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Schulz Bruno
(1892—1942)

Bruno Schulz was a Polish novelist and painter, widely considered to be one of the greatest Polish prose stylists of the 20th century. Schulz was born in Drohobycz, at the time when it was part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, in the province of Galicia. Now Drohobych is in the Ukraine. At a very early age, he developed an interest in painting, and eventually studied architecture at Lwów University, and fine arts in Vienna. He taught drawing in his home town, where his father, Jacob Schulz, was a paper merchant.

The author nurtured his extraordinary imagination in a swarm of identities and nationalities: a Polish Jew who spoke Yiddish, Polish and German. Yet there was nothing cosmopolitan about him; his genius fed in solitude on specific local and ethnic sources. He scarcely ever left his home town, and his adult life was that of a hermit, uneventful and enclosed.

Schulz became a writer by chance, after 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 by its English title, Street of Crocodiles. 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; however, in later editions of his works these illustrations are often left out or are poorly reproduced. While Schulz spoke German and Yiddish, he wrote his stories in Polish. He also translated 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 some accounts state 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 his home in Drohobycz, in the style with which he is identified. Shortly after completing the work, he was shot dead by a German officer, a rival of his protector, and his mural was hidden.

Poland, 1992, Bruno Schulz

Poland, 1992, «Models»

Poland, 1992.10.26, Warsaw. Bruno Schulz