introduced Schulz as "one of the most original imaginations inmodernEurope...

...And last fall the American Pen Center and the American Foundation for Polish-Jewish Studies established the Bruno Schulz Prize, to be awarded annually to an insufficiently known major author writing in a language other than English...

...Just as for some rajah of melancholy and insatiable disposition any woman brushed by a male glance is already tainted and thereby unfit for anything but the silken noose, so for me any piece of time someone has laid claim to, has even casually mentioned in passing, is already marred, spoiled, unfit for consumption...

...John Updike has described him as "one of the great writers, one of the great transmogrifiers of the world into words...

...In a brilliant Afterword to The Trial, Schulz wrote of Kafka that he "sees the realistic surface of existence with unusual precision, he knows by heart, as it were, itscodeof gestures, all the external mechanics of events and situations, how they dovetail and interlace, but these to him are but a loose epidermis without roots, which he lifts off like a delicate membrane and fits onto his transcendental world, grafts onto his reality...

...Only a fraction of the letters he wrote between 1934 and bis death by a Nazi bullet in 1942, at age 50, have survived...

...In an essay about his drawings, Schulz traces back to his early childhood two recurrent images: "the action of riding in a wagon" and that of " a child carried by its father through the spaces of an overwhelming night...

...In "The Republic of Dreams," one of the three miniature stories, he says: "Embedded in the dream is a hunger for its own reification, a demand that imposes an obligation on reality and that grows imperceptibly into a bona fide claim, an IOU clamoring for payment...

...Rather than pointing backward to some mythical matrix of meaning, they are fixed in their own pre-Holocaust context...

...The connections we retrospectively discover in Schulz' words, though, are more historical than mythical...

...Programmatic statements are nevertheless inadvertently revealing, at least as much for what they include as for what they exclude...

...The word in its common usage today," Schulz believed, "is only a fragment, remnant of some former all-embracing, integral mythology...

...Schulz obviously had an exalted view of art...

...Reality," Bruno Schulz complained four years before he was shot, "has won and penetrated my interior...

...I forfeit the rest with a grand gesture...

...Schulz was himself transmogrified into the world of fiction two years ago when Cynthia Ozick centered her last novel, The Messiah of Stockholm, around the recovery of his lost manuscript, "Messiah...

...As we manipulate everyday words, we forget that they are fragments of lost but eternal stories, that we are building our houses with broken pieces of sculptures and ruined statues of gods as the barbarians did...